Flashback....1996

This week my blog is going to go back in time. My wedding anniversary is this week and since we are going low key this year I wanted to devote my blog this week to my relationship with my husband from beginning to current time.

We start in May of 1996 in sunny CA. I was a sophomore in college and Dave was a freshman. Yes, I dated a younger man. It was towards the end of the school year and a friend and I went to a party. While at this party, at a house affectionately named "Chicken House", another friend introduced me to Dave. We spent the rest of the night, laughing, enjoying a few beverages and running through the sprinklers. We were up really late that night, in fact it was close to 4am when we went back to the dorms.

For me it was one of the best nights of my life. Why? Well, because what started as an ordinary outing to your typical college party led to me finding my knight in shining armor. We clicked instantly, like we were meant to be together.

My parents met him a few weeks later since it was my birthday and they wanted to take me out to dinner. That was a tad awkward because I had never done that before. I mean, my parents knew my boyfriends in high school but I had never had dinner with me, my boyfriend and my parents before until then.

School ended in June and I took Dave to the airport and I cried. A LOT! I had already made plans to go to Wisconsin and visit but I felt like that was too far away. We were just starting to get to know each other and now we were not going to be living in the same place. We were going to talk on the phone almost every day and email back and forth. Oh did we run up the phone bill. It was a few hundred dollars on my end and I am sure just as much on his end. One day we talked for a couple of hours. While it was hard to be apart, we got to know each other really well through our conversations and emails. I still wish he could have been my date to my best friends wedding that summer but it wasn't meant to be.

In July, I flew out to meet Dave in Wisconsin and thus meet his parents. They were so welcoming and everyone was so nice. I had a great time the week that I was there but it went by very quickly and I had to head home. Yes, I cried A LOT then too.

It was during this trip that I knew. I knew that Dave and I were meant to be together. We just fit. I can't really explain it any better than that. I have had that feeling only 3 times in my life so far. Once was when I was deciding where to go to college and as soon as I walked on to the campus at Santa Clara University this feeling overcame me and I knew I belonged there. It happened again when I met Dave. And the third time it happened was when we decided to adopt from Ethiopia. It just all felt right each time. All of the pieces fell into place and I found peace in my soul.

Things only got better that year when in November, Dave's parents flew to CA for Thanksgiving. They were going to eat at a restaurant and my parents insisted that they come over to our house for dinner. So 6 months after we had been dating, our parents were meeting. This was a HUGE deal but it went off without a hitch. It just reaffirmed that this was 100% right.

This is merely the beginning, stay tuned for the next segment, which skips ahead to December of 1997 and a funny story.