Winner!

In the midst of unemployment and job hunting, it's hard to feel like a winner. So this email from The Perfect Pamper could not have come at a better time:

Hi Emilienne

Congratulations on winning our competition with BN1 magazine!

You have won: A pamper party for six people - six x 15 minute treatments

• OPI mini manicure
• Mini Living Nature facial
• Face and head massage
• Neck, back and shoulders massage
• Hand or foot massage

When this competition appeared in the BN1 magazine a few weeks ago, I sent in my name and contact info but didn't really think twice. I can't imagine that many people even entered the competition. But hey, who cares? I won!

All the ladies in our family will be perfectly pampered for our wedding day!

Unemployed or not, today I got to be the winner who'll be treating the ladies in her family to a pre-wedding spa package. Not bad for a rainy late-January day.

Dressing to hit the dance floor

If I intend to dance at our wedding— and I do— then as much as I adore The Dress, I'll probably need a back-up, something in which I can actually move. A quick swing past a thrift shop last weekend landed me something white that can hit the dance floor.

£40 for a spare wedding dress? Thank you, Martlett's!

This was my blank canvas. Finally, I got to live my dream of sewing my own wedding dress, or as close as I could come with only three months to plan an entire wedding.

Dissecting my wedding dress: bodice and skirt are separated as I integrate the purple waistband ribbon

I hunkered down with my sewing machine this weekend to open up, widen, lengthen, and shorten various bits and pieces of Dress #2. With the help of a friend who gave me half of her Saturday night, I now have my dancing dress. And boy, is it ever made to twirl.

Dress #2, ready to dance the night away

Let them eat cake!

A wedding cake wasn't originally part of the plans. After all, it is somewhat frivolous spending and we are on a budget. However, two things clicked. First: it turns out that cakes aren't massively expensive here. A cake from Brighton's top-ranked bakery (according to TripAdvisor) that serves up to 65 guests costs £130, literally £2 per person. We're considering paying more than that to give each person a coffee or tea with dessert, and those won't make for nearly as pretty a picture as a three-tiered wedding cake. And second: although the French may have mastered the realm of desserts, they don't actually do wedding cakes. They only see them in the movies.

We're trying to make this wedding as rich of a cultural experience as possible for all of our guests, a large proportion of whom will be coming from a wedding-cake-less world on the other side of the Channel. So, unlike their queen who they enthusiastically beheaded, we will be letting the large contingent from the continent (and all our other guests) eat cake.

Yes, there will be cake.

The bakery has appropriately named itself Cloud 9. And by the time we've sliced our way through a mountain of vanilla, chocolate, and freshly chopped strawberries in buttercream, cloud 9 is just where we'll all be.

Going digital: Our wedding website

Wedding websites are a fantastic way to inform guests of wedding plans, collect RSVPs, share our registry, and count down together to the Big Day. When it came to creating our digital space, one word was key: free. Several Google searches and trial runs later, I'd settled on the lesser known withjoy.com, in part because they weren't trying to sell me anything (ahem- theknot) but mostly because of the photos. Rather than slipping our images into pre-designed blog-like templates, at withjoy, we got to put our photos front and center, and build up all the text around them. In short, it was pretty.

There were, of course, questions of how to tell our story. And how to translate it all. Not to mention that awkward moment when a friendly withjoy employee offered to feature our proposal story, only to learn that we did not, in fact, have one. But at the end of the day, I'm rather proud with what we've put together. Here is our wedding website: withjoy.com/nker

The welcome page of our wedding website, counting down the seconds until we are husband and wife!

Argentina 2018!

With our wedding website nearly up and running, we were just about ready to start digitally inviting our guests! But inviting guests means being prepared with a gift registry. And when you need to be prepared to potentially move anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, what kind of gift makes sense? There was only one answer: a honeymoon registry.

Other than insisting our site be ad-free, we simply set out to pick the cheapest user-friendly site. Most of the totally "free" sites shave more off each gift than those sites that request a small upfront payment from us, so there's no wiggling out of some costs. However, the sites with the upfront payment were more user-friendly. We settled on buy-our-honeymoon.com, which offers users some more tasteful domain names including our pick, ourdreamhoneymoon.com. This site allowed us to customize our domain name, use multiple dates (for our UK and US receptions), go completely bilingual English/French, *and* list our gift prices in three different currencies (£, $, & €)! I have never seen something so friendly to international couples.

After getting over my reservations (namely, how the hell do you start planning a vacation when you're unemployed, financing a wedding, and worrying how many more months' rent your savings will cover??), there was one thing left to decide: where. We wanted some place exotic but not too dangerous, affordable but not dirt cheap, and good to visit over the winter, by which time we hope to have landed wherever my next job will take us. I've been dying to return to Argentina since 2009, when I missed out on Patagonia. And with this sort of notice — we're planning for New Year's 2018 — it's enough time for Nicolas to pick up some basic Spanish. So we made our decision.

A screenshot of our honeymoon registry

Soon, I was waxing rhapsodic about buy-our-honeymoon.com. I discovered that for a mere £5 to £10, I could point anywhere on the planet and get a fully customized honeymoon itinerary, complete with activities, descriptions, and prices. Within a few hours of saying the word, I was adding to, modifying, and pruning our itinerary to polish it into our dream vacation. Suddenly, I'd won days of my life back for job hunting.

It's kind of exciting to know that when the dust has settled, though goodness knows where we'll be living, we know where we'll be ringing in the new year 2018!

Putting a ring on it, his & hers

Just checking items off the wedding to-do list at this point. Well, that, and wondering when I'll get a few more responses from all my job applications. This afternoon, when the jeweller rang, I was thrilled to learn I'd have the pleasure of crossing off a particularly big to-do: picking up Nicolas's wedding band.

Like anything shopping related, this task left Nicolas utterly uninterested, so I let myself get lost in the twisted maze that is the Lanes of Brighton. After testing band upon clunky band, each more awkward than the next when paired with my engagement ring, I goldilocks'ed my way into the perfect fit: a white, yellow, and rose gold triple band otherwise known as a Russian wedding ring. It was delicate, feminine, and unique, and it hugged my engagement ring just right. If only all decisions were this easy.

When my band was re-sized and ready for pick-up, I dragged Nicolas along with the assurance that his trip could be limited to just one shop. After sampling the gamut of colors and designs, Nicolas asked me what shade of gold I'd picked. In a minute, I'd gone from guiltily admitting I'd taken all three to helping him decide what thickness of Russian wedding ring looked best on him.

Our matching wedding bands are finally nestled side by side, awaiting the Big Day.

Finding a set of matching wedding bands that would make us both happy was certainly not something for which I was holding my breath. With just three months to pull this wedding off, I had bigger fish to fry. But I'm thrilled it's worked out this way. And now we're one step closer to saying, "I do."

Someone cleans up nicely

After a fair bit of arm twisting, I forced Nicolas to go suit shopping before the January sales came to a close. But, in case that hadn't been enough of a nuisance, I also forced him into a photo shoot today. And the man cleans up nicely, if I do say so myself.

Nicolas, dressed and ready for our Big Day (minus the coiffeur)