Our Secret Wedding

I suppose the title of this post invariably makes it a not-so-secret wedding but for a while there we were trying to keep it in on the down-low. We got married in the church before we got married in Costa Rica. Roughly 5 days to be exact, however, for all intensive purposes our anniversary will forever be March 1st; for a couple of reasons.

First, it is not fair for a husband to have to remember two dates, I get that, I work with mostly guys, most are not good with remembering dates etc. (I am blaming Rob but in reality I am the one that is not great with anniversaries or birthdays, just ask my sister).

Second, it was important to me that we get married in the Catholic church and they will not recognize a wedding done outside. Therefore we had to arrange an extra ceremony either before or after our wedding. We went through the entire Catholic marriage prep and finished up just in time for our ceremony. The marriage prep or pre cana is not for the faint of heart. We had 6 months to prepare which, naively I thought was plenty of time. It wasn't. We  finished most of it prior to our ceremony, but still had one Natural Family planning lesson left to complete. We spent many hours working on the online coursework, attending mentoring sessions and learning about fertility. Apparently, the Catholic church wants you to go forth and multiply (I kid, I kid...but really, they want you to have lots of them). They graciously let us get married without completing the last lesson.


Third, it is a bit of a pain in the a$$ to get married outside of the U.S. There would have been a month lag in order to receive the paperwork to make it official. Plus, since we love the old US of A we decided to have the paperwork made official on our home soil. Being type A I wanted to have it all shored up by the time we got home from the honeymoon, so we did. This way we were able to return home from the honeymoon and sink effortlessly into married life.

Good friends who showed up to witness

Finally, we didn't want to make a big deal out of it. We knew that in February there was a good chance there would be a snow storm (and there was). I personally didn't want people to travel to Colorado during possible bad weather.
We wanted to keep it private.  We knew that if we advertised the event we would end up having two weddings, which is what we were trying to avoid. Instead, we had a few close/local friends show up to be our witnesses. It was extremely low key. Rob went to work that day. Deacon Dick ran the ceremony (he is the old guy in the priestly robes). He is also retired Air Force Lt Col.
Our friends did the readings and we said the vows that we had picked out for our Costa Rican wedding. It was a nice evening and great dry run for our special day! My favorite part of this not-so secret wedding was signing the Marriage certificate. There was something awesome about signing on the dotted line therefore making a legal commitment for life. We were in agreement that our dream wedding in Costa Rica was our actual union, however, the church nuptials were part of this process.

I love Rob's smile in this picture. He seems to happy so lock it down.