Must Have An Awesome Photographer

I have to say that one of the best parts of our wedding was the photographer. I was super excited about her from the start. Once I found her, I had to have her. If you recall, she was the one who did Barbie and Ken's REAL French Wedding (I wrote raved about her work here). Béatrice De Guigné is awesome, we loved working with her.

And I have to say, her blog post about our wedding is pretty awesome too. You can check it out here.

I am absolutely loving checking out these photos over and over again. Our wedding was so great!

Happy First Anniversary, Mr. and Mrs. Fox!

One year ago today, Mr. Fox and then Miss D, stood in front of a civil officier of Amilly, Centre, France in the most adorable salle des mariages to say "Oui, je le veux"(Yes, I want this) in the presence of their families and one best friend.

Serious faces for serious words.

All smiles, promises made and accepted. Uncle A clearly approves.

Proudly, the new Mr. and Mrs. Fox. My proud Mommy beaming in the background.

This year has been full of so many joys and challenges and adventures! I'm still so happy that Mr. Fox threw his hat in the ring and never once relented. Here's to one absolutely wonderful year and the hopes of many, many more to come.

Still very much in love, yours truly.

Love and happiness.

You Must Have An Aggressive Agenda

This week we're back in France filing paperwork for my carte de sejour, the French equivalent of a green card. While we're here, we've got a whole list of lovely errands to run... and of course, the list is growing. The good thing is, if everything goes off as well as the paperwork submission did (thank goodness! It was smooth like spreading peanut butter on a good, thick bread), we'll be super prepared for October 13: Jour-J, like the French call it.

I did realize that time is sliding by quite quickly. We're now past the 2 month mark. The RSVPs are trickling in, my dress is in the hands of the seamstress, I'm all reserved up for my trip back to the US for bridesmaid dress fittings, and I'm starting to get excited. All is going well.

You Must Have a Religious Ceremony Revelation

We are having a Catholic wedding ceremony this time around. It requires a lot of stuff, one of them being "marriage preparation" which amounts to several meetings with a priest to read this little book containing a collection of scriptures applying to marriage and love and discussing them.

The little book. They've even got a website! Source.

At first, I was sure it would be nothing more than an interesting exercise where I would be forced to lie a bit lot about my stance pertaining to my practice of the Catholic religion in my every day life and future since I am completely non-practicing.

I was only half wrong.

Interestingly enough, the little book offers some really (surprisingly) good advice for married people (or actually any people whom are coupled off). It says things (in the discussions) that are real to life and reminiscent of not only someone married but also someone happily married for many years who is probably also some sort of successful professional marriage counselor. In actuality, it's written by a priest.

So our challenge with this planning this stuff was initially in which language to do it. At that time, my French was limited to niceties and adjectives, my German was (and still is) limited to food shopping, ordering and preparation, but my English is pretty strong. Our visit to the presbytère of Montargis provided us with a preview of their super organized and well-planned preparation program in French. Unfortunately, I didn't understand much. Double unfortunately, we'd be hard pressed to make it back to France for several weekends in a row. So we had to find another option. Options remaining: prepare in Greifswald in German (nearly impossible for it to be useful to both of us) or hope we have good luck and find somewhere in Berlin or Hamburg with an English program.

Somehow luck was on our side.

Mr. Fox found the English-Speaking Roman Catholic Mission in Berlin that was not only quick to respond to our inquiry but also fantastically accommodating, flexible, and just overall super.

Our priest seems to be pretty with it. We haven't had to lie... much. (But of course on the subject of birth control usage we had to fib. Who is really diligent enough to do natural family planning?!?!) But in spite of the with-it-ness of our priest, he tends to say these not-with-it things like "women tend to be unable to make decisions when they are emotionally charged (not totally wrong thought this does not only pertain to women) so in these cases you should leave it to your husband to decide." I don't completely disagree. In general, this is not bad counsel. However, you must know that these comments were made within the context of discussing the wedding preparations. Sadly, all of these are emotional decisions and if I left them up to Mr. Fox we'd be having a shoeless backyard kegger with fancy food. (Okay maybe not quite to that extremity, but I'm sure I'm close...)

Another example of the not-with-it-ness is when we read a scripture about how a wife with "governed speech" is a super thing for a man to have (Sirach 26:1-4, 13-16). So after reading this one, he asks us what we think the definition of "governed speech" is.

Me: (confidently) A woman with some education in how to handle herself appropriately in all situations and does.

Mr. Fox: (cautiously) A woman who never is embarrassing because she

The Priest: (basically, but not exactly) A woman who knows her place.

Me: (trying hard not to rebut or make faces) Ah.

Of course I expect stuff like this. He's a Catholic priest (and a pretty old one at that). So needless to say, though these things go off well, and we tend to have some (unexpectedly) awesome and down-to-earth conversations, Mr. Fox has come away with some niftily annoying soundbites that he can deploy whenever he feels like exercising his a**hole muscle.

Me: (discussing *fill in the blank* about the wedding) I can't decide between X, Y and Z. Maybe W or V or ...

Mr. Fox: (a*hole in full tilt and chuckling like a naughty child) Remember what the priest said! When you can't make a decision you have to listen to me!

Me: *sarcastic eyeroll*

Who knew scripture could be so fun?

You Must Have A Ring Story

As Sheryl Crow puts it, "diamond ring don't mean a thing" and for a long time I felt the same way. Diamond rings are no big deal.

That was until I actually had marriage on the mind as a real possibility. That's when diamond ring became a bit of an obsession.

And of course, I panicked.

I mean what kind of ring did I want? I'm not accustomed to wearing rings. What will I ever do with something so expensive on my finger? I can't fathom having someone spend so much on something so small. Would I ever be able to put my left hand in my pocket again? I'm going to have to put everything in my right pocket from then on.

So I made the practical decision to look for something not too big, not too small, pretty flat as to facilitate pocket digging, and not too pricey. And then I had to wait for Mr. Fox.

You see, Mr. Fox was scared to buy intimidated by the idea of buying the ring on his own and surprising me. He knows I am particular. He wanted me to be happy and satisfied. (*big smile*)

So I took this to mean that I had to hunt down my own ring and present him with options on how to buy. I was unfazed by this idea. Actually, me, the lover of control, decided that this was the opportune way to ensure I got something I really wanted, sans dramatic Carrie response (like I talked about here). So I went on an internet hunt to some of my favorite jewelry sites like the Shane Company (a throwback from home), Blue Nile, and pretty much anywhere else the random internet search turned up. After my study of the 4 Cs, I figured the easiest (and most cost effective) way to get what I wanted was to find a setting and then pick a diamond. I presented my findings to Mr. Fox.

But Mr. Fox still refused to make the purchase on his own. He wanted guidance. What this meant was that we spent an entire Saturday afternoon screen sharing over Skype. Yet, even after the lengthy discussion over price and value and investment and blah, blah, blah, Mr. Fox still refused to take the plunge and buy the surprise ring.

So we compromised. (Compromise: (n.) the key to successful relationships; almost like getting what you want)

Our Compromise: Mr. Fox was coming to visit a few weeks later where we would be attending a conference together in Chicago. We'd have a few days in NJ before and after the trip, thus we could fit in the ring shopping. Plan made!

Now that we had a plan of action, I decided to take a peek at a shop in the local mall, preparing for Mr. Fox's visit and impending ring purchase. I found this ring:

I thought I had found "the one". Source.

I tried it on and fell into immediate infatuation. It was so sparkly!!! It looked so lovely on my pinky finger!!! It wasn't terribly expensive...

I was so infatuated that I basically put a hold on the ring with the pushy sales woman and told her that I would return with Mr. Fox later that week to rescue my infatuation and make it mine.

So when Mr. Fox arrived later that week, we promptly went to the mall for a whirlwind shopping trip hitting 4 different jewelry stores, saving "the one" for last.

It was educational, to say the least.

In the first store, we were entertained by a lovely lady who turned Mr. Fox on to the idea of the solitaire. Interestingly enough, I really had very few concrete criteria going in to all of this and NO SOLITAIRES was one of them. So having Mr. Fox being so interested in such was a bit of a nightmare at first.

However, when that guy has an idea that has sound reason behind it he can be really persuasive. His newly discovered idea was this:

"If you are buying a diamond, why hide it with a lot of other diamonds? The reason a diamond is so beautiful is because of the way the light reflects inside of it. If you put many lesser quality diamonds around it you are essentially wasting money because you do not actually get to experience the quality of the largest and most expensive diamond."

That crap makes sense.

So somehow I found myself agreeing with this guy and going along on the great solitaire hunt.

But we still had not yet visited the jeweler where I had placed "the one" on hold. I saved her for last. Yet, after hearing all the hype, when Mr. Fox finally saw "the one" his only real response was a damning, "it's not you."

I was crushed.

Strangely, when I had that little sparkly on my pinky finger again, I had also felt the same way. My infatuation was gone.

So after some hurt feelings (not mine) and Mr. Fox getting to practice his fantastic ability to unapologetically say "No" to anyone, we left, exhausted and ringless.

But then along came Chicago and their lovely Diamond Row. However, the problem was that we were pretty unexcited about ring shopping again. We were tired of pushy sales people and not finding something that really fit the bill. I conducted another internet search trying to find a store on The Row worth visiting. Neither of us had any desire to schlepp up and down some long street peeking in every shop with diamond rings in the window.

My search turned up something that looked like a gem. I was a bit skeptical of it at first due to the uninspired name of Wedding Bands & Co. but there were just too many great reviews to ignore. Additionally, they are an actual jeweler and design their own jewelry and creativity turns me on. So we reluctantly dragged ourselves over to the shop in question.


We were greeted by a lovely salesman named Victor. He was friendly and stylish, clearly knew his stuff, and made us quite comfortable. Big plus: he was not at all pushy. 


So we did it: we made the BIG purchase! Our fantastic experience with Victor, plus the lovely settings and assortment of stones that he showed us helped Mr. Fox to find that ring that is uniquely me (that he would later use to torment me for several days like I wrote about here).


I couldn't be happier. (*big smile*)

Mr. Fox's tangible gift of love.