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Hey y’all!

Greetings, EAD readers! My name is Kathleen, I’m from Atlanta, Georgia, and I got hitched about four months ago to my grad-school sweetheart. I’m so happy to be here guest-blogging about my wedding for y’all this week! If you’ve somehow found your way to my little corner of the internet already and have been following me there, don’t fret — I haven’t copy-pasted anything! This is all new material. For any Atlanta brides out there, I hope my posts will be a good companion to the new Atlanta local guide that recently debuted here; for all the rest of y’all, I hope you enjoy reading about my wedding as much as I enjoyed planning and experiencing it!

Before I dive into the wedding recaps, I should probably tell you how my husband and I came to be engaged, right? I’ll give you the quick version:

Jon and I met on July 4, 2006, the day before grad-school orientation (and my 23rd birthday) at Syracuse University. We were two in a class of 16 arts journalism students, and we hit it off immediately. By the end of October, we were dating. In March, in Ireland for a class trip, we talked about marriage for the first time. We graduated at the end of June, lazed about on vacations with our families for most of July, and landed in my hometown of Atlanta to begin the great job hunt in August.

Jon and me with Scooch, the Syracuse Skychiefs mascot, a few weeks into graduate school
Jon and me with Scooch, the mascot for the Syracuse Skychiefs, a few weeks after grad school began.

As we both settled in to the rhythm of real life and 9-to-5 jobs for the first time ever, we put our thoughts of marriage on the backburner; but once we both became comfortable with work and apartments (almost two years later) the marriage talk resumed. We bought tickets to a Josh Ritter concert — it would be my first — and Jon cracked wise that he should propose at the show when Josh played his hit song “Kathleen,” one of our favorites. Well, wouldn’t you know, that’s exactly how it happened! At the time I remembered Jon had joked about it but I had no idea that he had a ring (it was his mom’s — beautiful and affordable!), so his proposal took me completely and happily by surprise.

So that’s where our wedding saga began, on March 24, 2009. By the end of the week I’ll have covered most everything that transpired between then and now. I hope you’ll follow along!