Weddingbee Blog

As Mr. Chick and I celebrated our tenth anniversary last week, I find myself reminiscing on how we met, and the ways we’ve grown together. I thought I would dedicate a post to our story and Mr. Chick’s proposal. What do you say?

Mr. Chick and I met one magical night in 1999. It was muggy and humid down in the courtyard where people were dancing at the Baker Blues party at Rice University, but we didn’t care because we were inside Mr. Chick’s dorm room with the air conditioning turned up high. I had been invited up to Mr. Chick’s room to play a rousing game of Trivia Pursuit, where I quickly realized I only knew answers to the popular culture category. I also noticed that Mr. Chick was very smart and knew answers to more than just the popular culture category. I wondered why all of the furniture in that room was labeled “AEM” and made a mental note to figure out that mystery later. Figure it out I did, as me and Mr. Chick attended a Rice formal dance called Esperanza together two months later.

Since it was a girl-ask-boy dance, I had to think of several crafty ways to get to know Mr. Chick before asking him out. One day, I was walking to class and saw him come out of a building. Excitedly, we walked together to the campus quad. Mr. Chick asked me where I was going, to which I replied, “The library.” Mr. Chick was going past the library, but since I wanted to talk with him some more, I kept walking with him. Mr. Chick then very smoothly pointed out “Um, the library is THAT way.” To this day, this is still a great joke between us.

(Please excuse the horrible quality of the pictures… this is before the digital cameras, y’all!)

It finally came time for me to ask him to the dance. I enlisted a mutual friend of ours, Celina, to help me. Celina lived across the hall from Mr. Chick, and kept me informed of his comings and goings that night. When he came home, Celina called me and said, “THE EAGLE HAS LANDED! THE EAGLES HAS LANDED!” I hurriedly called Mr. Chick, and asked him to the dance. That was our first official “date” and that is the date we decided would become our anniversary!

And this I did not remember until last week when Mr. Chick brought it up: on our second date, we went out for dollar sushi (very fancy and expensive in my college student mind!). During dinner, apparently I told Mr. Chick that I couldn’t date him because I was too busy with school. He then argued that he was probably busier than I was, but I insisted that as an architecture student I was busier. He then retorted that as a computer programmer he was probably even busier. I don’t remember what happened after that but apparently we kept dating because I had forgotten all about this little argument. Thank god for my short-term memory!

A mere nine years later, Mr. Chick proposed! Here is the story:

It all started when Mr. Chick and I were trying to plan our ninth anniversary. He asked me when we were in the kitchen what I wanted to do, and I replied, “Oh, something mellow. I mean it’s nine years—big whoop. It’s not really a milestone or anything.” Mr. Chick said, “But it’s our anniversary!”

We decided to go to Elisa’s Sunday Haus in Round Top, Texas, for a weekend retreat. While loading up the car, I noticed Mr. Chick brought a gigantic suitcase for only two days of traveling, but credited it to his pack-rat tendencies. The little cottage we rented was lovely, and at night we built a fire in the back to roast hot dogs and marshmallows. Afterwards, we decided to jump in the hot tub to wash off all the smoke from the fire.

We were sitting in the hot tub, looking at the stars, when Mr. Chick said, “When I was little, I used to do all these tricks in the jacuzzi. Want to see one?” He asked me to close my eyes and give him my hand. If you can believe it, I was still clueless at this point. Moments later nothing happened, so I said, “don’t pull me in the water!!” and Mr. Chick said, “I won’t!!” Then he told me to open my eyes and when I did, he was holding a box. It was an antique looking box and since it was almost pitch black, I momentarily thought he had found a random box near the pool. Then I saw his face and I knew! We then celebrated by opening the bottle of Sauternes wine Mr. Chick had bought from the region in France we had visited just the year before.

I later found out that Mr. Chick had to use the big suitcase because that was where he hid the ring, and he couldn’t transfer the ring to a smaller suitcase because I was in the room the whole time!

I guess nine years is a pretty big deal after all!

Do you have a funny story about how you and your sig’O met?