Tiny wedding away earns bigger sequel with family

I’m busy putting the finishing touches on my wedding.

I imagine faithful readers of this column might be scratching their heads with that news. “Uh, Daryn,” you might ask, “did you just get married about six weeks ago?”

Well, in a word, yes.

Not to worry. Everything is going just fine with that new husband. So well, in fact, we’re getting married twice.

Pretty much since the time we talked seriously about getting married, we knew we would have two weddings.

My new husband was a single father when I met him, raising his 11-year-old daughter alone after the death of her mother five years ago.

I came with one of the brightest lights of my life, my “Little Sister” in the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program. She was 10 when I met the man I call Mr. SummerFest.

By the time he popped the question earlier this summer, two years had passed and we found ourselves melded into a truly modern family. The girls get along great. We have my “Little” most weekends, holidays, much of the summer and whenever we travel.

The joy we share in raising these two remarkable girls who are now 12 and 13 is one of the things that I love about my man.

So therein the challenge once we were engaged. The house he was living in had sold. We were ready to combine households, but we didn’t want to just live together.

I’m very aware of the casual messaging kids, and especially girls, get today about relationships and commitment. It was important for me for our girls to see two people commit to each other before living together.

I also still have a bit of the girl in me and wanted the wedding where all our people could celebrate. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing we could pull of in the three weeks Mr. SummerFest had to get out of his house.

“How about getting married twice?” he suggested.

“Twice?” I asked.

“Yes, twice!”

It was simply a brilliant idea. Our “Starter Wedding” was just us, the girls, an officiant and a photographer standing by a waterfall in North Carolina. We squeezed it in before dropping our oldest off at sleep-away camp.

It was the perfect way to bond and officially begin our family.

Well, perfect to us. Like thousands wedding couples across the country, there has been a bit of family drama. My way liberal mother didn’t understand the need for any wedding, let alone, two. “Can’t you just live together?” she suggested.

And Mr. SummerFest’s very conservative family has serious concerns that we are not following the religion he was brought up in.

Welcome to the joys of getting married in your 40s. We get to take their concerns as signs of their love, but beyond that, not worry too much about what other people think.

To their credit, both sides of our diverse family are putting all their arched eyebrows aside and will be here with bells on when we tie the knot, again, next week.

I bet it’s going to be the best wedding I’ve ever been to, well, at least in the last seven weeks.

Wish us luck!

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