Merry Christmas from Ryan and Katy!

Merry Christmas!

It's been quite some time since we've noted anything (I would say of importance, but really, anything at all would be more appropriate) here, but I figured since the holidays are upon us, now would be a good time to come back, wish everyone a happy holiday season and update y'all (assuming there are any of you left reading) on what planning has been done.

Wedding planning for me (and Ryan...he's been involved in this too) has moved through several stages in the preceding months. At first, Ryan and I had an idea of what we wanted to do, but no real idea of how to make it happen. We knew that we didn't want to have the wedding in Shreveport as we are not (very) near a large airport here and none of our family and most of our friends would have to travel a fair amount of (inconvenient) distance to attend an event in Shreveport. We figured New Orleans would be better because it has got the benefit of the large airport and being close to at least some of our relatives. I called at least a half dozen hotels, restaurants, and other venues in the New Orleans area to no avail. (One hotel's wedding coordinator went so far as to set up a meeting with us and then never bother to show up, leaving Ryan and I waiting for an hour.) Ryan and I were getting exceedingly frustrated with these potential venues and each other as the time went on.

(The one bright spot in this whole thing was a photographer we met, with whom we fell in love. If any of you in the Baton Rouge/New Orleans area are ever looking for an event photographer, do contact The Photography Shoppe. We LOVED their work and would have loved to hire them. I believe that they have locations outside of Louisiana, as well, and I'd extend the recommendation to those of you not from Louisiana. They were truly fantastic and willing to answer any and all questions we had and they seemed like they genuinely knew what they were doing. Also, their style is gorgeous! I'm still trying to figure out if there's some way we can hire them to photograph something.)

Anyway, after several failed attempts to set up meetings and a multitude of un-returned phone calls, Ryan and I sat down and re-evaluated our situation. We talked and came up with a plan that suited our personalities, our budget, and our hopes and dreams for the day perfectly.

We had been planning from very early on in the process to go to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida for our honeymoon. While researching honeymoon packages and information on the website, I discovered that Disney World hosts weddings, as well. They even offered a package that would allow us to have exactly the wedding we wanted.

We've decided to have a very small ceremony and reception at one of the hotels on Disney property and celebrate our honeymoon there afterwards. We have been strictly limited in our guest list for the event we have planned so we've restricted the event to our immediate families (parents and siblings (and one sibling's spouse), only). After much discussion we decided that this event would fit our personalities and relationship the most.

We appreciate greatly those of you still interested in our story as we figure out all of our plans and hope any of you still reading will continue to check back with us. We can't guarantee frequent updates, but we'll do our best.

Thanks, all, for reading!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

A Weekend Expedition

Katy and I are making a trip to South Louisiana tomorrow to see her sister graduate from LSU on Friday. While we're down, we have wedding-related meetings all over the place: interviews with photographers, scouting possible venues, etc., etc. Katy's also doing some more dress-hunting, but I'm not invited on that particular expedition.

We leave early tomorrow morning, and I still need to pack.

The first tangible evidence of wedding planning...

Despite the fact that I've been buying wedding planning books and magazines like they are going out of style (I'm a planner who likes to think ahead...and about every possible detail, what can I say), planning a wedding has not yielded very many actual, tangible results so far. But a week or so ago, all of that changed.

Ryan and I decided that creating a wedding blog was all well and good, but how good was it, really, when no one knew about it. We then decided the easiest thing to do was to send out engagement announcements that contained this URL so that anyone interested could seek us out and read all about it. :)

So a week or so ago, the announcements came in and are slowly making their way out (hand addressing all of the envelopes is a lot of work!).

Welcome to all who have sought this page out after receiving theirs. We hope to have more tangible wedding preparing goodness to share in the coming months!

The rest of the story...

Ryan got home from work today and said he was going to write the first post on our wedding blog...how we got engaged. How sweet, I thought. He's really getting into this whole thing. Then, he said, "You get to write about the rest."

"The rest of what?"

"The rest of our relationship."

"Ah. Okay, then."

So here I am. Hello, visitors! Welcome to our wedding blog, where soon you will hopefully be able to find gift registries as well as information about dates and anything else we think you'll need to know. Please enjoy yourselves...we certainly are.

Anyway...to the point of this whole thing...

I'm sure most of you already know this story, but here goes for those of you just finding out:

Ryan and I met in our first semester of law school.

He was quiet and tried to sit as close to the back of any classroom we were in and hand-wrote his notes (HAND-WROTE! I think he was one of 3 people in our 200-some-odd graduating class that actually used paper to take notes for more than the first day).

I, on the other hand, sat in the middle of the room amidst a sea of people I had never met before and started talking to cover up for my nerves. I'm not sure I stopped talking for much of that first semester (except for those times when I was called on by professors. How I do not miss those days.)

I have no idea how I ended up sitting next to Ryan in Contracts first semester, but I did. It was one of our smaller section classes, with something like 20-25 people in it, and we sat around a large U-shaped table. I think I sat a few people from the front of the room with Ryan to my left and James and Joy, who Ryan knew from undergrad, to his left. And then I started talking to him (and James and Joy because they were slightly more responsive to my somewhat exuberant efforts to engage in conversation than Ryan was at first). I'm fairly sure I never shut up, but you'd have to get his input for the truth of that statement.

I made friends and met people and kept bugging Ryan during Contracts everyday. I'm pretty sure at one point I got him to respond in something other than monosyllables, but it took me a couple of weeks.

Then one day in October, Katie and I were sitting in the student lounge on the second floor waiting for something-or-other to start (maybe Contracts) and Ryan either joined us or we sat near him (the details are somewhat hazy 3+ years later) and we all started talking about movies. I remember that I had seen a preview for the movie, Proof, and we talked about how it sounded interesting and we'd like to see it. (You'll have to get Ryan's perspective on this conversation, because I have absolutely no idea when he made the following decision. Suffice to say, I was glad he did.)

At the end of the day, I was walking out to my car and I had parked right next to Ryan's truck. Quite a happy coincidence, I think. Anyway, he walked up to me and asked me if I'd like to go see Proof. I said, yes. (And then there's the part of this story that I really wish I didn't have to tell the world, but I think it adds to the charm of the story.) So taken aback was I by the invitation that I somehow managed to lock my keys and my shirt (I was wearing a tank top under a button-down and it was HOT that October) in my car (I was just planning to drive home) along with my cellphone. I had to ask Ryan to borrow his phone so I could call my sister and ask her to bring me my spare key from the apartment on her way to class. I was so embarrassed and couldn't believe any of it had happened.

So we went on our date and had a great time at the movie. When it was over, Ryan asked if I wanted to go to the buffet at Shoney's (which neither of us realized was going to be a seafood buffet) and we went and ate popcorn shrimp and mashed potatoes and made our waitress simply insane trying to get rid of us. (Ryan also made me laugh so hard I spit water across the table...Ryan's first indications that not only do I have a tendency to run off at the mouth, but I am also a giant klutz.)

And we've been together ever since. There're other stories (including the time I got Ryan's car towed), but we have to have something to keep y'all coming back! :)

With that, I'll leave you with an incredibly dorky photo of the two of us (look forward to many more of these in the future...)

Sorry you look so much like a serial killer in this picture, Ryan. I was trying to find good pictures from the early days. No such luck. ;)

How This All Happened

Welcome to Ryan and Katy's engagement blog. We thought it would be nice to have an easy place for our friends to keep up with our progress and planning, etc. I peremptorily vetoed use of the ubiquitous theknot.com, in favor of something more do-it-yourself, so here you are.

So that you will all have something nice to read when you come and visit our engagement blog in its early days, before any substantial planning occurs, and the wedding stress accumulates, I thought I'd tell the story, just briefly, of how the engagement itself came to be. So here goes.

It may be wrong to warn you this way, but there's very little suspense in this story. For at least a year before the "proposal" itself, Katy and I were privately talking about our wedding as a foregone conclusion. I know it's not the way that stories are canonically told, but you can't understand even the first part of all this if you think I was trying to surprise her. So I preface it this way.

Anyway, the day of my office's 2008 Christmas party, I came home from work and said that at the mall in Dallas there was a jewelry store with nicer rings than what we could find in north Louisiana, and I asked if Katy would like to go have a look. She said yes, and so in the morning we hopped in the Jetta, fueled up on Starbucks, and made the three-hour drive to the Galleria.

I could write a sizeable entry just regarding the sights and sounds of the Galleria, but for now it's enough to say that we were helped by a very nice saleswoman named Karen. Katy figured out the cut of stone that she liked the best. Karen gave us her card, and we came home to mull it over some more, and to figure out when was the right time to make the next move. Katy was very happy.

The time for the next move was Saturday, March 14, 2009. At the end of February, I had sent an email to Karen letting her know the kinds of rings we wanted to see, and arranging for a showing. Katy made a reservation at the Westin hotel attached to the Galleria. A hotel inside of the mall? Yes, this is the high life. We headed back for Dallas, this time without the coffee, because we've both been counterintuitively high-functioning since giving up caffeine for New Year's.

All the rings were beautiful, but we didn't have a lot of trouble choosing the one we liked best. After I bought it, we checked into the hotel—which was fancy, see below:


I sat there reading for a while, before we decided we could stand to do some more shopping, provided it was of the window- variety, as my pockets had all of a sudden become a good deal lighter. Because I wasn't going to leave the ring unattended in the room, Katy sat down beside me in the above-pictured window seat, and I put the ring on her finger, and we were engaged.

Is this next bit tacky? You can't all see the ring in person, at least not right now, and at least a sizeable minority of you must be chomping at the bit for it by now. I'm not feeling gaudy posting these below, because they evoke the sufficient level of irony. Katy took these the Monday after we returned from Dallas. Enjoy:



After the proposal itself, we hiked the mall some more, and had dinner at a Mexican restaurant overlooking an ice skating rink (Lap. Of. Luxury.) We ordered two glasses of red wine, whereupon the waiter informed us that because we were in a "dry area," we would have to join the restaurant's "private club" in order to be served alcohol. This, by the way, is the kind of legal reasoning that no amount of law school can prepare you for. I happily complied, jotting down my name and email address on the furnished "membership application." Two glasses of Cabernet speedily appeared.

In the morning, we took a side trip to the IKEA of North Dallas before heading back to Shreveport. I could live happily til the end of my days in the IKEA showroom. If I ever missed the outside world, I would step out on my front porch, gaze back at the below-pictured blue and yellow monstrosity, and know that I was in the right place, and then I would saunter back inside to revel in elegant, Swedish utilitarianism. We left without purchasing anything (miraculously), but with a list of the tables, chairs, dishes, and bookcases that we most coveted.


IKEA is the EPCOT of home decor, and I say this not as a hater, but as the avowed biggest fan in the world of Spaceship Earth.

So thank you for coming, and reading, and for thinking of us, and for your curiosity about how we're doing. Right now we're doing great.