Hines Happenings: Happy Anniversary!

October and November are busy celebration months for us with five birthdays and right in the middle is today...our 5th wedding anniversary! I have been looking forward to this day for about 11 months in awe thinking, I can't believe we've been married almost five years! Well, now we have! In some ways it seems like a huge milestone. In other ways, it seems like just yesterday! Many of you were not with us on the journey to our wedding, so here's a few pics to bring you up to speed. :) One of the advantages of having a long distance relationship was that we have probably more pictures to commemorate our times together because they were a rare occasion. And so, we have a picture from the night we met. Do not laugh. This is the best we could do. Had we known this picture would go into infamy as the night we met, we might have tried a little harder to get a good one. And don't forget...it was taken on a "old school" camera, so we couldn't check the results...don't laugh.

January 15, 1999...the night it all began.
We met on a blind non-date when I went out to Seattle to visit my friend Laura and we needed a 4th person to go swing dancing with us and her fiance. :)

Sept 1999...our second meeting at the wedding of our friends who introduced us, Mayson and Laura, and August 2000...the day Philip had told me he didn't think our relationship was going to go anywhere. That obviously got re-evaluated!

December 2000...meeting Philip's parents and brother. No, they didn't meet me near a cliff in case they didn't like me. This was a trip to Mt Rainier. :)

I spent the summer of 2001 in Seattle interning with Marsh, my future DC employer. This was our last date in August 2001, right before I left. A dad and his young (maybe 6) son walked by while we were sitting here and the dad told his son, "this is the way you treat a woman." Sweet, huh? This was a big summer for us. It was the first time we had spent together really as a couple, and not just as friends. So, it included the first hand holding and "I love yous". :) Sounds minor, but it wasn't! Just ask Philip. :)

Philip spent the fall of 2001 living with my parents in NC so they could "get a crack at him". I was finishing up school, so we didn't see each other that much. In January, he moved to Northern VA and I went to Spain for 4 months. After I came back in May 2002, we took a trip to Seattle for a wedding. On the left is Philip's not-so-well received attempt at kissing me that went down in photograhic history thanks to the fast shooting fingers of the couple that actually introduced us. Our actual first kiss came several days later and was not caught on film. :) On the right things were a little friendlier at the wedding we went to attend.

This is the day we got engaged, July 4, 2002. We weren't in a fog that day (maybe I was...I had mono and it was about 103*....if we look sweaty in the pic, it's because we are!) Philip's camera was on the fritz that day and mine must have been on vacation. This is the best pic we have.