Going to the chapel
Finally, during 4^th of July weekend, while I was visiting my friend Adra in Oregon, I got the late-night phone call I had been waiting for—Jesse was really, truly coming home!

About two weeks later, Jesse landed on American soil. I flew out to spend a weekend with him in Georgia a couple of days after he got back, then went back home to finish the wedding preparations and wait for his block leave to begin.

Jesse flew home to Washington eight days before our wedding, and on Aug. 9, 2003, we were married at Lake City Community Church in Lakewood, Wash. Despite the short notice, our wedding was everything I wanted it to be. It was beautiful. The flowers were perfect, the string quartet was amazing, Jesse’s dad performed a beautiful, touching, thought-provoking ceremony, my bridesmaids were gorgeous, the groomsmen were appropriately handsome, our flower girl and ring bearer were adorable and perfectly behaved, and we were surrounded by almost everyone we love. It was perfect.

We spent two weeks together after our wedding before Jesse had to report back to Benning. We spent our first weekend as a married couple in Seattle, staying at the Hotel Monaco. Then we headed back to Lakewood and hung out for a week before spending a weekend at the Stephanie Inn in Cannon Beach, Ore. The day before Jesse flew back to Georgia, he was able to attend my graduation from PLU—being able to have him there for such an important day in my life was an unexpected but much-appreciated surprise.

Newlyweds
By God’s grace, Jesse and I were able to spend a good portion of our first year married together. I moved to Georgia (via a cross-country drive with my dad) during the first week of October 2003, and aside from frequent field-time and month-long trips to NTC in January and JRTC in August, we spent the next year and two months enjoying married life together.

We adopted a six-month-old dilute-tortoiseshell kitten from the Humane Society in December, and Mythril quickly became a part of the family.

By January, Jesse and I had begun starting a youth group at the Foursquare church we had joined in Columbus, Ga. We started with just a few kids, but the group has slowly grown, and God has blessed us with some incredible teenagers.

In May 2004, I was hired as a reporter at a weekly community newspaper in Alabama. It has been a great job, overall, providing me with some close friends and some great experience.

All along, we knew another deployment was looming, and the Army didn’t disappoint—Jesse left for his second deployment to Iraq on Jan. 17, 2005. This time, he will be gone for at least a year, and as I write this, we are two weeks short of the six-month mark. God is faithful, and the time has gone as quickly as we could have hoped for. We bought an Australian shepherd puppy, Caspian, in March, and he has helped to pass the time and ease lonely days with Jesse gone. I can’t wait for him to meet his "daddy" … hopefully that will happen in August or September, when Jesse should be getting two weeks of leave.

Once this deployment is over, we will be just a few months from the end of Jesse’s enlistment. We’re thinking, talking, planning and praying about what our next step will be … and we’ll be sure to keep everyone posted when we decide!