My Super Special Deployment Present

When my husband and I decided to get married last year, that's all our "engagement" was, simply two people making the decision that we want to spend the rest of our lives together and get married.  There was no proposal.  No getting down on one knee.  There was no ring.  It was simply two people who were crazy in love with each other, who were tired of waiting for the "right time" after a year of setbacks, deciding to just go for what we want.  We had been shooting for a certain date, and because of one thing or another it kept getting put on hold.  So in January 2011, we just decided to go with a small ceremony and started planning out the details for our target date.  At the end of February we told our families and a couple close friends and gave them the details about our "big" day, and then that April 1st we were married, just one month after making our engagement public to everyone else via the almighty Facebook.

There were definitely some things that we missed, and still do, about not doing the whole traditional engagement/wedding thing, but it worked for us and what we wanted.  All we really cared about was being husband and wife.  And by having a super short engagement and having worked out all of the details about our day before we even told our family, it saved many headaches that would have resulted from a longer engagement and larger wedding.

The one downside to all of this is my husband has said before how he feels bad that he wasn't able to buy me an engagement ring.  Instead, when it came time to go buy my wedding band, I simply spent a little more money than I had originally planned on to get a nicer ring, using my increase in pay from the new job/promotion I had received at the time to pay for it.

Now that we have a decent steady income each month, my husband decided that it was time to get me the ring he never could get before.  When we began talking about it, I had looked up settings at the same jeweler where we purchased both of our wedding bands, and fell in love with one that looked like it should match my band perfectly.  All that was left was to find the center stone.

Given the fact that my husband and I haven't done everything by the most traditional means and prefer to do what works best for the two of us, I started to really like the idea of going with a stone other than a diamond.  After playing around with the jeweler's design your ring page, I quickly fell in love with the idea of a white sapphire.  I like the idea of having something a little different.  And honestly, I still wouldn't let my husband spend the money on a diamond now, as there are many other better ways our money could be spent.

My husband found and selected the stone he wanted me to have while on this deployment, and then sent it to me to have placed in the setting I had found, which turned out to be a perfect match for my wedding band.  I have to say, my man did a good job!  He says he would still like to change it out for a diamond one day, but I don't know that I'll ever want to make that change.

It has been kind of weird getting used to it, as I'm so used to just the one ring and not getting it snagged on anything, but I've only had it since the end of this past weekend after having to wait a couple days for the jeweler to set the stone into the ring.  But I love it very much and love that my husband was able to hand pick the stone for me.  It will always serve as a reminder of what we've been through this past year, the discovery of what we're capable of, and the love we have for each other.

My husband's response when I sent him pictures of the final ring: "it's HUGE".  I'm not sure if he remembers the fact that HE picked out the stone, not me lol.