How it all began...

John and I met in college at The University of North Alabama.

John came to UNA in the fall of 1998, upon graduating from Hoover High School in Birmingham, AL. He went through Fraternity Rush and pledged Phi Gamma Delta, often referred to as Fiji. After a semester at UNA, John decided to join the Army's ROTC program that would allow him to commission in to the United States Army after graduating college and serve as an officer for 4 years. In return, the Army would pay for his college education. John declared a major in Criminal Justice and Sociology. During his early college days he lived in the dorms and later moved in to a room commonly referred to as "the closet" in the Fiji house.

I came to UNA in the fall of 1999, just after graduating from Grissom High School in Huntsville, AL. I also decided to go through Rush as a way of meeting people at this strange new school! The first night of Rush a girl pointed out that I (somehow) resembled Lisa Kudro (or Phoebe) from the TV show, "Friends." It didn't take long before that was my nickname and what most people from UNA remember me by. I pledged Zeta Tau Alpha (Zeta or ZTA) and soon after began my pursuit of a degree in Elementary Education. I lived in the dorms my first semester, and moved in to the ZTA Room for the next several semesters.

John and I first met almost a year later, in the fall of 2000. John remembers being introduced to me as I took the new Zeta pledges to an ice cream social at the Fiji house. At this time I was the assistant Pledge Ed for the sorority. I met so many people that night that I don't recall meeting John. The next encounter I had with John will be a memory I never forget. After all, it was his sense of humor that drew me to him and this was my first dose of it! I was alone in my car driving back to the ZTA room when I looked in my review mirror and saw two crazy guys in a black Jeep Cherokee honking their horn at me and doing a "signature" ZTA Step Sing move. They kept yelling my nickname, Phoebe, and following me all the way back to the parking lot by the dorms. It turns out these two fellows, whom I later came to know as John Nichols and Jonathan McKinney, lived in the leadership dorms next door (Lafayette). That encounter was the first of many with these guys and I quickly became friends with them both and the other people that lived in that dorm.

It wasn't long before John and I were hanging out quite a bit and eventually started dating, although for some reason we had a hard time admitting we were a couple! :) I knew things were getting serious when he stopped calling me Phoebe. Our first "date" was to a Fiji Pledge Formal that was supposed to take place at the Fiji house. We went to dinner at the Renaissance Tower with Emilee Stansell and Shawn Dalrymple. Over the course of the next several months we developed many mutual friends and learned we were also involved in the same campus ministry, Campus Outreach.

The rest is a long, complicated story of most typical college relationships. We dated until May of 2002. We decided to focus on other things in our lives and severed our relationship and most of our contact with one another as well. We both grew in our faith and matured into "adults" instead of college kids over the next year. We both graduated from UNA in December 2002. John took a position at with the UNA ROTC department as a Gold Bar Recruiter. I also remained at UNA and began seeking a Masters in Elm. Ed. In April I was offered an opportunity to be a full-time substitute teacher at New Market School (almost 2 hours away on the eastern side of Huntsville.) I knew that this opportunity should be taken seriously because it would give me a chance to get my foot in the door for a "real" teaching position the following school year. So I began a daily 2 hour (both ways) commute to NMS while working toward my masters at UNA at night. This continued until the middle of May.

In May of 2003, John was getting ready to head to Fort Knox, KY for his OBC training to prepare him for life in the Army as an Officer. In the final weeks before he left for KY, John started to call me again and we even went out a few times. His first weekend in KY, he called and asked me to come visit him and we started dating again. In the meantime, I moved back to Huntsville to live with my parents and started to prepare for my first year as a 4th grade teacher at New Market School. I dropped my plans for grad school for the time being.

In October of 2003, John proposed and we scheduled our wedding for July 17, 2004!