In the weeks and months ahead, I have a new journey to share with you.  It is the story of family wedding preparations.  A joyful but sometimes stressful time in a family’s life and so I thought that perhaps following our odyssey may help you when the time comes to create your own special event whether it be a wedding, an anniversary or a milestone birthday celebration.  We are a family who loves to celebrate and we are pretty darned good at it as this story may indicate.

“The Frenchman” has been a part of our family for a number of years now but as of this Christmas (two days after Daughter #2 returned from a humanitarian trip to Israel), he has made it official and will be renamed Son#2 in the fall of 2014.  D and I are absolutely delighted, but not terribly surprised.  When he asked D to meet him for a Friday night beer, we knew something was up.  When he formally asked his future father-in-law’s permission to marry his daughter, there was not a moment’s hesitation.  In fact, D has often said, if he was to personally chose someone to cherish his baby girl, he could not select a person more suitable than The Frenchman.

Would it be considered ethnic profiling to say that The Frenchman is very romantic? He thoughtfully selected the location and moment of the proposal and then requested that our niece who is a professional photographer be hiding to be able to capture the exact moment.   Now it turns out that Daughter #2 was seriously jet-lagged and turned down his request to go out for dinner with him on his first attempt.  Unfortunately, messages got crossed with the photographer and she ended up hiding at the decided location to no avail (what a trooper)!

Daughter #2 never got to go out for dinner on the designated night.  Once she said “yes” there was a whirlwind of car rides to let her family share in their good news in person.  One of the first stops was to visit my mom in Deer Lodge Hospital (what a good girl).  It just so happened that Sister #2 and #3 were there as well as well as her cousin who now lives in Australia, so it was a happy mix of laughter and tears.  I happened to be at a women’s networking event with many of my old media friends when all of a sudden the couple was there.  My girlfriends sent up cheerful screams when they knew what had just transpired.

D and my first thoughts were of the Frenchman’s parents and we wanted to see them face to face as we talked about the news.  Since the poor couple never did get to eat that evening, D picked up a mass of sushi (our first thoughts are almost always of food when we are celebrating) and connected his tablet to the TV so that we could Skype with our daughter’s future parents.  D had a bottle of champagne chilling and we were able to raise our glasses as a new family, via the wonders of technology.  As I write this and see all of D’s preparations that evening, I see that I married a pretty romantic guy too.  The Frenchman has big shoes to fill in the romance department…..

Kath’s quote:  “I dreamed of a wedding of elaborate elegance, a church filled with family and friends. I asked him what kind of a wedding he wished for, he said one that would make me his wife.”

Love-that is all.

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