Catching up - Married

In this blogisode we discuss how I got married.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I have been absent from the blagosphere [sic] lately as I was somewhat distracted with the birth of my son, Patrick Dylan Carr. Having recently gone through the frenetic and confusing dance that is childbirth, I thought that it might be timely to write down some of my thoughts. By its nature, I expect fully that there will be graphic things covered within these posts so if you are squeamish then be warned. As well I should note that I am not a doctor nor am I a lawyer - I try to cover the medical issues as best I can as a layperson. No guarantee is implied. :)

Much sneaky collaboration ensued and we conspired to head up to Dawson Creek to talk with Carol's parents. We had decided that we weren't going to go public with news about the pregnancy but I wanted to have an opportunity to speak with Carol's dad face-to-face. Basically I took him aside privately and asked for his permission to marry his daughter. To be honest, I'm kind of surprised that he didn't figure an ulterior motive in why I was asking but he didn't, and he gave his wholehearted permission to me. Looking back, it seems a bit silly to have asked, but I wanted to be sure in my heart that I had the blessing of her family with no baby pressure imposed. It would be better to have it out verbally without that complication and resolve our issues before moving forward with words unsaid.

(For the record, I do tend to over complicate things at times. :)

We returned to Prince George and I started writing what I called "the Dad speech". This was in honor of my dad, who had passed ten years previously, but also served as an opportunity to make my proposal publicly. It was easy enough to convince my sister and kids to come in to hear about "Grandpa Bob" and easy to justify why I was taping it.

This is in two parts as my sister wanted me to cover the more grisly parts of my dad speech without her children present. My dad was an addict and some people/children find this disturbing.

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d3llrZiBdw
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_Z8KdvJfC4

I'll note for reference that there was a young gentleman at Toastmasters named Joe Turner who I was working with and who I chose to evaluate my speech. It was the first speech evaluation that he had ever done, and a bit of a dickens, but I thought he did exceptional and will always appreciate his work:

Evaluation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVss_Xozegs

After this the frantic preparations for our wedding ensued. We gave ourselves six weeks to get this all together which as far as weddings go is not a lot.

Actually, why not ask the question, why was the wedding so rushed? As I've politely put it to others, I couldn't have done anything about my child being conceived out of wedlock, but I certainly could do something about him being born out of wedlock. Carol had a limited amount of time where she would potentially be mobile and energetic enough to participate in a wedding. Similarly there is a minimum amount of time needed to plan a wedding - people need to book time off work, you need to book a venue and during the summer months they already tend to be booked up with weddings... Additionally I have some OCD as it applies to numbers and it was important to me to be married as close to my 30th birthday as possible.

It worked out that my birthday was August 12 and the wedding date needed to be August 14th. However this got even more complicated because we didn't want a religious ceremony, per say, so we needed to go through with a justice of the peace. We also had another complication in that we were both Toastmasters and thus had some particular requirements and desires for the ceremony. When we talked amongst ourselves we discovered that we both wanted the same person officiating our ceremony - Dr Peter MacMillan.

Briefly, Peter was Carol's mentor at Toastmasters as well as a colleague of Mike's on the executive. He's a sensitive compassionate man who is a strong natural speaker. He also has a wonderful ability to seamlessly work with religious material in a tasteful manner. Having Peter's involvement with the wedding was invaluable and we can't ever express how much his participation meant to the two of us.

However, because Peter is not a minister or justice of the peace this then meant that our wedding plans needed to change. In the end we were legally married August 13 in a small ceremony with Carol and myself, with Jon Stewart and Michael Alborn as witnesses. On August 14th we had the more public ceremony and had quite the turnout. You can read about some of the highlights at http://wedding.pachogrande.com/ including the wedding invitations that we sent out.

I'd love to talk more about the wedding but I'm getting a bit off track :)