I first met Andre on Saturday, September 3, 2022. It was not a church potluck Sabbath, and therefore, like we do a majority of the time, our friend group decided to have our own potluck of Haystacks. It was Andre’s first time at Scottsdale-Thunderbird Church since moving back to Arizona, and Danika invited him over for lunch. It was at the lunch where we first met. I honestly don’t remember talking to him for more than 2 minutes, but he definitely made an impression.

Skip forward to about a month and a half later (actually October 29— I went back through my texts to look it up), and here we are again at one of our groups lunches after church. This time it was pasta, and Andre brought broccoli. Again, we didn’t talk much and he had to leave early. But I was starting to notice him a little more.

In the middle of November, I was planning a fundraising dinner with my eighth graders to help raise money for their class trip to Washington D.C. I, of course, invited everyone I knew to the dinner. So early November, on a Sunday afternoon, I get a text from Andre saying he’s planning on coming to the dinner and asking what he needs to do to RSVP. So I tell him what to do and thank him for supporting my kids. The next day, about mid-morning, he texts me again saying he did everything he needed to do and then proceeds to just ask me out. I immediately freaked out and left him on read. I couldn’t deal with that. It was only Monday morning and I had a whole bunch of kids I still needed to teach.

The whole rest of the day I kept going back to the message not knowing how to respond. He waited patiently for the entire day until I responded that night. I was so nervous to respond that my roommate, Sarah, had to actually hit the send button for me. Needless to say, I’m glad she did.

Our first date was Tuesday, November 15th at Thai House. I was pretty sick, having caught a bug while I was in Washington D.C. over the weekend, and had already called out the next day. However, I didn’t want to cancel on him, so I still met up with him (and thankfully didn’t get him sick).

For the next three weeks, we talked consistently and officially became a couple on December 7th and the rest is history!

Registry