Our Wedding Part 5: Party Time!

In the final part of my 10th wedding anniversary blogging week. So far I’ve shared our decorations & guest book, our crowdsourced buffet, a DIY tutorial for our hand stitched notebook favours, and some favourite photos from our special day. On this last day, I wanted to share with you what we did at our party. Of course we had some speeches, and it probably won’t surprise you that I insisted on giving one too.

Then, after we declared our crowdsourced buffet open, we had a pub quiz! We weren’t actually planning to have one to begin with, but we were already known for having a quiz at almost every party we hosted, so people were actually expecting it. So we obliged. We had three rounds: a picture round with wedding scenes from movies, a round with questions about love and marriage, and a round about the bride and groom. Here’s me reading out the questions, and one of our guests puzzling out the picture round.

My absolute favourite part of the evening, however, and possibly of the entire day – even more so than the They Might Be Giants surprise in our church service – was when we performed a set with our awesome bluegrass band ‘Forks of Ivy’. Why hire a band when you can put the entertainment on yourself. Here’s a video clip of the first song. There’s yours truly in the middle on the ukulele, and also playing were our head usher, best man, the groom and another friend. Our guitarist sadly couldn’t make it, so watch out for some mid-song instrument swapping from the husband. The first 30 seconds or so are a bit shaky while my brother sets up the camera, but after that it settles down. Best viewed once the video has fully loaded, for uninterrupted bluegrass pleasure.

After our performance we moved on to dancing. First we had our First Dance, for which I’d chosen Anne Murray’s “Could I have this dance”. The lyrics to the chorus go “Could I have this dance, for the rest of my life…”. The first time I ever heard it, I knew that if I ever got married, that had to be our First Dance song. Which was followed by our Second Dance to “Kiss the Girl” from Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” – as chosen by the husband! After that we reverted to local tradition and had Scottish ceilidh dancing, for which we’d hired a piper and a fiddle player (also known as ‘half a ceilidh band’), and one of my lovely friends from work, who is also a dance teacher, called the dances. I actually love ceilidh dancing, so it was the perfect end to a wonderful day.

I hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about our wedding this week, and maybe taken some inspiration from it. I’d love to hear your wedding stories if you want to share them in the comments. Here’s to the next ten years!