Wedding Story - G and Me before Baby L

Slightly off topic from living abroad, I realized as I was putting together photos for Baby L's birth story that I never really took the opportunity to showcase the amazing wedding photos that my sister's husband took for us when G and I got married.  And as I thought about displaying our photos on the blog, I figured I might as well share our story for those who haven't heard it!

G and I met online in June 2015.  Since divorcing my first husband in 2014, I had been in one serious relationship, and other than that, I dated like it was a second job. During one particularly busy 3-day holiday weekend, I went on 7 first dates!  My first husband and I separated for many reasons, and the biggest reason was that I was ready to start a family and he wasn't sure when he would be.  I felt my biological clock ticking (really, it was more like the alarm clock was blaring in one of those dreams where you can't turn it off) and so I felt that if I didn't actually put myself "out there" in the dating world, my family dreams would never come to fruition. I had so much anxiety around starting a family and becoming a mother that I went through a procedure to stimulate my ovaries and freeze one dozen of my egg cells.  The process is similar to IVF, except that the eggs are not fertilized until they are removed from cryopreservation, which saved me from some sticky moral dilemmas about being Catholic and freezing embryos.  I considered it my (very expensive) insurance policy that if I didn't meet Mr. Right until my early 40's, I could still have a baby.

Anyway, back to G and I.  As I mentioned, I was dating like it was a second job, and I had essentially exhausted my online options in early June.  When this happens, the best thing to do is to take a little dating vacation and shut down my online profile for a month or two to let the dating pool "regenerate" itself.  When I logged into to temporarily suspend my profile, I noticed a message from G - he seemed like a nice guy, and so we started texting each other outside the online platform.  This was generally new territory for me - when I meet someone online, I like to meet them for coffee as soon as possible to see whether or not there was any spark or chemistry.   I remember clearly some of our early conversations because Houston had just experienced the 2015 memorial day floods, and we made some jokes about taking boats to work instead of driving.  I think G actually saved all of our texts - he's sweet and sentimental like that.

In fact, everything about dating G was different from my previous dating experiences.  We didn't actually talk on the phone until over a weeks later - he was working nights and I was travelling to Connecticut for Father's Day.  Talking on the phone was unusual for me.  I typically might have one or two conversations on the phone, and then I would want to meet. I really enjoyed talking to him on the phone though, and hearing about his job and his friends. After talking on the phone with him, I decided to let him pick me up from my home and take me to dinner - another first, since I almost always met my first dates and it was almost always for coffee or lunch, rarely, if ever, dinner.

Our first date was amazing. With our conflicting work schedules we weren't able to set our first date until the end of June - the same day of the Houston Pride Parade, and the day that SCOTUS ruled on Gay Marriage.  He took me to Local Foods down in Rice Village to avoid the congestion downtown. We ate and talked and then walked around Rice Village and talked some more.  He admitted to living with his parents in Baytown to save money while going to school, and that while he was in the process of divorcing his wife, the paperwork wasn't finalized yet.  The first thing I was totally cool with since it seemed so financially responsible, the second gave me pause, and yet I started dating before my paperwork was finalized so I couldn't really judge.  After walking a loop around Rice Village, neither of us was ready to call it an evening, so we went to go see the movie "Inside Out" - I loved that he was ok watching a kids' movie on our first date.  I later learned that he actually likes kids' movies as much as I do.  He took me home, walked me to my doorstep, gave me a kiss and was gone before I say anything other than "goodnight".

Side note - I happened to be casually seeing 2 other people at the same time.  By the end of my second date with G (which involved walking from my place downtown to Jackson Street BBQ, free Argentinian Tango at Discovery Green, and cold pressed juice at Tout Suite), I decided to date G exclusively.  From there, the whirlwind started! We spent as much time together as we could.  I was training for a sprint triathlon, so I would go jogging with G at his parents' house in Baytown after work.  I gave him a key to my house, and he surprised me one day by cleaning my entire kitchen and having dinner prepped and ready to throw on the stove with bottles of wine to fill my wine rack.  Talk about sweeping a girl off her feet!!

By Labor Day weekend, we were searching for a house to call our own.  My dad was thrilled for me, my sister a bit skeptical - after all, we'd just met, and we were already buying a house together? Wasn't this a little fast?  I joke that she had a 3-year engagement, anything less than that would seem fast for her.  She agreed that he could come with me to her wedding so the family could meet him, even though we were well past the RSVP date.  He turned out to be a HUGE help for her wedding - he shuttled people, flowers, whatever was needed from the hotel, the church, the salon, and the reception.  My family loved G - we were engaged shortly after, and married in January.

We both had big white weddings the first time we were married, so we decided to keep it small this time around - immediate family only, and we had the wedding in Mystic, CT where my mother is buried.  The weather in Mystic on our wedding day was unseasonably warm for January - I think it was like 55 degrees and sunny.   The gal who did my hair said I was the most chill bride she'd ever met - but why wouldn't I be?  I wanted my wedding weekend to be relaxing and fun, and it was exactly that. My family and I stopped at the cemetery before the wedding to drop off flowers at Mom's grave and then we headed to Latitude 41 for the wedding.  G's father held a quick ceremony for us followed by lunch and then bumming around Mystic Seaport for photos.  After the festivities, my dad hosted the family at his home where he, his then girlfriend (now wife), and my cousin cooked us a delicious Vietnamese dinner.  It was the perfect intimate ending to a perfect intimate wedding day.  I couldn't have been happier, and I'm pretty sure my face hurt from smiling by the end of the day!

Jonathan took almost 300 photos that weekend, and I've picked a my favorites to share here! I haven't figured out how to make my blogger gallery work well on mobile, so I apologize if the photos are distorted for mobile phones...consider the galleries works in progress. ;-)