They always say don't date your boss, but we've never been the best at playing by the rules. As it happens, if you're meant to be with someone even the highs and lows and stress of starting a business aren't enough to keep two people apart. When we opened Shade Cafe together back in March of 2021, it turned us into business partners, then best friends, then romantic partners, and, well...you can guess the rest.

On May 17th of 2022, Sidney got down on one knee by the Columbia Riverside, and of course the answer was an instant yes (tears included). It was the day that were in so many of our prayers as a couple and we quickly began preparing for a magical winter wedding planned to take place on December 31st, 2022.

By July, we were in full swing with plans for a large celebration, hundreds of guests, music, dancing, cake cutting, all of the things that make a wedding so grand. In August, however, we took a second to pause and realized that we simply wanted to start our lives together sooner, and focus on the one most important detail about our wedding day - our life long commitment to each other. And thus, practically overnight we came to a complete halt in our plans for a December wedding. Of course, this was not an easy decision. There are so many people in our lives that we wanted to include in our plans and it seemed there was no way to have the best of both worlds - a small intimate elopement and a wedding celebration with all of our loved ones.

We had known from our early planning stages that our civil wedding wouldn't be able to coincide with the timing of our religious ceremony. The first would occur in 2022 and the other in the summer of 2023. We wanted to put an emphasis on the importance that our religious ceremony holds to us and so this we felt, is what deserves the celebration anyway. With that being said, we are thrilled to announce an open house reception taking place on July 8th, 2023 after arriving home from our time at the newly constructed San Juan, Puerto Rico Temple.