Dear Daughters

Dearest Daughters

Our Four year anniversary is coming up, and it's making me reminisce about that day in April 2011.

  My husband proposed Christmas morning, 2010, in Tofino.

We started to plan a quick engagement, as we also announced that day that I had little Miss B growing in my tummy.   Kevin had been planning on proposing Christmas morning for a while, and we had only found out ten days before that we were expecting. I wanted to enjoy the excitment of our engagement so we kept our pregnancy very quiet until Valentines day 

We planned a small seventy-five person wedding in four months.  We DIY'd everything we could, and held the whole wedding, ceremony, dinner and reception in the same small local restaurant called Tree Frog Bistro.  It was beautiful, the food was so delicious 

and we had a great musician entertaining us.

We used green and white beach glass from my parents collection, and our gift to the guests were heart shaped birdseed feeders.  My mom found the fabric at the local thrift shop and we had the twine and wooden beads on hand, so the whole thing cost little more than the bird seed, a heard shaped pan like this and a lot of sewing and surging time. (thanks mom & grandma!)

    We had a tribute table for our loved ones that had passed away, but we wanted to honour them and include them in our special day.  

    Our thumb print tree guest book, was an Etsy find which has hung in the girls nursery all these years.

 I made many, many ribbon napkin rings; many tissue paper pom poms and agonized over the seating chart.   

     Every table was given a paper and pen to add up the age of all the guests at that table.  The table with the highest age totals got to eat first which ensured that our grandparents would get to eat first (after the wedding party of course)

The dress and veil was my moms.  I planned on wearing it since I was a teenager and I tried it on for the first time.  I loved the simplicity of it, as it was an off the rack dress from The Bay back in 1979. The sentiment to me of wearing my moms wedding dress meant more to me than any brand new dress could come close to, and it only needed minor alterations to a) make room for my expanding baby bump, and b) transform a 1979 lace caplet and bring it into modern fashion. 

 I found a local seamstress who was able to add in the lace up panel in the back to accommodate my growing belly, and she changed the simple lace caplet into a modern bolero jacket.  The talented seamstress even reused the original fabric covered buttons on the caplet and put them on my bolero and the button loops were reused on the back lacing of the dress.    Wearing my moms dress was more priceless to my sentimental heart than any expensive dress could have ever been.  In total, the alterations for the dress was like sixty-five dollars.  I told her that she should charge more.

We altered the veil to be a bit more modern and tuck in to the back of my hair. This dress was priceless to me, and I'm lucky that my mom had such great taste as to pick a timeless wedding dress that I could wear.

The Broach.   This was my maternal Great-Great Grandmothers, and every woman in our family has worn it on their wedding day. That delicate little piece of jewelry has special significance to me because it has followed the path of women in my family through the generations to where I am.  When our daughters get married, they will be the seventh generation to wear it.  You cannot put a price on that kind of tradition.

My beautiful bouquet of garden roses was provided by flowers by Cori-Lynn and she saved some green berries for the wedding cake and my hair.  My little green clutch was found at a local thrift shop called Charlie Rose.   My hair and make up were done by Beyond Bliss and we got ready in their beautiful suites upstairs. (which we spent  our wedding night in as well.   Luckily the spa was just a few doors down from our wedding venue so we were able to walk both ways.

I walked down wedding the isle to a local musician, Tom Dowding from The Music Room playing Tuolumne by Eddie Vedder on the guitar.   The song couldn't have been more  perfect, and can be listened to by clicking the video.

Our siblings were our Maid of Honor and Best Man; My Brother and Kevins' sister stood up for us and did a great job, and really helped us focus on the idea of family first.  

We wanted to keep the ceremony simple, so we wrote our own vows. (can be seen below)  The officiant called me by the wrong name (Kristin instead of Kirstin) and then referred to me as Kevins Husband, but otherwise it went off without a hitch. And then we were hitched. After seven years as a couple, and knowing each other for fifteen, we were finally husband and wife.