If you read my first blog post, you might be curious about the gaps I skipped over when trying to briefly explain my life. I said I would post later (in more detail) about Jay and myself. I met Jay when I was a freshman at Wofford College (go Terriers!). Jay was a junior at the time. It was not love at first sight. In fact, I was dating someone else at the time. Jay and I had mutual friends, so I would run into him every now and then. I always thought he was the cutest out of his friend group, but I kept that to myself :). 

Jay and I didn’t go on our first “date” until he asked me to be his date to his fraternity’s formal in Myrtle Beach in March 2015. We had so much fun that weekend but remained friends. It wasn’t until our spring break that following April that I admitted to myself (and others) that I was really starting to like him. Since my group of girlfriends were all close with his group of guy friends, we all stayed together in the same spring break house. Jay and I were inseparable the whole week. 

We spent the rest of the spring semester hanging out at school, and we said we would visit each other over the summer. We knew that we couldn’t exclusively date though, because he was going to study abroad in Italy for 4 months that following fall. The more we visited each other, the more I realized how much trouble I was in, because I was REALLY starting to like him. A lot. It crushed me to think about what could happen to us when he went abroad.

Jay left for Rome at the end of August 2015. His phone didn’t work for the first 3 days that he was gone, but I didn’t know that. I thought he was completely blowing me off. It felt like for those 3 days, people only knew how to talk to me about Jay, always asking how he was liking Italy, and what he was doing. All I could say was, “I don’t know; I haven’t heard from him.”

When I finally got a hold of him, I felt relieved, but it was still tough. We weren’t together physically or in regard to a relationship. He would go out, I would go out, and we would both get jealous and upset with each other but couldn’t do anything about it. So, after a rocky couple of months of Jay being abroad, we finally decided on October 12th, 2015 to stop this weird together/not together gray area thing we were doing and just fully commit to a relationship.

Jay came back in December 2015, and we had the next spring semester to look forward to together before he graduated. The memories I have from that spring of his senior year are some of the best of my life so far. I know that when I am old and telling my kids about my college days, those are the memories I will look back on.

Jay graduated in May 2016, which made me sad, because I still had another 2 years of college ahead of me. I couldn’t be too sad though, because Jay was hired to work for (at the time) Governor Nikki Haley in Columbia, SC (only 1.5 hours from Wofford and 2 hours away from my hometown, Beaufort SC). We visited each other every weekend that summer, and we continued to get more and more serious.

Jay’s mom was diagnosed with cancer in July 2016, and it was extremely hard for Jay. I was with him when his dad called him to let him know that he was at the hospital with his mom, and that the doctors found swelling in her brain. Jay was upset immediately. I guess I didn’t realize what the implications of the phone call were, because I remember thinking, “Wow, he’s really upset. I’m sure everything will turn out fine.” I didn’t even think that a brain tumor was in the realm of possibilities. I was supposed to study abroad that following fall in Spain, so the news of the cancer made me feel extremely guilty about leaving. However, neither Jay nor his mom were going to let me stay behind and not study abroad, so in August 2016 I left for Alicante, Spain.

I had an amazing time abroad. It was definitely a once in a lifetime opportunity. I got to travel all around Spain (and other parts of Europe), but I really missed Jay. Luckily, he was able to visit me for 9 days in October for our first real anniversary. We spent some time in Alicante and some in Barcelona. We spared no expense (which led to both of us being very broke by the end of the trip), but we knew the memories would be worth it.

I came back from Spain that following December, and we were both so happy, because we knew that we would never have to spend 4 months apart ever again. We were also happy, because I had a teaching internship in Columbia for the entire month of January 2017, which meant I got to see Jay every day for an entire month. It was around this time in our relationship that I knew I wanted to marry him. 

I hated when people would ask me, “Is Jay ‘The One’?” or “Do you think y’all will get married?” because, I still had a year and a half left of school, and a lot can happen in that amount of time. My go-to answer for those types of questions was usually, “I have never met anyone like Jay in my life, and if things keep going the way they are going, I would be lucky to marry him.”

Jay and I had been talking about things that people who are in serious relationships talk about (do we even want to get married, do we want kids, how many kids if so, etc) for some time already, but we didn’t seriously start talking in the sense of “Okay, I could really marry this person – this could really be the person I spend the rest of my life with” until summer 2017.

During that summer, we began planning a weekend getaway to celebrate our 2-year anniversary. We decided to go to Asheville for a mountain weekend and stay in a little inn. In the back of my mind I couldn’t help but think, “Hmm…that would be a really great time for him to propose!” The closer we got to our weekend getaway, the more I knew that it wasn’t going to be our special engagement weekend after all. That didn’t stop all of our friends and family from speculating, though.

I was beginning to get a little annoyed with everyone asking me when I thought Jay was going to propose. It was a question I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t want to say “Oh probably sometime soon” because even though I had a feeling it would be sometime soon, I didn’t was to tell people that and be completely wrong and look pathetic. I also didn’t want to play it cool and say, “Not for a longggg time” because that wasn’t true either. What I wanted to say was, “Um I don’t know, Nosey Nelly. That’s not up to me. Why don’t you ask him?” It was always awkward when people would bring it up and honestly just pointed out the fact that he hadn’t asked me yet.

Meanwhile, Jay was scheming. We went on our weekend trip to Asheville, and even though I knew by this point that he wasn’t going to propose that weekend, I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed when we got back without him asking me. I just had to tell myself, “Let it go, Leigh. He’s going to do it when the time is right.”

Fast forward a month to Thanksgiving 2017. Jay came to visit my family and me. The whole proposal story is a long one, so I’ll save it for another post. To keep it short and sweet, Jay proposed on the dock at my parents house at sunset the day after Thanksgiving. My whole family was there, and when I turned around, I saw that Jay’s family was also there to celebrate with us. The feeling I had when he proposed and for the rest of the night is an indescribable one. I was so high on life, I can barely remember all that happened after the proposal. I don’t think I stopped smiling the whole night.

Jay was planning on going to law school starting fall of 2018, and we wanted to get married the summer before that, so we began planning immediately. The date we decided on was June 30th, 2018. We wanted a big wedding with 300 guests on the Beaufort waterfront. There was going to be a big band and lots of dancing. We had engagement parties in December and went to New Orleans for New Years. We were staying very busy.

We thought our lives were going through some big changes as it was, but little did we know that God had an even bigger life change in store for us. Jay and I found out in early January that we were 9 weeks pregnant (this story is also a long one that I will save for a separate post). After the initial shock passed, we were filled with an inexpressible amount of joy.

We decided shortly after finding out we were pregnant that we needed to change the date of our wedding. My spring break was the first week of April, and I knew that was the best time for us to go on a real honeymoon, so we started planning a wedding for March 31st, 2018.

Because of the short notice, our best option was to have our wedding at our original ceremony location, Beaufort First Presbyterian Church, and to change our reception location to my parent’s inn, Anchorage 1770. Having it at the inn meant we had to downsize. We went from a 300-person guest list to a 100-person guest list, which was no easy task (Jay and I both have large families, so they along with the wedding party made up about 75 people).

The wedding was nothing short of a fairytale. We got to celebrate with our closest friends and family. Most importantly, Jay’s mom was able to be there. I have never cried so many happy tears in my life, and I wasn’t the only one. I think everyone there cried at least once. We really felt the love of our people that day.

One of my favorite memories from the day was our gender reveal wedding cake. Jay and I decided to find out the sex of our baby the Wednesday before the wedding at our 20-week check-up. We wanted to find out together, alone before we told anyone else. We didn’t announce that we were doing the gender reveal wedding cake, but when we cut into a bright pink slice, everyone understood exactly what it meant. The whole room burst into loud screams and cheers!

If you read my first post, you already know that Jay’s mom passed away a month and a half after our wedding. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to go through. I was still in school at the time but basically told my professors that my finals had to take a backseat, because Jay needed me. They agreed to let me take my finals after graduation, whenever I felt ready. 8 months have gone by since Jay’s mom’s passing, and we are still getting used to life without her. We know she is in heaven watching over us and the rest of the family.

I have since graduated from Wofford. Jay and I are now finally living together after having to go almost two months of marriage with me still at Wofford and Jay working in Columbia. We had our sweet, sweet baby Hollings on July 27th at the Duke University Hospital. I cannot believe that she is already 6 months old, and that our first wedding anniversary is coming up in just two months. Between law school and taking care of Hollings, Jay and I stay very busy.

Jay and I have been through a lot. We have been through more ups and downs than most couples our age (keep in mind I’m 22 and Jay is 25). I have to say, as cheesy as it sounds, all of these things have really brought us closer. He is my best friend. He is the most amazing person I have ever met. I don’t know what I did to deserve him, but God really blessed me with a good one. I couldn’t imagine doing any of this without him.