Three Year Anniversary

I really try not to post on weekends usually, but yesterday I was pissed off and today is my wedding anniversary! Plus this was pre-written last week so I'm not taking any time out of our day, which is a good thing!

 

Us at Denny's in Killeen, TX a few months after we were married. Photo by Zebo (a friend)

Today marks the day three years ago when my husband and I were married in a courthouse in the outer Chicago suburbs.

We met online on an art website called DeviantArt in February 2006, we both like to take photographs and ended up coming across one another on there. We talked on there for a while, leaving comment on one another's photographs and writing until my husband managed somehow to convince me to give out my email and IM.

He was deployed to Kosovo at the time as Active Duty Public Affairs support for the National Guard out there, so our time difference was only an hour as I lived in England. After I got home to my apartment from work in the evenings, at around 11pm, I would get online and we would talk all night, getting ourselves into trouble with our respective jobs for being constantly tired. There were a couple of guys that I was already seeing at the time so I just thought of him as a friend, someone to talk to. After all, we were from different countries and led totally different lives, it would have been impossible. We would send one another music we were listening to, photographs we'd taken and talk about our writing.

We took the plunge and decided to have voice conversations on Skype. He played guitar for me over Skype and I fell in love, although he didn't let him know that until much later.

In July of the same year he took two weeks leave and came to visit me. We met for the first time in the arrivals lounge of Heathrow airport, got a hotel and hung out together for a few days in London. We caugh the Eurostar to Paris and wandered around seeing the sites, eating great French food, taking photographs and talking.

Us in Paris. Photos by a timer and my husband. Man, I used to have long hair before it started falling out.

After a long weekend in Paris we came back to my apartment in Nottingham for the last week, he said to me "What would you say if I asked you to marry me?"
I said "Um, yeah I guess."
He wandered off for a while, came back and said, "Well. Um, well... will you marry me?"
I hugged him tight and he said "Is that a yes?"
"Yes."

He caught the plane back to Kosovo a week later, I went with him to the airport and cried on the way home in a London Underground train filled with early morning commuters. We emailed one another and spoke online nearly every day until I traveled to the States in December of the same year.

We were married in a courthouse under a week after my arrival, I wore skinny jeans, a cute purple dress and crochet ballet pumps. He wore a shirt, jeans and converse sneakers. A couple being followed around by 6 young children in cute little dresses and suits were married before us, while we waited in the main hall. His best friend was the only person with us during the ceremony. She cried and made me promise to never tell anyone that she did (oops). On our way out, two men in handcuffs were being escorted into the building by men in police uniform. We don't have a single photograph from that day, but I wont ever forget.

The past three years have brought us so many things, the main one of course being our son. There have also been 3 different homes in two different countries, lots of joy and laughter as well as the hard times. I wouldn't change anything for the world.

Us in Autumn 2008, photo by my dad.