Chapter 2 of the Tim and Bethany love story.

I'd like to take a pause before I get into this and spell out why I'm doing this.
For starters, my parents' story of connection is very precious to me. It's my history and it informs my values. I love it. It tells me who I want to be. Ergo, I expect my love story to be important to my children, so I need to write it down. Secondly, I put my faith in a God who is mighty and loving and very, very detailed. I believe that He is on my side and He fights for me and my dreams. I believe that He orchestrated impossible circumstances to give me the wonderful husband that I'd been dreaming about since I was young and I think He can make your unlikely if not impossible dreams come true too.

Now, after that first initial email contact with Tim, I took a deep breath and gave myself a pep-talk. How many other people in this world look great by their web profiles? It's the easiest thing in the world to create: pick a flattering photo, write something witty, add some credentials, and that's it. I decided to not get my hopes up.
 However, the more we talked, the more we realized that we had everything in common. The similarities between our stories just kept piling up, right down to having horrible teachers in second grade who made us afraid of and hate school. We both had short furlough experiences in the USA that led us to believe living in America was a utopian experience. We were both middle children.

Emails begot g-chatting, which begot Facebook friendship, which begot Twitter following, which begot texting. I was studying him, and finding all good things. Specifically this video he created of his family at Christmastime
 
Behind my computer screen, I swooned. I would've married him just for his sweet family at that point.

These little bits and pieces of his life experience that I was able to catch through social media were integral in our early friendship. I knew all the words to the songs his family sang because I sang them when I was a kid. His mild yet spicy family dynamic, with swirls of French and American culture was not only incredibly attractive to me, it showed me that because of my own history, we could relate on a very basic familial level, and that was huge.

In one month we had covered all this ground, and on the Sunday that I returned home from celebrating Thanksgiving with family, Tim texted me this: "Are you busy next weekend?"

Since someone who is in Chicago should have no concern about my weekend plans in Kansas City, this was out of the ordinary. I remember being in my room, and staring at my phone wondering if I was ready to meet this guy and risk a potentially very awkward experience to move the friendship passed the 500 mile hiccup we had going on.

"I don't think so. What's up?" And I waited for his response. For forty-five minutes I waited. I checked that it sent, and it had. I waited longer. I agonized that he had changed his mind. I agonized that his phone wasn't working. Oh, those forty five minutes.

And then finally: "Sorry, I'm in the middle of a photo-shoot. I was thinking maybe I might come down to KC."
Gosh, that feeling was weird. He was so bold I wasn't sure what to do. Why would he travel all this way to meet me? He was probably one of those socially special types. Or was he perfect? I couldn't know yet, I'd never even talked to him on the phone. The possibility was exciting, but also frightening.

"That could be cool."
"How about I call you tonight and we talk it over?"
"Sounds good."

Then I walked into the hallway and told my roommate, and we screamed like little girls.

I just need you all to understand one thing:

Something wonderful has happened. There are two individuals in this world who have reached a crux in their aging process and now look EXACTLY THE SAME! Those two people are:

My Uncle Bob                                                              Jerry Seinfeld

My dear Uncle Bob and Jerry Seinfeld.  I'm so excited about this.
I should tell you a little bit about my Uncle Bob (since you all know about Jerry Seinfeld). Uncle Bob has a Ph.D. in Fisheries and Allied Aquaculture, which makes him a fish doctor. Who knew that fish had their own doctors?
Uncle Bob likes to doll out fish facts on Facebook. Ask him anything, he'll know!
Hey Uncle Bob, is it true that fish swim differently during a full moon?

I distinctly remember going on a walk with him once when I was eight years old. I couldn't figure out why he was so far ahead of me, so I tried to take exactly the same number of steps as he did so I could keep up. The problem was that his legs were twice as long as my height back then.  He is married to my Aunt Bev, the synchronized ice-skater. As you can imagine, these two are quite the pair.
Their daughter, Allyson, is 3 days older than me. We thought this was so cool and, for the majority of our childhood, fancied that it legitimatized us as twins. But then, by the same mysterious powers that Uncle Bob and Jerry Seinfeld ended up looking the same, Allyson and I ended up looking dramatically un-twin-like.

Such is life. 

we're moving!

And now for a post where I don't overthink my life too much and just tell you what's new:
We're moving in January. In Chicago, also known as the Windy City, where the wind chill is known to cut through layers of wool and leather, straight down to souls, and makes eyes water not just because it's a physiological reflex, but because being outside in that weather just makes you sad. It's going to be great!

The first time I came to visit Tim in Chicago, we spent a Sunday afternoon at a dear family friend's home in Oak Park. As we were driving through this neighborhood, the old architecture turned me into a rubber neck and I suddenly piped up: "Where are we right now?!".
"My mom grew up here," Tim answered.
That's a valuable statement for a guy who was raised in France and didn't come to the states to live until he was 18. This neighborhood has rich history for him. I find this so fascinating; my mother-in-law grew up marinated in the culture of Oak Park, then moved to France, fell in love, and raised her children there. Without even realizing it, she must have continued to live and teach cultural norms specific to Oak Park to her children, and when Tim decided to go to college in Chicago and encountered his mom's old neighborhood, he felt like a certain amount of "home" was there too.  I loved it.

Tim's parents own the place we live in now and we've been renting from them. It's been great, but now that Tim's brother and sister in law are expecting a little one, they need these three bedrooms and finished basement more than we do, and we want to be closer to the city for work anyway. The first place we looked was Oak Park. After seeing a couple of duds and getting discouraged, I got a call back from a building management company that had advertised an apartment with lots of windows. We went to see it, and fell in fast, optimistic, googly eyed love. We do that a lot.

This is the building; a concave structure with the ethereal light of heaven shining down into everyone's homes and hearts.

This is that wind I was telling you about. Flattering, no?

There was a problem: we saw the apartment at the beginning of November and couldn't move in until end of January. We knew it would be gone by then, so I called up the building manager and expressed my undying love and affection for her apartment and begged her to please call us in January if another one came open. She must have found my begging to be charming because she replied that they might hold it for us if we put in an application fast enough. So we did and we were approved. We decided to go see the apartment again and think realistically about living without a dishwasher or in-unit laundry, on the third floor without an elevator. It turns out that modern inventions can't trump natural light and deep, deep closets or free radiator heat.

This is our new place:

so cute

This right here is just the most adorable moment. Tim's grandmother, affectionately known to her family as Mamie Suzanne, turns the corner into her 80th birthday party, shocked at the huge crowd gathered in a little church to celebrate her.

Mamie Suzanne is the matriarch of a community of Christians living in Grenoble, France. Her son (my father in law) now pastors the church that her husband planted in 1967, and the congregation loves and respects her so much.

At her party, everyone who wanted to share got up and told stories of how Mamie Suzanne had blessed and encouraged them over the years, and helped them to better understand the love of God. She's already left such a great legacy in her wake.

I love grandparents. I have four of them, which is unusual and incredible and a huge deal on its own, so I can't believe my fortune to have another sweet grandmother in my life now. I will meet her for the first time this Christmas when Tim and I get to France to celebrate. Parties!!

my coffee snobbery knows no bounds

One of the things I miss most about Kansas City is all the delectable coffee shops I had within 10 minutes of my house in midtown. I'm talking about the kind where the good folks behind the counter were career baristas and barely thought me worthy of a second glance unless I dropped a fiver in their tip jar, and I never had that much cash. I knew my place in those shops. I'd smile and order something easy, knowing that even the spare drips from their high end espresso machines could stop me in my tracks as I scampered out of their way with my Americano to find a table just so I could keep breathing in the rich coffee air and let it infuse my clothes for a pick-me-up later in the day.

I would say it's my one guilty pleasure, but I have lots of guilty pleasures, so I won't.

There is nothing of the sort here in Wheaton, and that's usually fine. But sometime I get a hankering for expensive espresso and Caribou and Starbucks just can't deliver. Woe is me. My life is so hard.

Tim and I have an unspoken rule that whenever we do a photo-shoot in downtown Chicago, we get a date in the city afterwards.  Last week we stumbled up Caffe Streets, and melted a little inside.  

It was this good:

Thank you. Thank you. And once again; I thank you. Latte art is the way to my heart.

Chapter 1: October 25th, 2010

Today is a marked day for us. I wasn't going to write about it or tell the story for fear of the general public thinking our decisions over the past year were brash or unwise, but all day I've been marveling at  the beautiful changes in my life that started one year ago today,  so I guess opinions don't really matter.  On this day last year, I found Tim.

On October 25th, 2010 at 4:39pm, I was doing what I do a lot; browsing a photography blog. The Smiley Face Collective had a beautiful post and I left a comment.  

After I submitted the comment, I glanced at the other comments in the box and saw the name "tim tab" above mine, and I thought that was very odd. When people use funny internet aliases instead of their proper names, I just think it's dumb. So I clicked on the dumb alias to see who this person was. It led me to another photo blog. 

The pictures were exceptional, so I looked through a few posts. Pretty soon I started seeing wedding pictures from France. This really grabbed at my attention because I grew up in France and I have never seen particularly good photography of French lifestyles. I haven't been back to France since I was 11, so my memories were in a time warp and these pictures were opening up a new understanding for me of how young people do life and weddings in France. I was fascinated, so I expressed my appreciation through another comment on this Tim Tab's blog (this timestamp is an hour off,  I really left the comment at 4:47 pm)

After that, I switched over to the photographer's profile to find out who this person was. 

I had to read it a few times to fully grasp that there was a real person living on this earth who had that resume of life experiences. This guy was around my age, worked my dream job, went to the same university that my dad graduated from--which I had been hearing about my whole life--to study the same degree that I got, and he grew up in France, just like me. Besides that, he appeared to be a highly motivated, hard-working person to own his own business at the age of 24. He seemed very down to earth, and had a goofy sense of humor that made me chuckle condescendingly. And he was very, very cute.
I sat back from the computer screen and wondered what was going on. It was all very strange and frustrating. This little bio was the most fascinating one way conversation I've had in my life: he had laid out the basics of his story and there was no way I could respond. He lived 8 hours away and we had no friends in common (although I found out later that we did).
I decided that the best thing to do was forget those 20 minutes of internet snooping because they would only drive me crazy. Tim Tab, whatever his real name was, was a figment of the internet and not anyone I could actually meet, so that was it.
Later that evening,  I went to hang out with Amy and Natalie. We made pumpkin cookies, ate way too many, and then had a "pute hang" where we sat around in their living room on our computers, browsing and chatting. I checked my email and my heart about stopped when I opened this:

He was flirting with me. I just knew it. He must have followed the link I left to my blog and figured out that we had everything in common and surely he was just trying to start a real conversation. Amy insisted that he was doing nothing of the sort (and she was right) and even though he was a really good photographer, he had way too many typos on his website to be the man of my dreams. I told her, adamantly, that she was wrong and she rolled her eyes. Then I started a reply to him, smiling at the screen with my hands poised over the keyboard, not knowing what to say. This went on for about 5 days until I finally wrote him back a simple one liner, asking him what his story was and how he got to Chicago from France.

The rest is a long story, and I may tell it in a few more pieces over the next few months if anyone wants to hear it. Some simple math can tell you how fast our relationship moved: we've been married for two months already.  Our families and friends supported our decisions to get engaged after 5 months of dating, and married after 3 months of engagement. I wouldn't advise that pace for anyone else, but it was good and right for us and I wouldn't give up this precious time of already being married or the peace I have in our marriage vows for anything.

Today in honor of this anniversary (and because it really needed to be done), Tim and I changed the text and pictures of his profile to reflect the current state of Tim Tab Studios.

timothee martin

Sometimes we will be doing some very mundane task, and I'll look over at him and be struck all at once by how incredibly handsome he is, how I love him so much it scares me, and how I'd die without him if he was gone. I couldn't possibly love him any more than I do at this moment.
But I will tomorrow.