the time my husband lost his wedding ring three times

When Jeff and I were betrothed, I knew I wanted to have our wedding bands specially made for us by a shop in my hometown called Goldmakers.  Not only is their jewelry gorgeous and original, it is operated and most of the jewelry design and craft is done by two chicks I went to junior high/high school with, and they were awesome at jewelry even then.  (Isn't it cool that my high school had jewelry and metals classes?  That's public school done right, Nashville.)

I knew exactly what I wanted for mine.  It's called a gypsy setting, and it's basically a standard-width band with lots of tiny little diamond chips dropped in in a random pattern.  Here's a good example (but with sapphires instead of diamonds, and thinner than mine):

I love my wedding band and it still brings me a lot of joy to look at it each day. 

Jeff also knew just what he wanted.  He is a fidgeter, and he loved the idea of getting one of those rings with a spinning inner channel, so he could fuss with it all day long.  It cost a fortune because it is basically two rings fused together and then specially set so that one can spin freely.

These artisan rings set us back a couple grand, but it's okay, because you only ever get one, right?

Umm.  Well, in addition to being a fidgeter, my husband is also a chronic ring-taker-offer-and-putter-back-on-er.  Working in a restaurant compounds this, and he is constantly slipping off his ring when he has to get his hands in something nasty.

We were married (first in April, then in May) about four months before he lost the original spinner ring.  It's a long story, but let's just say he believes it was in a parking garage and it was gone the next morning when he went back to look for it.  Four months, people.  That's how long this lifetime investment lasted us.

So, off I go to Australia that winter (to do little stuff like meet the Dalai Lama and understand the world's religions).  While I was in Melbourne, the Gyuto monks (which are like the Dalai Lama's special task force) were selling handcrafted Tibetan goods to raise money for their cause.  I found a gorgeous hammered steel ring with a spinner!  It was embellished with Tibetan symbols and letters.  I bought it for about ten Australian dollars, prayed over it with a monk, and arrived home with my husband's second wedding ring.

He loved that one.  Maybe even more than the first.  He showed it off and talked it up wherever we went.  I thought we had found a keeper with that ring. 

But then the baby was born.  And the chaos ensued.  Somewhere in between being up all night and shifting around all our stuff to make room for her detritus, the second ring was lost.  We were sure that when we moved it would turn up.  Nope.

In the meantime, Jeff picked up a cheap ring from the gas station.  Somehow, in spite of his total inability to keep track of a wedding band, he still wants to wear one to show the world that he's married.  I appreciate that. 

But somewhere between Vicki Jo's arrival and our move to Tennessee, that ring was lost as well.  He thinks that one got left on the sink at work or something like that.  I wasn't too sad, as I really had nothing to do with that. 

So here we are, working on our fourth year of marriage, and my dear husband has already burned through three wedding bands.  He is the illustration beside the definition of "you can't have nice things."  I'm either thinking that he gets one tattooed on (which he would love as he already has a number of tattoos), or I just plan on buying him a new one for every year of marriage.  What do you think?