Welcome

Mike and I met through Tinder in the beginning of the summer of 2016! Yep, that’s right, Tinder the dating website, which for many reasons I was very skeptical about. After he “super liked” me, messaged me a few times and reached out to one of our mutual friends, which is one of my good friends so I trusted her opinion, I decided to respond. I mean I had to respond after all that dedication (or stalking) and after having normal conversations I realized he really wasn’t that creepy. Our first date was for drinks at MTK, a downtown restaurant, on a weeknight at around 9pm. I have to add this next part because for those of you that know Mike, you know that, 1. He doesn’t love to go downtown and, 2. he barely goes out on weeknights, and when he does, he needs to be home no later than 8pm. I was working at EB Green’s at the time, so if he really wanted to see me, which he obviously did, that was his only option. Anyway, our first date went great, we had a great conversation about our love of travel, country music, concerts, the outdoors and fitness and I haven’t been able to get rid of him ever since. We have now been together almost 5 years, and in those 5 years we have had such great adventures and memories. From all our tropical vacations, country concerts, hiking experiences, dinner parties, and our many backyard parties I can truly say we have lived our best life. So it was about time that Mike FINALLY decide to propose in September of 2019.

For those of you that don’t know the exact story, I will fill you in. In the past I mentioned to Mike that I either wanted to get engaged in Napa or Paris in front of the Eifel Tower (I mean who doesn’t, right?). So, he decided to take me on a surprise vacation to San Francisco and Napa. I actually had no idea where we were going. Even at the airport I was kept in secret and was then surprised by my BROTHER; I had no idea anyone else was coming, so it was a GREAT surprise. Once we got to the San Fran airport I was again surprised by another companion, one of Leandro’s good friends, Mikey, that was living in Seattle at the time! We then arrived at the beautiful Hyatt and was yet surprised again by Mike’s sister, Jill and her bf, Harsh. Well let me tell you this trip was just the best, because we did all the things I love. We rode bikes over the Golden Gate Bridge, took a boat ride and toured Alcatraz, had great dinners & wine, went hiking at Muir woods, and my favorite part of all… wine tasting in Napa!!! (which was also a secret until the morning we left). I seriously couldn’t be happier, or could I? For our first day in Napa, Mike had picked the most beautiful restaurant, Auberge Du Solei, for lunch because it had the best views. On our way to lunch I sat in the back of the SUV feeling extremely emotional, I just had this feeling in my heart that it was happening, and my heart was so full of love. I then stopped thinking about it and enjoyed one of my favorite lunches ever with all the people I LOVE and the love of my life right next to me. After lunch we decided to go down and take a ton of pictures with the beautiful scenery behind us, Mike asked me to come back and take a picture with him, he hates pictures, so that’s when I knew it was happening. He looked at me and we both just started crying! He then got down on one knee and I SAID YES, of course! It was the most amazing day of my life. We spent the rest of the trip wine tasting! Beautiful!

Let’s get to the wedding plans already, after finally deciding that we wanted a destination wedding and were about to go for a “Big Day Preview” in April of 2020 to check out the new Hyatt Resort in Cap Cana, DR… COVID happened. We obviously put everything on hold, but I was still hopeful and after a few months continued planning for something in 2021. After MANY months of this, I realized there was not much we could do until there was more information out there and decided to stop planning and getting my hopes up. That is when we decided that we were going to get married at city hall and celebrate with just our immediate family and then we would either have a big party or plan the destination wedding with the rest of our family and friends next year when things hopefully went back to normal. However, we then had a plot twist (baby in the oven) which helped us decide to just have this be our wedding and with keeping our venue we already had booked decided to add a few more people. Unfortunately, we wanted to invite all of you, but with everything going on right now that was just something that was not possible. So if you are not able to celebrate with us in person, please understand that this was EXTREMELY hard for us to decide and we really wanted you all there with us! We hope that you can join us if not in person, virtually (the new normal) so we can still celebrate and share this special moment, during these crazy times with all of you. And PLEASE know that we LOVE all of you and really appreciate you being able to attend in any way you can.