Love

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I moved back to Maryland in June 2005, following college and graduate school.  I realized then that its really hard to meet people when you aren’t in school!  A few of my friends had success on dating sites, so I thought I’d give it a try.  I joined match.com and enlisted the help of my girlfriends to write my profile. (You can actually see our success story on the match site here.)

It’s a good thing that Craig is so cute.  Otherwise, I’d have just ignored his weenie wink.  We emailed back and forth for a while.  Then upgraded to IM.  Then to the phone.  A few weeks after those first emails, we went on our first date.  Craig picked a bar in downtown Baltimore, some brewery.  When I got there, the bar was all boarded up and I was pretty sure he was actually a serial killer trying to lure me into a construction zone.  I called him to tell him the bar was closed and then found him a few blocks away.  We ended up relocating to a tiny Italian bakery in Little Italy.

We ended up closing the restaurant down.  After a half hour of no one coming to check on our table, we realized that they had closed a half hour before and no one had wanted to kick us out.  Craig drove me back to my car (so I didn’t have to wander the construction zone alone), tapped me on my leg, and said “I had a really nice time tonight.”  I still tease him about that too.

We went on our second, third, and fourth dates the next week.  After that, we saw each other pretty much every day.

Craig asked me to marry him in July 2006.  He made me a wonderful dinner and even bought canolli like we had on our first date.  My engagement ring and wedding band are my grandmother’s from 1948.

We got married on May 5, 2007 at a beautiful, outdoor ceremony.

We had our first child (but also kind of our second, being a step family makes those distinctions hard) in June 2009.

The first years of marriage have been joyful, fun, crazy, busy, challenging, and full of love.  We are so lucky to have each other and our wonderful children.