As most of you know, we are not a conventional couple. Also, we are woeful planners. Behold the timeline of our unconventional, altogether unplanned couplehood:

❖   Meet.

❖   Quickly become pregnant. Quickly again become pregnant.

❖   Wait several years, become engaged.

❖   Move at such a glacial pace on wedding that years pass, friends and family stop asking, and our daughters         grow tall enough to work the event as cater waiters.

Clearly, planning was never our strong suit. And after checking out several amazing venues over the past year, we decided one evening in early February that… neither was a wedding.

There were a dozen factors: Family members scattered across the continent (and friends across the globe) who have their own obligations, the politics of invitations and seating arrangements, the insanity of planning details (lighting themes! confection tables! seasonal favors!), and on and on. Everyone we spoke to over those years lamented the stress their weddings generated, and above all, the relentless focus on throwing a perfect party. As much as we wanted to share the day with the people we most love, it was ultimately more important to us to worry less about things going wrong at a big event, and to instead spend the day contemplating the commitment we were about to make.

And with that one decision in early February — to elope — everything changed: we’d gone from virtually zero progress over three years to having the entire event booked within days. The next weekend, our close friends Krista and Ryan Munro were visiting from Vancouver; Krista has been Michael’s friend for 17 years, and the Munros have been present for nearly every major event in our coupledom. We asked them for their assistance in eloping to BC: their official roles as our Canadian witnesses, and their silence for the next five months — and they delightedly agreed.

The past five months have been a strange journey of elation and wonder and secrets and surprise. Not sharing a happy truth feels like hoarding all the best wine and cheese, and an elopement is always undertaken at risk of offending a few… but in hopes of equally offending none.

Ultimately, our elopement was everything we could have imagined. Perhaps a glimpse at a few of the photos from 30 June will offer a window into our elation and contentment, in a remote Pacific Northwest setting as wild, romantic, unspoiled and sacred as our commitment.

We hope you share our joy.