Our Story

So I've been messing with my blog lately.  Among some of the changes made, I wrote our an "Our Story" page.  I'm including it here, so it will get printed off with this year's blog posts.  Enjoy!

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 In early March of 2001, I was a sophomore in college when I met a handsome young man at a single adult dance at our church. His name was Ryan and he lived in the same town as my parents, and worked where I was going to school. He asked me to come with him (and several other people I didn't really know) sailing the next day. I met up with him to carpool, and ended up sitting in the backseat while his other carpool-ee refused to move from the passenger-side front seat. Once on the sailboat, Ryan proceeded to keep himself so busy that we exchanged maybe a dozen words on the several hour, bone-chilling ride on the Puget Sound. I was oh-so-excited I was skipping working on one of my final papers to come be ignored and frozen to death.


The good news was my frozen state was visible, and Ryan's chivalrous side came out and I was allowed the front seat and full access to the heaters on the ride home. (Ok, I may not be fair- it was the other passenger's lack of manners that had me stuck in the backseat on the previous trip.) Ryan dropped off the other guy before finding his way back to my car. Then Ryan managed to come up with enough complete sentences to ask for my phone number and permission to call me.

We were pretty inseparable from this point. Ryan asked me to marry him in June (with a ring my grandfather made), and we were married in August of the same year. 5 days after we were married, we moved to another state. There we lived the college dream- hand-me-down furniture in an older apartment while we worked and went to school.

We really lucked out. Some couples talk about how hard it can be adjusting to living with their spouse. It wasn't like that for us. The apartment, on the other hand, had some serious issues. 

I was diagnosed with endometriosis early 2002. We made the decision to not wait to start a family with fertility problems running in my family, and that diagnosis. Emma joined us a year later, right during the first week of Ryan's student teaching. (Pain was my problem, not fertility.... I came to find out as soon as we started thinking about having a child- there one was! Or two...)

Ryan got a job teaching in 2004, a little closer to family than where we'd been living. Elizabeth joined our family the following year.

We settled into our life here. We made friends and liked our new town. After two years we bought our first home. And then the itch to add a 3rd (and probably last child) came along. And that's when Annie and Maddie entered the scene and changed our lives forever.