Today 12 years ago...

On the 18th of December 1999 Terence and I got married.  Of course Terence says that if he was in jail for some of the other criminal offence he would have been out by now :-)

Here are some photos.

We used the flowers above the door after our wedding ceremony and took it along to the reception hall where we put it on the bridal table.  My dress was made by my mum and her friend.  I saw a picture in a bridal magazine that I really liked and my mum replicated many of the aspects including sewing hundreds of tiny little beads all over the dress.  My poor mum and her friend spent hours and hours over many weeks making my dress.  They did an amazing job!

 We made all our own invitations.  I found some really nice handmade paper from one of the local craft stores and this worked perfectly.  It was a big job making about 120 - 150 invitations and thankfully some of our friends jumped in and helped.

I most definitely did not want a traditional little man and woman on top of our cake.  The restaurant where we held our reception had mostly an African theme we sort of went along with this theme.  My mum even made wine bottle covers looking like giraffes.  My grandmother baked the cake and my aunt decorated it to go with our African theme.  And I managed to find a lion and lioness to go with our cake (instead of the little man and woman).  Was a mission and a half to try and find a lioness ornament that did not have lion cubs with her.

This was the song that played when we walked into the reception venue:

This was the song that played for our first dance.  Or rather same words, same melody, but our song was faster.  Unfortunately I cannot find the faster version on Youtube. 

Before we got married Terence and I both did some ballroom and Latin American dancing lessons.  So we learned to do some basic steps in the cha-cha, western swing, eastern swing, tango, rumba, samba, foxtron, waltz, merengue, boogie and mambo.  And one of the dances we were okay with was the eastern swing which is a faster dance, but with only a few steps we looked half impressive and so this is what we did for our first dance.