The Gonser's... One Big Loud Fun Blended Family!: it's all in the DETAILS!! the WEDDING :)

i can't tell you how many people have told mike, myself, or our parents how great and UNIQUE our wedding was. obviously i'm happy people enjoyed our wedding! but the fact that so many people referred to it as "unique" made me really examine the entire production! and, while i think it was just very "mike and laurie" ... i guess it WAS indeed a different kind of wedding!

what made it different? well... being married before, and being older now... we realize the wedding IS important, but it's our MARRIAGE that is the real deal! a wedding lasts a day, a marriage is for a LIFETIME! so with that in mind, i set out to make every detail of our wedding meaningful!

the INTERNET is a fantastic resource for wedding ideas! on one site, i read "don't do a unity candle or sand ceremony if all you're trying to do is kill time". this really hit home! i knew i didn't want to do any cliched time wasters.

one of the first things i did was set the "wedding structure". i got ideas from different websites and put together:

Ceremony Structure

Processional- We all enter- mike chose our processional song "marry me"... we both love it and it worked beautifully

Introduction:

- Welcome

- Presentation of the Couple

- Thanking of Family & Friends

Reading- Love Story, Address, Sermon… Pastor Time!

The Asking

Vows- i wrote my own vows. mike found some on line he liked.

Ring Exchange

Family Bouquet Ceremony- this was one of EVERYONE'S favorite parts of the wedding! i posted lots of pictures below!

Power Point During our power point, we picked a song that was meaningful to us "When We're Together" from the Courageous soundtrack. Then i picked enough pictures to fill the 3 1/2 minutes... the pictures were of mike and i and of our family over the two years we've all been together. i promise you, there wasn't a dry eye in the room!

Closing Remarks- a childhood friend of mine, wrote a beautiful poem for mike and i. this was where she read it.

Declaration of Marriage

Recessional- again, mike chose the song we left to. he chose "i can only imagine" which at first seems like a strange choice, but it worked nicely!

Guest Dismissal- we went back and greeted each row

for each of the highlighted areas, i found samples and had mike pick which he liked best. they are below:

The Welcome we liked- “Welcome everyone. Mike and Laurie- Today you enter as individuals, but you will leave here as husband and wife, blending your lives, expanding your family, and embarking upon the grandest adventure of human interaction. The story of your life together is still yours to write. All those present have come to witness and celebrate your love and commitment this day- eager to be a part of the story not yet told.”

Readings we liked:

“True marriage begins well before the wedding day, and the efforts of marriage continue well beyond the ceremony’s end. A brief moment in time and the stroke of the pen are all that is required to create the legal bond of marriage, but it takes a lifetime of love, commitment, and compromise to make marriage durable and everlasting. Today you declare your commitment to each other before family and friends, your yesterdays were the path to this moment, and your journey to a future of togetherness becomes a little clearer with each new day.”

I Corinthians 13:4-8
Ruth 1:16-17
Ecclesiastes 4:9-12
Matthew 19:5-6
Mark 10:6-9

Vows-
“Do you ________ take _________ to be your partner in life, to support and respect her/him in his/her successes and as well as his/her failures, to care for him/her in sickness and in health, to nurture him/her, and to grow with him/her throughout the seasons of your life together?

“I, Mike, take you Laurie to be my wife, my partner in life and my one true love. I will cherish our marriage and love you more each day than I did the day before. I will trust you and respect you, laugh with you and cry with you, loving you faithfully through good times and bad, regardless of the obstacles we may face together. I give you my hand, my heart, and my love, from this day forward for as long as we both shall live”

my vows... folded and sweaty... and now a treasured keepsake!

Ring Exchange
“I ______ give you _______ this ring as an eternal symbol of my love and commitment to you. With this ring, I thee wed.”

Family Bouquet Ceremony-
“Mike and Laurie, along with their children have chosen to create a Family Bouquet. Each member of the family has a chosen a flower, symbolizing them as individuals. They will combine all their flowers symbolizing the beauty of individuals brought together as a unified family”

like i said before, we didn't want to do an over-used time filler... if we were going to do some sort of "ceremony", we wanted it to be meaningful. my original plan was for each of us to chose an artificial flower that they loved. instead, my step-daughter lexi and i found a group of Gerber daisies (my FAV!) and they had tons of colors... and each one seemed to match a member of our family! so... we each had a daisy in a single vase behind where we stood.

one at a time, our children brought us

their flower

and gave us a hug.

there was A LOT of crying! tears of JOY!

then mike and i added our flowers

and created a bouquet... which now sits in our home!

if you've followed our blog, you know we are a special "blended family"... and every time i look at that bouquet, i'm reminded how EIGHT special people were brought together by God, to make one beautiful family!!

DECOR-

i did NOT stress out over the decor at the church! i wanted to keep it simple! after all, our friends and family were there to see US, not $1000's of flowers and tulle! the one thing i HAD TO HAVE was this arbor! i saw one on pinterest and fell in love! my dad made it ... and it was so popular, we've rented out to other couples!

i collected lots of other "personal touches" from pinterest...

i came up with the "family tree"... i got the sign from pinterest. i made the tree because we ARE so unique... our guest could see who belonged to who and all our children's names

after my dad built the arbor, i wanted to spruce it up abit, so i made this sign out of scrap wood and hung it with twine

other details...

PHOTOGRAPHY- obviously it's important to find a good photographer... but beyond that... HAVE AN IDEA OF WHAT YOU WANT!! i knew i didn't want super traditional "church pictures"... there i go again being UNIQUE!! thankfully, i had a creative and up to date photographer who was familiar with what's currently popular.

but here was the problem... our church is an old elementary school and i couldn't fathom where we would get any good back drops... me of little faith... we got AMAZING PICS!!