Our Reception is August 22nd!

On April 18th, we were able to get married at St. Lawrence! Accompanied only by our parents, Nathan, Tierney, and Fr. Tom our wedding day was definitely unique. Now that we have officially tied the knot and restrictions are lessening, we would love to celebrate with all of our friends and family who we were unable to have at the ceremony itself. On August 22nd, we will be having our wedding reception and hope to see many of you there. Because there is still some risk to the reception, we completely understand if you are unable to attend for any reason. Thank you again for all of your love and support through these trying times. Love, The Meiners

We met Freshman year at Bishop Chatard High School in Biology class. Week one of school, our class was assigned a project about duckweed which resulted in us ending up in the same group. At the time, Riley only knew Evan as "the quiet kid" and Evan was more focused on school than the girl in his Biology class. The project was soon forgotten as the year went on. It wasn't until we had been dating for a couple years that Evan found his notes from our duckweed project. Both of our names were at the top of the paper and we realized that we had met long before we originally thought. Our story had begun before we even knew it.

In the beginning of sophomore year, we started flirting with each other. Riley would steal the fruit snacks that Evan brought in his lunch every day, and he would wrestle them back from her. This gave Evan the idea to use fruit snacks to ask Riley to homecoming. Using 10 packages of smiley face fruit snacks, Evan wrote out "Homecoming?" at Riley's seat while she was getting her lunch. When she came back, she sat down without saying anything. Evan looked at her and said, "Well?!" Riley laughed and said, "Yes. Of course."

Riley went to Xavier. Evan went to Purdue. It sucked, but we came out stronger on the other side.

We love hiking and being in nature, so it is no shock that we got engaged at Shades State Park. Shades was our 12th Indiana State Park together. As traveling to state parks wasn't out of our norm, Riley was none the wiser and definitely didn't see it coming. Evan had previously scoped our the park and picked out the perfect spot. We hiked a ways down the trail and ended up on a high ridge overlooking two streams on either side. Riley led the way, as Evan is not particularly fond of heights, until he stopped mid-bridge. As Riley turned around to check on him, he got down on one knee and proposed. It was such a special moment filled with tears, laughter, and lots of love.