Happy anniversary!

Today marks our 10 year anniversary...  It's hard to believe that it's been that long.  Our wedding was quite the celebration.  You can check out some of the photos here, if you don't believe me (the lower in the page, the later in the night and the emptier the kegs and bottles.  And yes, I wore a red dress.  In fact, I saw the dress and ordered it -- I didn't actually try it on for the first time until after it was specially ordered and paid for.  But it was perfect.  As you could see in the gallery of our actual wedding, E and I didn't get very many photos together that day.  Both of us were too busy having a great time celebrating with all our friends and family.  So as our 10-year anniversary approached, I had asked E if he would be willing to take some photos of just him and me in his tux and make it back to where it all started...  Where he proposed to me.

I had envisioned the perfect day in December in New York City for our photos.  And let's just say that not everyone cooperated with us.  My hair was perfect -- I mean, seriously, perfectly curled when I left his mother's apartment.  The rain began the minute we stepped out of the car in Brooklyn and continued until we were driving back up to the Bronx with a HUGE slice of NYC pizza in our laps.  It rained and rained and rained that day -- and I will tell you that the Brooklyn Bridge was COLD.  I couldn't feel my feet by the time that we walked over to the Brooklyn side to get into our car.  And big thanks to Mike, E's friend who came and froze & soaked his balls off to snap the photos on the camera set up with a tripod -- I will be forever grateful for you sacrificing your warm-inside-Wednesday for us.

In thinking about the rainy day and looking at the photos now, I think they accurately represent our 10 years of marriage.  Imperfectly perfect.  We are considering a re-do -- running about the city again in a warmer (more hair-friendly) time of year (in hopes of being able to hit more places that are important to us as a couple).  But for now, these are the two most important spots in New York City in the re-telling of our story -- the Brooklyn Bridge (the site of our official proposal) and Trinity Church (the site of our first proposal).

One cold day in December 2003 (the 13th to be exact), E proposed to me in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, with him standing in Brooklyn and me in Manhattan.  Without going into the whole details of the proposal story, it involved one $115 parking ticket, four broken cameras, one busted side-view mirror re-attached with duct tape, and an episode that will stay between me and the South Street Seaport bathroom.  But I did say yes and we went on to drink with friends until the wee hours in the morning at the Village Idiot.

The exact spot where the proposal happened

Ten years, two babies later -- two people stand in the same spot -- different, but still the same.

Trinity Church is also special to us because it was the first place that E proposed to me.  What you say?  The first??!?!?  A little background -- our first date was a wedding in June 2001.  I was living in Iowa City and he was living in NYC.  In August 2001, I went out for my first NYC visit.  E took me on a grand tour of the city on motorcycle.  The first night there, we came across a street vendor hawking cheap silver rings.  After being insulted by the vendor that I had fat fingers, we bought a ring each and came up a plot to make our friends in Iowa City think that we got married.  Now this was before the invention of Facebook and Instagram -- so we had to take tons of photos to show them back home, tons of FILM photos.  One of the photos that we took was him getting down on one knee in Trinity Church to "propose" to me.  If only we knew then what we know now...

A photo of a photo

The entire roll of film looked like this basically -- ring flashing...

I really wanted to get a photo of us inside Trinity with our wedding attire -- I had the times the church was open to the public.  But the weather threw some wrenches into our plans and when we were there, they were just starting mass.  The ushers looked at us quite strangely -- but never offered to stop the mass to usher us to the front (darn them!).  Maybe next time.