The short version (as Ben remembers it)
I met (and let’s face it, followed around) Jacqueline at Campus Crusade for Christ’s national staff conference in Ft. Collins, CO back in late July of 2005. Living 7 hours apart made dating fun, and buying a ring more urgent. I wasted no time, plopping down the cash and carrying home a ring on December 5th, 2005. Then, to continue with the “wasted no time” theme, I took the 7 hour trip two days later, on a wednesday, to ‘surprise’ Jacqueline and sing her a song chronicling our first date before asking her to marry me.
Four months and some change later we were married. After a honeymoon in Spain, we moved into the above-referenced single-wide, where we lived for 2 months, in my grandmother’s back yard.
In August of 2006 we made the move to Asheville, NC to work full-time with Campus Crusade for Christ on the Campuses here. Find out more about that by visiting our ministry page.
We felt it important to go the plants, then pets, then progeny route, and got our first plant, a flowering perennial we named Dr. Stee Ruggle, (he had a rough existence) to prove we could keep something alive for more than a few days. It’s good we only set the “a few days” mark, because Dr. Ruggle didn’t last much longer than that.
We moved from flora to fauna when we made the poor decision to “stop by the animal rescue shelter” with no intention to adopt a dog. We piled Loretta, our lovable German Short-haired Pointer, into our late Altima about 85 minutes (and dollars) later.
We’ve been far more successful at keeping Loretta alive, and in the summer of 2007 we decided to start trying to have a baby. In August Jacqueline called me back to the bedroom of our small apartment and showed me a 10 dollar apparatus she’d peed on. I spent the next 15 minutes reading the English (and Spanish) literature that accompanied the pee-stick, discerning that the indicator meant what I thought the indicator meant, that we were officially going to be parents, and need a bigger place to live.
Benjamin Junior (We call him LB for Little Ben) was born about nine months later, and we’re pretty sure he’s one of the most well documented children in the history of the world.
Worth a few thousand words:
Pre Marriage Photos
Baby Ben Photos
LB and Friends
The Late Altima
