Cake Day


Last Friday, June 6th, was our Cake Day.  Mike and I performed many feats of bureaucratic contortion and form-filling in our quest to get married, and June 6th was the final day set for our Irish wedding.  

Here is an abbreviated version of the saga:

Last fall, when Nova was still snug inside my belly, Mike and I started to talk about getting married so we could all live together in the same country, but I didn't want to rush into it, and didn't want to tie the knot while my brain was addled with pregnancy hormones.  We planned, tentatively, to get married without family or fuss at Cambridge City Hall in December.

Well, Nova was supposed to come out in early November, but she was actually born on November 29th, which meant that by the time she and I had recovered from childbirth, Christmas was upon us and so was the end of Mike's 90-day visa to the US.  We planned to get married after our return from a visit to Ireland in early January. 

Mike didn't get a visa to come back because of some short-sighted bureaucrat at the US Embassy in Dublin, so we started to try to get married here in Ireland.  The lawyer Mike's mum recommended to us told us that we would have to appear before a judge in the family circuit court to get a waiver for the three-month waiting period, then go to the Health Board which regulates and performs civil marriages.  I arranged my flight back so that I would be here for the next sitting of the circuit court, but the lawyer didn't make an appointment for us, saying that we had to go to the Health Board first, on March 6th.  That was supposed to get us a wedding date on March 27th, according to the lawyer. 

Well, we got to the Health Board, Registry of BirthsMarriagesDeaths and it turned out that we hadn't decoded their piles of forms correctly, and that the lawyer's advice was not in accord with the Health Board's current rules, and that we actually needed to go before the judge first and then go back to the health board, but we had needed that first meeting to get a date set for the judge to put in his letter.  So, the date was set for May 1st, which I thought sounded like a fine day to get married.

But no.  The circuit courts of the world conspired against us and I had to go back to the US to testify in a trial, and it looked like we wouldn't be back before the 1st of May, so we had to re-schedule.  That was when the June 6th date was set, after yet another meeting with the women at the Registry of BirthsMarriagesDeaths.  I rescheduled our restaurant reservation and cake for the day.  

Thanks to yet another pile of paperwork Mike was allowed to accompany me back to the US on my unpleasant errand to the circuit court there.  Once my business was concluded, we got married with haste and great rejoicing.  

And so we returned to Ireland, legally and officially married with no further need for the bureaucrats of BirthsMarriagesDeaths.  But we did have a cake to eat, and that's what we did last Friday.  


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Creating a Home for Body, Soul, and Spirit by Bernadette Raichle rating: 4 of 5 stars I borrowed this book from the local Steiner playgroup. I've enjoyed the parent-toddler group, and have picked up a lot of ideas about education and childrearing from its Steiner/Waldorf based activities, but I've always been a bit uneasy about its philosophical underpinnings. Here, at last, was a book which was explicit about how Anthroposophy informs the operation of a daycare centre, and man, is there some whacky stuff in there! The anthroposophical jargon about creating a "penetrated" environment and the four sheafs (Physical, Etheric, Soul/Astral, and Ego) would turn off most people I know, but it does explain why Waldorf kindergartens are organized the way they are. I gave this book four stars because it was exactly what I was looking for, and because I think it is useful, but it is not particularly well-written. Some sections are less well-developed than others, and as I
Read more

Spanische Windtorte

Image
When I was young, my mother had a nearly-complete set of the Time-Life Foods of the World cookbooks. Although the recipes in these were not, as a rule, very good, I was much taken with the photo on the cover of The Cooking of Vienna's Empire -- a Spanish Windtorte. I told my mother that I wanted one for my birthday cake. I had not grasped quite how difficult they were to build. I think we wound up with more of a Pavlova instead. The thing is, a Spanische Windtorte is almost exactly the same thing as a pavlova, only with a fancier-shaped meringue. So, when I set out to make one again yesterday, I used a combination of this Pavlova recipe and these Spanische Windtorte instructions . I increased the quantities in the pavlova recipe by about 1/3, and, in the final step, did not macerate the fruit but rather mixed it with sugar immediately before adding it to the whipped cream mixture... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Making the meringue was fairly straightforward, except that
Read more

Transatlantic Baby

Nova is about to embark on her fourth transatlantic flight since she got out of the womb.  I wish we didn't have to go back and forth so much, but that's just how it's turned out. The first flight was on New Year's Eve, when she was just over a month old.  She surprised me by sleeping almost the whole way from Newark airport to her grandmother's house in Galway.  On the next two flights, I traveled alone with her, and honestly it wasn't so bad.  The flight attendants on Continental pretty much ignored us, and offered me no extra help.  Aer Lingus was a different story, with the flight attendants all offering to hold her and walk up and down the aisles, or sit with her if I needed to go to the toilet.   Each time, I've brought a little less with us.  This time Nova's equipment will consist of a stack of disposable diapers, a small towel, a blanket, a change of clothes, some cotton wool, a teething ring, baby tylenol and bum ointment just in case, maybe a
Read more