Late last fall, we emailed friends and family an invite to our wedding, scheduled for September 3rd of this year. Fast forward a few months and baby animal is on her way with a due date of September 16th. Ay yi yi… We audibled, electing to have only immediate family join us to avoid extra stress so close to the due date. Some of my siblings didn’t like that and were grumbling how they might come up and just see us for only an hour if the baby comes early. Fair enough.
Yet we had already changed our plans once to accommodate previous grumblings and weren’t keen on changing again. It is about us after all. After a couple weeks of going back and forth, DF and I decided we were just going to go ahead and get married locally beforehand. Fast forward to earlier this week, DF gets offered her new job and has to leave in a week to direct training for ~1.5 months elsewhere in the state. On Monday we talked about how it might be beneficial to just get married before she heads out to make things easier and to get her on my health insurance plan.
So come Monday night we texted all of our friends in town and told them we were going to get married at the courthouse Wednesday afternoon. Well, we found out Tuesday that we couldn’t get married at the courthouse, they don't do ceremonies. Hm, plan B it is. Our relationship started when we met in forestry, most of our friends still work in forestry and most of the people who were going to go to the courthouse were from forestry, so we did the most logical thing and had the ceremony at the edge of the forest adjacent to the forestry office parking lot.
The ceremony was short and sweet and one of my best friends presided as originally planned. A former coworker made a bouquet of pussy willow buds and another made a chocolate cake with a raspberry glaze from locally harvested berries, which we enjoyed immediately following the ceremony. They were both unprompted and incredibly thoughtful, especially on one day notice! Later that night, friends came over for a bonfire and food. DW (!) cooked up a Brazilian salmon stew and apple cinnamon rolls while I made some sourdough bread, salsa and fruit salad.
We very much enjoyed it and DW has expressed wonder nearly a half a dozen times as to why anyone bothers with a stereotypical western wedding as everyone, from immediate family members who couldn’t attend to our friends here, told us how great it was how we were doing it. No need to fuss with extensive dress, cocktail hours or other formalities. Just get married in a parking lot
. Anyway, it worked for us and now The Animal tribe has officially jumped to 2! Here’s to great relationships and many years ahead together!
I like making the pizza dough. From start to rolling it out it's probably 30 min of segmented direct work tops for me and I can make a few at a time to freeze what I don't use for later. 
