2001 - the year all hell broke loose

B returned from Japan sometime in December (2000), before Christmas is all i can remember.
[history on that - by the time B entered my life, i had given up on boys. i figured out i was going to be a spinster. things never seemed to go right in that arena for me. when we met, first date, first kiss i made a point of not making a mental note of it. i didn't want to remember it to only be painfully haunted by it in the future. i was tired of celebrating anniversaries that never happened. talk about damaged goods....onward, please.]

shortly after B returned he proposed & we were engaged. he had waited to see how we weathered the deployment, evidently quite a feat to have survived it.

while he was in Japan i moved back to my mom's condo. i helped her with the mortgage & she helped me keep my sanity between working full-time during the day & schooling part-time at night. [it was a fair-trade, maintaining my sanity takes a lot of effort.] so our immediate task was to find a new apt; however the rates had gone up dramatically in the interim & we started looking at buying a house together.

yeah, funny how we were all about taking the relationship steps slow & once we were engaged we moved at lightening speed, huh? just you wait, we're barely in january people. on superbowl sunday we found the house & put a bid in on it. i remember looking at it, thinking it was more than a girl from a trailer park could ever dream of. to this day B jokes about how the 95lb girl dragged the 200lb marine around the house to show him every room.

in february we eloped. we had the full intention of not telling anyone other than my mother until we were financially stable enough to have a real wedding. (did you notice the use of had?) it was a rainy day & we decided to get the formality over before signing paperwork on the house.

over the course of the next few months we moved into the house & i focused on finishing my final semester of college (it was a bitch). graduating in may was such a relief; B was so proud of me it made me cry. our original plan was once i finished college we would have the real wedding & start our family. so once my head wasn't swirling from business classes & presentation crap we were out looking at venues & i was trying on wedding gowns.

then 9/11 happened & 3 short weeks later i found out i was pregnant.
the pregnancy story gets it's own post at later point in time. i can't get into it now. i wish i had a blog back then.

we visited B's family for thanksgiving that year & sprung the surprise on them. although they loved the idea, i know it was a tough pill to swallow - eloped & pregnant. i'm sure his family wasn't too impressed with the mexican girl from the trailer park at that point in time.