There was one last thing I needed the girls to help me with before they left me to my thoughts on Wedding Day Eve. It was the most precious of my parcels: the dress!



With a little hoisting and a handy curtain hook, we got it hung up and flattened out.

With nothing else to do but play a little Solitaire on my iPhone (a bit of a bedtime ritual for me) I called it a night, and eventually fell asleep...

I feel a little bad admitting this, but I hardly saw Jase on the day before our wedding.

Two of my best girlfriends were arriving into Sydney specially for the wedding, so I kissed him goodbye and headed off to meet them. I spent the morning with them (and my mum & Maid of Honour) getting our nails done.

Ah, pampering. I usually have fairly average length fingernails, so I decided to splurge on the day and get french tipped acrylics put on. I also snuck in a pedicure while the girls had some fun things done to their nails.  And then we waited for everything to dry!
Pretty nails in tow, I headed back to our apartment to pick up all of our wedding goodies and the dress. I gave Jase one last cuddle and made him walk down to the car with us to help us pack it all in... and then we drove away, with him waving us off. I can't even tell you how strange it felt leaving him behind. It was seriously weird.

The girls accompanied me to my hotel room for the evening, and we settled in there for a few hours.
(Bridal confession:  those awesome props? I completely forgot about them on the actual wedding day. Other things I forgot about: our message chalkboards, our toasting champagne for mimosas on the morning of the wedding day, and lots of posed pictures that I didn't request. Bride brain: it's a real thing.)

This kind of light heartedness was exactly what I would've wanted to do on the night before the wedding. The girls kept me distracted, encouraged my random bouts of giddiness, and made everything perfect.

Do do do dooooooooo, do-do-do-do-dooooooooooo!

Sorry, sorry. My apologies if I've now got that tune stuck in your head - if it makes you feel any better, it's in mine too. I was lucky enough to take a few days off work from my teaching job in the days leading up to the wedding. I thoroughly recommend this to any bride-to-be, it really helped me get my head around what needed finishing during the home stretch.

There were minor stress attacks to be had.
Our charity ribbon favours hadn't arrived yet and when I phoned to check on their arrival, I was told they'd sold out... and nobody had told me! WHAT? Thankfully a friendly receptionist at the Breast Cancer Foundation scrounged around through some old charity boxes and found me the ribbons I needed. Crisis averted.

There were last minute projects to finish.
I needed to assemble our table number lumies, our home-made wedding programs, and our place cards & charity favours. I don't think we saw the top of our dining table for a good month prior to the wedding.

Thankfully I had lots of help with Jason, my parents AND my wonderful Maid of Honour all putting in some serious crafting hours with me.
There were delivery runs to the venue to be made.
With several boxes of goodies in tow, my Maid of Honour & I hoofed it across town to our reception venue to get everything dropped off and ready to go for the weekend. We managed to get everything in the car in one trip between us, thanks to pure adrenalin. It took us a good few goes up and down the stairs to get it all into the reception venue though, with my lumie table numbers choosing that moment to fly out of the box in the wind and attempt to make a break for it! Arms full, we eventually managed to round them all up and get them into our reception room, safe and sound.

Ah, our wedding rehearsal. Otherwise known as the Tuesday evening before the wedding when we practised saying our vows in our lovely old church while freezing our pantaloons off.

I was really quite nervous leading up to the rehearsal. I think it might have been the idea of having all of our bridal party gathered together in the one place for the first time, particularly since Jason's older brother/best man had just flown in from the UK the night before. We headed straight for the church after work, with gifts for our bridesmaids, groomsmen and parents in tow.

When we arrived, we introduced the few remaining members of the bridal party who hadn't met one another yet & got straight down to business. Now I should preface this by saying that don't have many pictures from the rehearsal because my mum, bless her, was far too busy bawling her eyes out to remember to use her camera!

Pretend-walking down the aisle with my dad was so just what I needed to calm me down. My dad was making me laugh, our priest was hilarious as he made faces while telling the bridesmaids to SLOW DOWN. (They were racing up that aisle!) And seeing Jason standing at the altar - even though we were both relaxed and taking it lightly - was such a great feeling. It felt surreal to think that the next time I'd be visiting, it would be the actual wedding day & we'd all be decked out in our fancy wedding duds.

After the church rehearsal was over, we zoomed off to a nearby restaurant for dinner. We gave everyone their gifts, where I finally got to give the bridesmaids their matching robes & necklace/earring sets that I'd been planning for months. Jason gifted the groomsmen assorted stripy grey ties & cool looking cuff links. We splurged on our parents gifts and gave them tickets to a luncheon and boat cruise around Sydney Harbour.
After eating our meal and thanking everyone for coming, that was that & the rehearsal was over. (Not before a family selfy, though.)
Everyone tells you how quickly your wedding goes by. And when they do, it's really hard to imagine it being over when you're still in the thick of planning. It's easier to just fuzz over it and carry on in your happy wedding bubble. Until it really is all over, quick as a flash. And you're left with beautiful memories, black spots and hazy moments... and a husband. A husband. Squee!

It was like this for the rehearsal too - it felt as though it was over before it had even begun. It was hard to imagine at this point that the wedding was only five short days away, or that this would end up being our last picture together as an engaged couple.
As for the rest of the wedding week... it went by in a blur, too.


Let's start at the very beginning - it's a very good place to start.

So remember that time back in June when we got married?

So, without going into too much detail (mwahaha), what did we actually do on their Vanuatu honeymoon? Well, if you were following along on my previous posts, you'll have noticed that it was very much a R&R type of resort, rather than one chock full of adventurous activities. And that was exactly what we wanted.

When I last left you, we'd arrived at our honeymoon destination and had just begun settling in to our beautiful waterfront accommodation in Vanuatu.

If I had to pick one photo to sum up our honeymoon, it would be this one.

That, my friends, was the view we had from our bungalow balcony. Bliss!

We started our holiday nice and early which made me glad that we'd rested on the Sunday after the wedding and chose to depart on the Monday instead. Two good friends were apartment and cat-sitting for us, and dropped us to the airport, where we sweet talked our newlywed way into exit row seats... with champagne. Huzzah!

After a short shuttle ride, we were in the city of Port Vila. We walked through the Grand Casino and headed for the jetty. A boat was already waiting, ready to ferry us across to our hotel for the trip: the Iririki Island Resort and Spa.

I always thought that after the wedding was over, I'd go back to blogging away as per usual. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. In actual fact, there really isn't much to talk about! I'm on school holidays at the moment, but aside from that there is work, lovely married life, and an extremely frustrating slow-moving house build that is not exciting at all. Sigh.