Our Anniversary

Five years ago tomorrow Darrin proposed to me in Holland's Centennial park. It was snowing and all the Christmas lights were on. It was beautiful. We attempted to plan our wedding for December 4th (my grandparents 50th wedding anniversary) but we weren't having any luck making that day work with the church and reception hall. December 18th was the only date in December that was going to work and as fate would have it, that date would end up working out perfectly. We began all the planning and spring rolled around. Darrin began applying for teaching jobs. He looked online and found a job fair taking place in Morganton, NC. We decided to take a chance and see what happened. We flew to NC and Darrin attended the the job fair. He called me at the hotel and told me he'd been offered a job. I'll admit, I freaked out! He took it. We went down one more time to look for a house and began the process of buying our first house on Susan Drive. In the meantime, we spent the first half of the summer preparing for our move and in the midst of it all decided we wanted to be married before our move. I called the courthouse and we were scheduled in for about a week later...Friday, July 16th. We only told our parents and a few friends. Our parents were the only ones at the courthouse with us but afterwards we had a large shower/going away party. We asked my unsuspecting grandma to read something before we ate. It said something along the lines of, 'Darrin and Elizabeth VandenBerg-married July 16, 2004 at 4:00 in the afternoon...December 18 wedding is still on.'
It was so fun to see everyone's reaction. We moved to NC the following week. When we got to NC we headed to Darrin's school to look around. At that point I had been planning on finding any random job as it didn't matter to me what I did. While at the school I was offered the Reading Remediation position. The teacher before had just resigned. Everything was falling into place. The year went quickly and before we knew it, Christmas break was almost upon us. We only had to take a couple of 'sick' days to cover for the time we'd be in MI. Thank goodness it wasn't on December 4th! We had our beautiful Christmas wedding complete with Christmas trees, ornament favors, 12 flower girls, and the West Ottawa Vocalaires singing Christmas carols. It was wonderful. And four years later I still feel like a newlywed...still so in love...except with a lot more on our plates :). Happy anniversary to us. I couldn't be more happy!