Five years!

My husband trumped me by writing a very lovely tribute to our marriage on our family website.

His words come so much more eloquently than mine but I'll expand a bit more here.

As my husband mentioned, we originally met online. Not a romantic site (soccer related) and we weren't searching for life partners. Not on that site anyway. But, we had a similar sense of humor and ended up talking online all the time. This online friendship lasted nearly two years before we met.

In December 2007 I dragged friends off to London for a... wait for it... Spice Girls reunion concert. No, I'm not kidding.

I sent James an email saying "Hey, I'm coming to London. I know it's not exactly up the street from you (he lived in Fleet, Hants), but any chance you can come to London and hang out with us one day?". He said he'd love to and we made the plan.

As he mentioned in his blog post, when we arrived he was very sick and bed ridden. He told me he was very sorry but he was too sick to meet up with us as we had planned.

I was disappointed to not be able to meet up with the guy I had been talking to online for nearly two years but hey, he was sick. Stuff happens.

A few days later my friends and I are in London doing typical tourist things and he calls saying he feels a little better and asked if I'd like to meet up that day. I told him what our agenda was and he met us at the Gloucester Road tube station.

He was still feeling a bit rough but he was a total trooper. He spent most of the day with us going out to lunch, London Aquarium, the arcade next door, etc.

He was funny, charming and extremely nice to me. He won over my friends with his sense of humor and I wanted to see him again. I can't remember the exact time scale but he came back a day or two later to take me out to dinner then again the next day to bring me to his house in Fleet.

Then I left for Belgium. The enitre time I was in Belgium we were texting (hefty phone bill when I got back home). I missed him.

So I invited him to come visit me in America. And, he came. We both knew it, we wanted to be together.

James had never been to America. On the other hand, I was quite familiar with London having visited many times before I ever met him.

Despite that, I told him I felt like I'd be happier living in the United States and he agreed. That was easy!

Thus began our very long journey with USCIS to bring James to the United States so we could get married.

That took about 18 months and in that time, he wasn't allowed back in the United States while his Visa was pending. So I spent a lot of time traveling back and forth. I'm glad the approval came through when it did because the flights to visit him started to wear me down.

Because of the type of Visa he was granted, we had to get married within 30 days of him arriving here.  So, he landed on August 3rd and on August 8th we officially became man and wife at a B&B in the mountains where he proposed to me the year before.

The only people in attendance were two of my friends, my Aunt Maggie and Cousin, Fiona.

Official marriage certificate in hand, we filed the paperwork for his Green Card.

In September we had a more traditional wedding with family and friends from England flying over to celebrate with us. By that time, I was already "baby on board" with Ryan. Yes, I walked down the aisle in a white dress, already married and already pregnant. Go me!

Now, five years later James has been a US Citizen for over a year, has a job he loves and we have Ryan.

We went through a lot of crap, too, with the death of our second son and now infertility but we've stuck through it together. We don't always agree (and I almost always win when we don't), but we've stayed in love.

So there you have it, the story of how we became the Hunt Family.

PS - I made another entry to the Top Secret blog yesterday.

PPS - Yes, I did the blood work today and no, I don't have results yet. I have unofficial results but, I'm not posting anything until I get the blood work results.