September sunshine…

Last year on 6th September I wrote this post, which is actually very similar to a post I was going to sit down and write this morning, so I won’t bother 😉

Tomorrow is me and Ady’s seventh wedding anniversary. I wrote a bit about our wedding two years ago on our fifth anniversary here. Anyway I guess we’ve already bored most people with the story of our wedding day, shown you the pictures and several of you have seen the wedding video too 😳 But for those newer readers, those who can’t be bothered to follow links to old posts, or the romantic / bored / trying to kill time by reading blogs this morning among you I’m going to take a moment now to just reminise again about it.

The week leading up to our wedding was fantastic. One set of friends had a party for us in their garden where we all got very drunk. On the way home from their house drunkenly weaving about as we walked home we decided to start trying for a baby – 3 months later I was pregnant with Davies.

Another set of friends had a barbecue for us. They have a dairy farm and their house is next to a field with loads of cattle in it. When it got dark we had a firework display which made all the cattle stampede. It was on the way over to their house that I think I had my most pure moment of utter happiness actually. We went over on Ady’s motorbike – long since sold once we had children. I used to love riding on the back of it, we went really (stupidly) fast, everything was just a blur and I used to sit inside my crash hat laughing insanely at how crazy it was. I was there on the back of this bike, holding tightly to the man I loved so much I was heading out to Las Vegas with him in less than a week to marry him and stay with him forever, on our way to a good evening with friends riding the equivalent of a road rollercoaster. Bliss – and of course utterly responsibility free 😉

Our actual wedding day dawned with an alarm call at about 5.30am and just that one morning we had breakfast delivered to our room.
We got dressed up and headed down to the lobby to meet our limo to take us to the wedding chapel with my parents and brother. Once there we sat with the minister who married us chatting about what sort of service we wanted and he managed to work out how to pronounce my name – in Amercia they seem to have lots of ‘Nicole’s’ but no ‘Nicola’s’ so he was saying Nicole – a. Then Ady went off to stand at the altar and my Dad came in to take me down the aisle to him. Frazer passed us the rings, my Mum held the bouquet while I held Ady’s hands. It was a romantic, perfect, intimate, amazing experience with every single word said loaded with meaning, truth and love.

We left the chapel back to the hotel by limo, which dropped my parents and brother off, we nipped back to the room to get changed out of wedding clothes – getting stopped innumberable times as we ran through the lobby trailing confetti and dressed up by random strangers wishing us congratulations and wanting to kiss the bride. Back into the limo and off to the airport. We were issued with name badges and as we were slightly early we sat in the waiting lounge for about 15 minutes looking at our wedding rings and catching each others’ eye, giggling and feeling amazed at being married. Then we got a helicopter with another four people and a pilot and flew to the Grand Canyon, over Hoover Dam and landed in the canyon. We had a champagne picnic lunch and were toasted by all the other picnickers, then we got back in the helicopter and flew back over the Vegas strip. Limo back to the strip again from the airport where we walked hand in hand trying to get to grips with the very surreal feeling that this was our wedding day and here we were in probably one of the most unlike our ususal lives places in the world.

We went to the MGM Grand where they have a lion enclosure inside the hotel and petted a lion cub while watching a constant stream of Elvis impersonators, we watched the fountains at the Bellagio dancing to classical music and many of the other amazing sites and sounds around Vegas.

But of course that was just one day, just the start. And actually it was a full six years after we’d already been a couple. So while I love to celebrate that day, to mark another year since we said those vows to each other, to recognise how long it is since I became Mrs Goddard – and to think again about what being Mrs Goddard means to me. It is not the years which make our marriage. It is the moments, the snapshots of our life together, our children, our names said together in one breath, our identity as a couple as well as individuals. It is knowing that we can always rely on each other, we can trust and belief in each other, know that when the rest of the world is somewhere you’d really rather not be you can shut the door, close the curtains, take each others hand and be happy that you have all you need right there.

Tomorrow we won’t have a spare moment to celebrate our anniversary, we’ve got a houseful of people and the birthday party of our son – seven years later it is lovely to see what was stretching out infront of us waiting when we said ‘I do’. So for once an anniversary in the Goddard house will not be marked with moonlight and rose, champagne and expensive cards – it will be simply living the life we have built together – children, friends, chaos, laugher, celebration, music, love. Sounds about right to me :-).