Hi Jessica! I loved your creative Monorail wedding! That was just awesome! So inspired. I love that you tried to keep it as discreet and unobtrusive to other guests as possible. That alone speaks volumes about you. And honestly, if you weren't thinking thru the best options to be unobtrusive would you ever have landed on the Monorail idea? And oh how romantic to be a passenger in your monorail car! Talk about sprinkling Pixie Dust on someone else's day!
I'm with you. I would love more than anything to have my real wedding in the form a vow renewal with DFTW's. My hubby & I were 19 & 21 when we met. We knew each other a total of 2 months when we got engaged. Initially we were planning for a big wedding but then our families were having financial troubles and weren't going to be able to pay our tuition for fall quarter much less afford us the luxury of our dream wedding. Our solution? Go ahead and get married. Once we were married we didn't have to claim our families' incomes and qualified for grants. So after having known each other just 4 months we stood in my in-law's living room while my best friend's dad married us. Our honeymoon was 1 night at the beach because we had to get back to start classes Monday morning. And that will have been 18 years ago next month.
Nowadays I look at the cost of the DFTW events even the least expensive ones and just can't bring myself to do it. I see that $2k and think, "That's the food budget for our family for 10 days at WDW" or "That would buy the boys' curriculum for the school year" (we homeschool). There's always things that seem more important than another ceremony just to indulge the little girl in me that yearns to be a real princess if only for a day.
So I'm happy with my sweet husband who tells me everyday that I'm his princess now and always. I'm good with that. How could I not be, right?
I feel ya, girl. Of course we'd rather have the grand event but not everyone can. I also enjoy living vicariously thru all these other beautiful, blessed brides on their own adventures. At the end of the day I think it's wonderful that we all have our own, very different fairytales to tell. If we all did the same thing that sure wouldn't be any fun. The contrast of stories and experiences is what makes us all more interesting and colorful.
Again, loved reading about your super-cool wedding! So awesome! Thanks for sharing.
Oh! And BTW, I have never heard of a bouquet of paper flowers but I think that idea is really cool! One of my favorite things is to see ordinary things repurposed into something far from what it originally was. Did you make them? They looked great! Who knew? Paper can be a pretty flower!