It’s been a while.  Three months exactly, apparently!

And now I’m writing this as a married lady – in theory that Bridget Jones persona became a thing of the past almost three weeks ago.

On the 24^th June I married the most amazing, lovely, loving man I have ever known and became Mrs R.  (Mr R is ‘Himself’ first referred to a good few years back on here, just for reference). But it turns out that there is still a huge portion of Pog left behind, so the blog will continue…

I know people say that weddings are high stress and keep you busy.  I couldn’t work out quite what was the issue, so in true Pog style I kept on adding bits and bobs that I wanted to do to make ours a bit more unique. It was a small wedding so I figured it would all be relatively simple….

Wedding favours?  No, I decided to do party bags.  Obviously, I made the party bags (reclaimed silk Japanese knot bags for the ladies, material sandwich bags for the men), and then had to work out what to put in them.  Dad and I gathered seeds from our respective Love in a Mist flowers from last year and I made a little package of them for everyone.  Then I made a lavender heart for each person (plus more for decoration), and of course you need something sweet, so homemade ginger truffles it was.

I had to make the truffles the day before the wedding so they were fresh and I was making one of the three wedding cakes on the same day, but of course managed to forget this when I booked my spray tan for that morning and was then told not to wash my hands too much for the day or I’d wash off the tan before it took.  That was an interesting cooking session…

And of course, the children wouldn’t want the party bags so I made them Pogimals (the sock animal toys I used to make a lot of for fairs) instead.

My Mum and my now Mum in law had carried something in addition to their flowers down the aisle (horseshoes I think were the thing of their era), so I made myself and my two big bridesmaids a button ball each as a nod to that.  Mum has also carried three coins in a little bag (we’re not sure why!) which weirdly we found without even looking for them, so I carried them as well, alongside a gold teddy charm from her charm bracelet – the first charm my dad had given her when they were married.

Around April I’d decided to crochet my own cake toppers, but am a little out of practice, so they took a while to make… but I finished them about three weeks before the wedding.

And then I couldn’t think what to get as gifts for my bridesmaids and wondered if I could make replicas of the three of them in the three weeks left, so I did that too.

And then it was Mr R’s aunts birthday the day after the wedding, so obviously I had to make a cake for her too.

And that was before having to reprint the table plans three times as people couldn’t make it / could make it, the rejig the afternoon before as my oldest friend and her family had the joys of Covid land like the plague, and the other rejig between the service and the meal when two people just didn’t turn up at all!

And we had to decorate the venue the night before and the morning of the wedding.

So, all the plans to keep it low key and low stress didn’t go quite as I’d imagined.  But I didn’t go into melt down at any point, which frankly is quite an achievement.

Our first dance was a song called ‘Still falling for you’ which we love (and slightly ironically was in the last Bridget Jones film).  We thought we’d be able to come up with some sort of shuffle ourselves.  We couldn’t.  We did a You Tube tutorial – pretty much every night for three weeks with an increasing sense of panic.  We (eventually) nailed it.  I knew exactly where to be in our lounge at all the different key points.  Only our sofa / tv / fireplace didn’t appear on the dance floor of the venue, and we lost it a bit.  Then a lot.  So, I stopped and asked the DJ to start again.  Later, the photographer took us outside to take some more photos and muttered that he’d ‘never seen a dance like that before’.  I felt rather proud and told Mr R so.  Mr R informed me he was pretty sure the photographer was referring to the fact that I’d stopped and restarted it all…

There may have been a few panics and unplanned moments, but I can bring back every detail of that overwhelming happiness as I walked down the aisle looking at the man I love more than anyone I have ever loved before.  I can still feel the giggle that bubbled up from my tummy and escaped each time the registrar said ‘husband’ or ‘wife’. And I can remember the utter contentment that settled over me as we were hidden around the corner after the ceremony while the guests were assembled to throw confetti as my shiny new husband snapped this selfie of us:

If you’ve been reading this blog a while and have come along with me through my days of internet dating, single independent woman holidays, distractions from loneliness, moments of only just managing to adult, changing careers, and times of utter lunacy you will already know, but if you’ve not, trust me on this:  Life doesn’t always pan out the way you expect it to.  If you’d given me a crystal ball and shown me where I am now ten years ago, I’d have assumed it was faulty.

But there will still be moments of Pog – I don’t doubt that.  There was one on the way back from our honeymoon, but I’ll add that as another post as this has been too long already.  But I hope you understand why :o)

Love,

Mrs R. x