Our surprise wedding

When we were pregnant with our twins, Andy proposed to me in front of our close friends. He took me totally by surprise and the whole time I kept interrupting him and asking him if he was serious. We’d been together for almost exactly 5 years at that point and while we knew we were going to get married, I was still shocked when he proposed. It was a perfect day.

After our engagement we had discussed that we would get married with two close friends as witnesses, a good friend as our officiant and do a simple ceremony with a nice dinner to follow on our actual five year anniversary. We wanted something simple since we were pregnant with twins and didn’t want to spend a bunch of time planning a big wedding when we knew life was going to get pretty crazy soon enough. We talked and decided that a vow renewal ceremony with our friends and family would happen a year or two later down the road.

Fast forward about three weeks later, on Mother’s day in fact, and I woke up with pain and bleeding. We rushed to the hospital and were told that we were going to be transferred to a high-level facility that would be able to handle our situation a lot better. Needless to say, that day went by in a blur. You can read more about our twins birth story here. While we were thinking about our babies and how we could get them out safely, we were also worried about our marriage. We really wanted to be married before our twins were born. It was something I said from day one when we found out we were expecting again. We already had our marriage application approved and we really only needed to have the ceremony so we could get our marriage license signed. We were running out of time though because our babies had other plans.

Once we arrived to the hospital that we would have the babies at, we asked the nurse if there was a hospital chaplain that could come and talk to us. The nurse, and I’m not even exaggerating, ran out of the room to go call them and see if they could send someone up.

The chaplain arrived and heard our story, about how we were planning in just a couple weeks to get married, but that the babies had their own timeline. He agreed that it would be very special to host a ceremony right there in the labor and delivery room. The nurses made us a makeshift veil with a pillowcase and the doctors got us some flowers. At one point in the day as I was dealing with contractions and medicine that made me feel absolutely miserable, the doctors asked if we would wait to perform the wedding until they finished up with their next birth. We obviously weren’t going anywhere and we were glad we waited for them.

Just a mama in labor getting married to the love of her life, no big deal.

Right there in attendance of about 15 amazing doctors and nurses, the chaplain married us. To be quite honest, I don’t think I would have had it any other way. It was so special and we were known throughout our NICU stay as “the couple that got married in the hospital”. It was already an emotional time because we were so worried about the babies but even more so when we looked into each others eyes and decided on forever.

So if you are engaged and you’re still here reading along I hope that you remember one thing… It doesn’t matter what setting you get married in as long as it’s to the right person. I mean - I didn’t expect to get married as I was laying in a hospital bed, unable to get up because of the medications I was on, but there we were…and it was perfect.

Our wedding party and guests

Do you have any wild and crazy wedding stories? I’d love to hear more about yours and connect!

xo,

Heather