*EXTENDED* RSVP Deadline: November 1, 2024 Please notify us of any dietary restrictions and/or allergies!

As many of you already know, we began dating officially on January 2016 and were engaged on September 2022. We became civilly married soon after on December 3, 2022. (This also happened to be Andrea's late grandmother's birthday.) We didn't want to wait for the big, grand celebration and figured, we could have a small ceremony to hold us over until then. It was an intimate ceremony with some of our closest friends present, held in one of the most beautiful photography venues in Houston. (This is also where our featured photos were taken at!) We had the fortunate honor to have Andrea's high school friend and Harris County Judge, Lina Hidalgo, to officiate our ceremony. This day was technically the first day of the rest of our lives. However, both raised in the Catholic Church, we find it equally important to bind our marriage in the presence of God and the rest of our loved ones. Since our civil ceremony, we really wanted to focus on two things: strengthening our faith as a couple and strengthening our foundation as a new family. We have, then, regularly attended our home parish, Holy Rosary, and hope to nurture our new family under a solid and modern foundation based on our faith. We have also put in a lot of conscious effort to harness the type of individuals we want to be within our new family - this meant having the hard, sometimes brutally honest, conversations. Our first year and a half of marriage has been full of intentional hard work, sorting out our differences, ironing out our kinks, and learning what we want within our new family unit. Because of all of these, we both acknowledge we have become an entirely renewed couple since our civil ceremony. With this, we are really looking forward to our church ceremony also as a renewal of vows of sorts. We can't wait to celebrate with each one of you. See you all in January!

(How We Met: Andrea's POV) It was a season in my life when I closed a few doors and welcomed in so many new beginnings. I just graduated from my program at UT Health Science Center and accepted a job back home in Houston at Texas Children's Hospital. I was newly single, newly in my career, finally making own money -- I felt so free!! My dear friend, Roxy, best known to bring that spark and sense of spontaneity to any one in her life, encouraged me to take a trip to New York City with her to visit our friends, Luigi and Jonathan. Luigi and Jonathan both recently moved there which made it a perfect excuse to go. On our second night in the city, Jonathan took us out to Brooklyn at a bar called Kinfolk. At the corner of my eye, I saw this carefree looking guy in a navy blue polka dotted shirt, dancing the night away. (He won't admit to the dancing part to this day!) For whatever reason, I decided to go up to him and introduce myself. On that serendipitous moment, we didn't realize just how much both our lives just changed. We met up with each other for dinner the following night, me with Roxy, Jonathan and Luigi, and Alvin with his wingman, Bernard. This was my last night in NY but from then on, we decided to keep in touch. This became the start of where we are now. What came next was 3 years of long distance, traveling back and forth to each other multiple times in a year, followed by 6 years of sharing our lives in Houston with our two fur babies, Casey and Griz. Through our years together, we look back at how we met and one thing we always agreed on was the sense of comfort and familiarity and how strongly apparent it was from that very first day. Whoever said long distance doesn't work is lying…

Old York Cellars Winery - Ringoes, NJ We were on our way back to Bergenfield after our best friends' wedding in South Jersey. What was supposed to be an ordinary brunch at a vineyard on our route back home turned out to be a pretty memorable day! Our friends helped in planning and executing the proposal. At our arrival, we were encouraged to take photos around the vineyard while waiting for our table to be ready and others were "in the restroom". As we walked through the vineyard, we hit a corner of the field and that was when Alvin got on one knee and asked THE question that was the topic of so many conversations between us! FINALLY! Our brunch was held in the private room filled with all the wine we could drink, an assortment of pasta dishes, and full of some of our dearest, most favorite people. Thank you to our friends who helped make this day far from ordinary.