Thank you for all of your love and support this past year. We're thrilled and looking forward to celebrating with you this summer!

Last July, we packed up our Virginia Beach home. Steve got to come up to visit KC and Cooper in Newport, RI for almost a solid month (the most they had seen each other since November of 2019!). He went ahead to Hawaii and she still had a few more months of graduate school at the Naval War College to wrap up. In November, she and Cooper finally left their tiny cold apartment behind to start heading west. They were lucky enough to have friends and family in Annapolis, Alexandria, San Diego and Los Angeles help them along their journey. Since all reuniting in November, the whole family has been loving living in Maunawili. We hope some of you can come out to visit us soon!

It all started in a WhatsApp group text with our dear friend Dan Deitrick in October of 2016. Dan introduced Steve to KC to help her get settled when she moved to Bahrain. Dan said "I'm sure you'll try to convince her to live in Amwaj" - and Steve definitely did. KC and Steve became fast friends, bonding over their shared love for travel, activities, food, fitness and work. Within two weeks of actually meeting each other, they went on their first adventure trip to Salalah, Oman over Veterans Day weekend to hunt for lakes and wadis to stand-up paddleboard in. Since then, they've spent nearly every day together - except for when work pulls them in different directions. As a team, they've thrived personally and professionally. They continued to travel and visit places that Steve claims "were never on his bucket list". Likely at the bottom of that list was getting stationed in Virginia, so it meant a lot when he took orders there to be together with KC. They became roommates in March of 2018 and were engaged on a trip to Iceland in November of that year, two years after running off to Oman with each other.

KC and Steve were inspired to take a trip to Iceland to see geothermal lagoons, waterfalls, glaciers, geysers, volcanos, and the Northern Lights. KC planned/navigated and Steve was in charge of driving. The days were packed because the sun would rise at 9 am, set by 4 pm, and there was just so much to see. On the second to last day of the trip, we caught the sunrise at Diamond Beach. It's a black sand beach covered in chunks of ice that have washed ashore from icebergs that have broken off from the Vatnajokull Glacier. While taking pictures, Steve told KC that he wanted to get a photo of them jumping. She agreed to go along with his idea and Steve rushed off to find another person on the beach who could assist as a photographer. As it turns out, Steve actually did not care about them jumping at all, but at this point KC was still completely unaware. A gentleman agreed to take photos for them and Steve told him what the actual plan was; he wanted to ask KC to marry him. So posed next to a blue ice, with the North Atlantic in the background, on a black sand beach, Steve got down on one knee and asked KC. She was in disbelief. She turned away briefly and then rushed over to kiss Steve, while smiling ear to ear. Her reaction was amazing and her smile was the biggest Steve had ever seen. She eventually said "Yes!" but initially she was in so much shock, excitement and busy kissing Steve that the words were secondary. It was fine, Steve was confident from the smile and the reaction that she was excited to spend the rest of her life with him and continue their adventures. Following the proposal, KC kept gazing at her now decorated left hand and recounting with pure stoke, "We're getting married!"