The brunette behind the blog...

I forget sometimes that most of you guys haven't been reading this silly little blog long enough to have been around for this post.  Or this one.  Maybe you didn't know that Micah and I met in middle school, or that our dads went to high school together.  (And so did our grandparents.  It's kind of insanely cute.)

And because you gals really are dear friends to me, and I like to think of us chatting away over a cup of coffee (a skinny peppermint mocha latte with extra peppermint, to be more precise), I just sort of feel like you should know who you're chatting with.

So... meet Ryan.

I was a slightly weird child who sometimes wore medieval headdresses and bowties to school.  (And I apparently wanted to be a romance novelist when I grew up.)  My older brother was the cool kid, and I followed him around like a puppy, hoping the coolness would eventually rub off.  It did not.

I went to a teeny, tiny high school in north Texas.  (This one, actually.  Go Braves!).  

It was so tiny, in fact, that I played volleyball, basketball, cheered, wrote for the school paper, dated two quarterbacks and the captain of the basketball team, and graduated valedictorian of my class.  All while managing to remain totally and completely awkward (so I can totally say all of those things without you guys thinking that I was that girl).

Micah and I started dating my senior year (he was quarterback number two, if you're keeping count.  And I won't bore you with the story about how we actually started dating when I was a freshman, but he broke my heart after a couple of months, and I didn't really speak to him for about three years until he called me out of the blue one day and professed his very unrequited love.)

We knew pretty early on that we what we were dealing with was the forever kind of stuff, and most of the decisions I made from that point forward revolved around us creating a future together.  (Although we did break up once.  This is how he won me back over.  One of the sweetest moments of my life.)

I went to college at the University of Texas at Dallas (go Comets!) to study biochemistry with the idea that I'd head to pharmacy school after I graduated.  But after breaking a ridiculous amount of glassware in the chemistry lab, I figured mixing medication was probably not my calling and decided on law school instead.

My parents divorced when I was a sophomore in college.  It sort of shattered my little world, but it was probably the smoothest divorce in the history of the universe.  My parents are amazing and are still very friendly with one another.  And that has made all the difference in the world for my brother and me.

After I graduated college, Micah and I moved to Houston for law school (go Cougars!) and so Micah could finish undergrad.  (He's a year younger than me... rawwwr  ←  That was me being a cougar.  I have a feeling that didn't quite come across.)  We lived there for three years and survived a hurricane, two tropical storms, our wedding, law review, the bar exam, and the death of my twenty-year-old cat.

Houston was always supposed to be a temporary thing, so when I got a job in Dallas and Micah got the okay to transfer to the Dallas office of the engineering firm he was working at, we left Houston in the dust and headed home as fast as we could.  (And by "home," I mean a different small town in between Dallas and Josephine.  Girlfriend wasn't even about try and do the hour-and-a-half commute into town every day...)

In the last three-ish years that we've been home, life has been just about as sweet as it could be.  We're making our house into a home, raising our little girl, and savoring the ordinary moments before they can pass us by.

Same old boy, same sweet girl.  Ten Eleven years down the road.