Excuse me, I think the word you're searching for is "Space Ranger". - Buzz, from "Toy Story"

Hello again everyone!  You're reading yet another blog entry created by Jennie, and this time I'm going to talk about (and I guess in a way introduce you all to) someone that has an extremely important part to play in our wedding.  I'm talking of course about the person that will actually be marrying us!  Our wonderful, lovely and spectacularly brilliant officiant, Renee Silverman (come on down)!

Renee is the one in the middle, she performs the ceremonies rather than participates in all of them.

Before I get into details about why Renee is the perfect person to marry us, I'll take a moment to explain basically what an officiant does to those living in Australia that probably have never heard that word before (yes I've had some really weird looks from people when I tell them we already have our officiant).

An officiant more or less does the same thing a celebrant does in Australia.  Having said that, all ministers are officiants, but not all officiants are ministers (if that makes sense).  Renee doesn't do religious ceremonies as she's a Notary Public, which is perfect for us as we're not after a religious ceremony.  I'm pretty sure Renee can explain all that 100 times better than I can and probably correct me if I got any of that wrong, as we're not religious the things that ministers do confuse the crap out of both of us!

Contrary to popular belief, this guy will not be officiating our ceremony.

We found Renee through the Disney Wedding Podcast by Carrie Hayward (which has been absolutely invaluable to us by the way).  Renee explained all about the types of things she does and types of personalization she can include and just about everything she spoke about in the podcast we found we could relate to.

From the podcast we contacted Renee and set up a nice and late (I think it was about 11pm-1am ish) meet and greet over Skype which all happened a couple of months ago.  We all instantly clicked and Tan and I knew we had found the perfect person to officiate our ceremony!

For more than 35 years Renee has been officiating weddings!  So you could say she has a little bit of experience with it.  Although she isn't yet on Disney's official wedding officiant list, she does do a number of Disney weddings and vow renewals.  Hopefully she can inch her way onto that list soon, she's been apparently waiting 6 years (since 2007) to get on that list and not one place has opened up since!

Hopefully our ceremony will look half as awesome as this one, with the only difference being us standing next to Renee, not this handsome couple!

Renee offers a personalized service as well as the more traditional ceremony, so we can actually go ahead with some crazy ideas that we were just toying with and didn't think we'd actually find someone willing to do them!

Having been in the profession for so many years, you can tell how dedicated and passionate Renee is to her job by just talking to her and reading her blog entries.  She is extremely personal and has already taken the time to connect with both Tan and I on a more personal level, even sharing our distaste of the final episode of Dexter.. seriously, what were they thinking?!

Why Dexter, WHY?!?!?

We are both super excited to start working on the details of our wedding with her and including in it things that are special to us that we can share with our friends and family.  We plan to make sure that people are as excited and interested in the ceremony as they are in the reception and celebrations to follow.

This dude is clearly not attending one of Renee's ceremonies!

After all, the ceremony is really the reason we are celebrating!

Renee's website is: http://www.lovelyceremony.com/

She also has a blog located at: http://lovelyceremony.blogspot.com.au/

For those that are interested in listening to the podcast that  helped us find Renee, the link is:
http://disneyweddingpodcast.com/2013/08/07/vendor-spotlight-officiant-renee-silverman/

Thanks again for reading, and please stop by again next week!