Hey everyone, thought it was about time for another post and this time its a pretty good one. I want to talk about the VOW RENEWAL. A few months back I was thinking about this topic and why people do it and how they do it. Im sure like many of you I was a younger bride, 25 at the time, and I had a wonderful wedding. We got married at MacKenzie Hall and had our reception at the Ciociaro Club as per the windsor usual! It was honestly one of the best days of my life! I also started thinking about how I would do things so very differently now……….and wow do I mean different.
We had a very very traditional wedding, apart from it not being in a church ( sorry Francie, its RJ’s fault lol), it was a run of the mill wedding day. Ceremony, pictures, reception and done. All of our family and friends were there and it was pretty much perfect. It was perfect for the person I was then, for the couple we were then. I know it is so common to hear that you don’t really get to know yourself until you are well into your 30’s, 40’s and maybe even 50’s and I think as I get older, I realize there is so much truth in this. The person I was 12 years ago planning a wedding and a marriage is a very different person than who I am now. Also as a couple we have grown and changed as well. Especially having a career in the wedding industry, I constantly find myself thinking “oh thats cool…I wish we had done that”….or “I wish that had been available when we got married”! RJ and I have been married for almost 12 years. Just to give your some perspective on that ….our wedding was shot on film. Yes, on film….remember that stuff that you had to buy in the little tubes and load into the camera and wind it up when you were done, take it to Shopper’s Drug Mart and get it developed…..yeah that stuff. When we were planning our wedding digital photography was the new thing. It was expensive, unpredictable and nobody was a real expert at it quite yet. The big debate among brides was ” are you going digital or film?”. It just goes to show you how much can change in a short period of time.
So how does this all tie in with Vow Renewals? Well as years went by during our marriage, we discovered we had a passion for travel. We have taken many adventures across the world together and are always planning our next excursion. As many of you know, we do not have children ( unless you count our 6 fur babies) by choice, and we very much have devoted our lives to living the way we want to, exploring this beautiful world of ours. Coming from a family that travelled, I have always had a love of travel, my hubby, took a bit of convincing, but soon enough he had the bug! Now being a wedding photographer and having had the privelage to travel for destination weddings, I quickly realized that the couple we are now, we surly would get married in an exotic location….perhaps a cliff in South Africa or on a Mountain in Hawaii or maybe a beach in Tahiti………
We had always said we would renew our vows on our 10 year anniversary. Well the 10th year came and went and no plans were made…you know life just gets busy. So we have a funny way of booking vacations. Let me put it this way…it usually involves a couple bottles of wine on a Saturday night, groupon or some other travel site, and waking up in the morning looking at each other and saying” I guess we are going to (insert destination)”….cause we bought a trip last night! So along comes a Saturday night back in November and out came the drinks and Rj pulls up a groupon for a trip to French Polynesia, better known as Tahiti…..it was for ten days and two different islands Moorea and the lesser know Rangiroa. It was like fate was tempting us, because we had been reading about Rangiroa recently and how amazing the diving was. We both also share a passion for the ocean and scuba diving. There was 5 hours left to purchase the groupon……..so an hour later we were booked to be heading to the French Polynesia in March 2017.
About 6 weeks before the trip I started to think “what if we renewed our vows in Moorea”….could it be possible? Would RJ go for it? How do we go about doing something like that? So I started to think about our wedding 12 years prior and how I would do it at his moment in time again. Like if I had to decide how to get married again right now on the spot what would I want to do. This was my answer: on a beach just me and him, being photographed, and not giving a damn about the dress, the guests, the cake or anything. At our wedding we had written our own vows and to his day, I hold them very very close to my heart. I started looking into officiants to do a ceremony for us and everything I came across was very “cookie cutter”, although I did find a Tahitian priest willing to do a traditional Tahitian ceremony, but that still didn’t sit right. Why did i need someone else to tell me what to say to my husband? So I decided we didn’t need that …all we needed was each other in a beautiful place, to make our promises to each other again. Oh yeah and a photographer to capture it all!!! So I found a husband and wife team SV Photography in Moorea and hired them to capture this for us. Here’s the thing….I didn’t tell my husband about any of this………till we got to Tahiti. lol He was thrilled and excited!
Okay so I am going to share with you all some of our photos from our vow renewal……….viewer discretion advised it gets a little sexy at the end! lol
