For a long time, long before we even truly were planning to get married, we’d casually discussed what we would do for our last name. Neither of us had any real ties to his last name and while my last name was an option, that didn’t feel exactly right to us either. Hyphenate? Keep our names the same? Take an older family name? There were a lot of options and we discussed many of them. It wasn’t until we were actually engaged that it settled in for us both that this was the real deal and we’d have to pick a name. We pulled that conversation off the shelf and dusted it off and found that we’d never really found a solution. Crap. So the talks began again from a completely new perspective with the realization that whatever we decided would be the one. I began looking into the idea of creating our own last name. Of course something like Stormborn or Dragonblood would fit us, but would that really be what we’d want to pass down? (For me, yes, for Tyler, not so much). It only seemed perfect to me that we used an anagram of both of our current last names. I worked with various anagram sites for a few weeks before I finally found a name I felt was perfect: Pfernere. It felt fresh and new and right. The way it rolled off of each of our tongues as we said it back and forth to one another. (For those of you that may need it- it is pronounced FERN-air.) Kayla Marie Pfernere. Tyler Austin Jason Pfernere. I Googled our new name to see what the language of origin was, and found myself shocked to see an empty Google result. Could this be? After further investigating, it was found to be true: there has never been an existence of the last name Pfernere before. And we are so ready to take on this adventure.

“How are you still single?” is such a tired phrase, and yet he commented it on one of my many selfies. But he was cute and two weeks later he arranged for us to go on our first date with some of our mutual friends. It was the first installment of the Hobbit series, which fast became our favorite. My mom, of course, warned me that going on dates with boys at my age should be taken seriously. “You never know,” she’d warn solemnly, “you could end up marrying him!” “Mom, I’m not going to marry this guy, it’s just a date.” Anyway, we’ll add marrying Tyler to the long list of things my mom ended up being right about.