How We Met

June 2nd is Bill's and my 3rd wedding anniversary.  Wow.  Three years isn't very long, but it seems like forever (in a good way).  Bill and I met at my old school.  He is an engineer, and at that time, his employer had a fantastic partnership with my school where their employees could donate an hour of their time, with pay, to tutoring kids at my school.  The first years we had the program, we had so many Study Buddies that all but 2 students in my class had them. After a couple years, their budget got cut and they could no longer pay the tutors.  Sadly, most of them stopped volunteering.  A few remained, though, including Bill.

One year, I moved up to fourth grade.  I was lucky enough to get two Study Buddies, and one was Bill.  As the year went on, apparently (he says) he tried to flirt with me, but I'm all business at school, so I didn't see it.  Then, coincidentally, a friend of mine threw a party he also attended.  Her fiance worked for the same company, knew Bill, and had invited him to the party.  It was the infamous Janet Jackson Superbowl (and yes, that's how we refer to it here).  Well, I got there and my friend was feeling bad.  She was feeling sorry because there were not as many (read: zero) single guys at the party as she was hoping for.  As we stood talking about it, in walks Bill.  He proceeded to flirt obviously with me all night, declaring at one point, "I don't want to sit there, I want to sit next to her!"

When I left the party, I figured I would just give him my phone number at work.  We kept talking about getting together to discuss the students (yeah, right).  Finally, I got his information from our tutor coordinator, and emailed him because we were going on a field trip the day he was scheduled to come.  His reply included a suggestion that we meet at the pizza place across from the school after work one day and talk.  And that was our first "date".  It was right around Valentine's Day.  We did not talk about the kids at all. 

Then our real first date was a hockey game right after my birthday, which is a week or so after Valentine's Day.  I remember him asking if I wanted anything to eat or drink.  I wanted a soda.  As he walked off to get it, I said, "NOT diet!" and he replied, "You are quite the woman."  That was a real compliment from him.  I remember being so excited that he had said that.  We had a great time and went for ice cream afterwards.  Then, we just kept going out. 

We had been dating for a while, I think about a year or so, when we found out his company was expecting a ton of layoffs.  Bill, not having worked there very long, could potentially be one of them.  His only option to guarantee staying with them was to move to another center.  He picked one in Florida.  We spent a year apart and it was awful.  He had told me that he wanted to marry me.  I kept waiting for him to propose, and thought he was going to at Christmas when I visited him.  He didn't.  On the day before I had to leave, I told him, "Look, when I go back, they are going to hand out Intent to Return forms at school.  If I tell them I'm coming back, I will be coming back.  But I can't do this long-distance thing anymore.  It's too hard and I'm sad all the time.  What do you want me to tell them?"  Then he told me he had intended to propose but something happened and he never got around to buying a ring.  So, in the little town of Titusville, we went ring shopping.  We found a beautiful ring at Sears, with three stones.  It's technically an anniversary ring, I think, where the stones stand for past, present, and future, but I wanted something completely different from my first engagement ring.

 Here is a picture of my engagement ring and wedding ring, because I can't find the photo of just my engagement ring.  This is a dessert I had on our honeymoon.  It was exactly as good as it looks in the picture.  Yum!  But there's the ring; I hope you can see it okay.

I returned home, filled out my Intent to (not) Return form, cried over my resignation letter, and everything else, and moved to Florida with Bill.