An Unexpected Blog: Wedding

So it's been a busy week. I wanted to write everything down, mainly for myself, so I can remember all the stuff that happened over the past week. As you will see from a earlier post, my last day at work before the wedding was Tuesday 18 September when I was given a lovely cake and lots of presents. It was strange having the whole office gather in the staff room with fizz and presents for me. Normally this only happens if someone is leaving for good, but no, I was just out of the office for a week and a bit to go and get hitched. After work I had to pop to a couple of shops to pick up some last minute bits and bobs and then I headed home to start organising things...

First of all an introduction about Stuart and I. We met at university in London, in 2002, in our first year and got together in our second year. After pretty much the first few months we were practically living together. By the end of the third year we were completely living together and have been ever since. We travelled to Australia and New Zealand together in 2007, returned to London and settled into our jobs. Since then we haven't really done anything exciting, just nice holidays, nice days out and such. We decided to get married about this time last year. I don't know why, we've been happy keeping things the same as they have been for while but we decided if we were going to do it, we might as well do it whilst we are young(ish). So with that decided we booked the wedding for the 22 September 2012. We didn't realise it at the time but 22 September is Bilbo and Frodo Baggin's birthdays, and as a complete Lord of the Rings geek this made the date even more special. Although Stuart and I live in London we decided to get married on the Isle of Wight, where I grew up so my family could all attend (plus we hoped IOW would be cheaper than London!)

So with work finished it was time to head down to the Isle of Wight. We loaded up the car nice and early on Wednesday morning and started on the long drive down to the ferry. It was a pretty uneventful drive and even more uneventful ferry ride and before you knew it we were on the island and heading to our flat.

Stuart on the ferry bound to the Isle of Wight

We could have stayed with my mum but as we wanted our own space we decided to rent an apartment for the week. It was a great decision. The apartment was spacious, clean and stylish, and it had two bathrooms - the master bathroom was the size of a small flat. The only problem with the apartment was I didn't want to leave, or I at least wanted to pick the whole place up and dump it in London to live in.

We were even left presents when we arrived at the apartment.

Me, on the balcony of our apartment.

The next task was shopping - for the evening buffet we were preparing our own food so we had a lot to buy. The first stop was cash and carry where much to Stuart's delight we brought a while box of snowballs. After a trip to Tescos we headed back to the flat to relax.

Stuart loves snowballs!

Thursday and Friday was a mass of preping the band hall where we were having our reception and preping food. On Thursday I was lucky enough to have lots of helpers, putting together paper chains, making pom poms and delivering booze. As we had so much to do I even let Stuart sort out Winchester House (where we were having our ceremony) on his own so I could focus on the food and band hall. This was a pretty big thing for me, I can be a bit of a control freak so not even going to Winchester House before hand was kind of a big deal, but I didn't need to worry as it looked great. Before I knew it it was Friday evening and the very next day I would be getting married...