I am a bit of a TV hound. If I am at home, it's on. Over the years I have enjoyed a few shows, but one show that my wife and I love just started its final season. How I Met Your Mother is on CBS on Monday nights and follows the lead character, Ted, as he tells his kids the story of how he met their mom. Call me sappy, but the beginning of the end of the show has me feeling a little nostalgic. I feel that way because my wife, Amanda, got me started watching the show not long after we met back in January of 2006. Since that time we have spent most Monday nights during TV season together watching the show. When we first met, the show was just in its first season and we enjoyed sitting down to watch it together as a break from our studies at WVU. I was in my last year of law school and she was finishing up her master's degree in reading education. As the show has progressed over the last 8 years a lot has changed in my life. It got me to thinking about someday telling the story of how I met Amanda to our kids.
Our little girls, Allie and Lauren, are only four and 19 months respectively, so I thought the story could wait a few years, but seeing how Allie has already started playing and (GULP!) planning her wedding it might not be that far off. How is it even possible that a four-year-old would starting planning that young!
The story of how Amanda and I met is simple enough, and to this day I am not sure what Amanda saw in me. We had a mutual friend, Holly, whom I had gone to undergrad with at Concord College and who was at the time in the same master's program as Amanda. Holly had been plotting for some time to get Amanda and me to meet and we had struck up a few conversations on the popular social media of the time AOL Instant Messenger. Giggles3153 already had Romes452tke very interested through those brief conversations. Unfortunately, our first meeting did not proceed as I would have hoped. January 26, 2006 was a fairly typical Thursday night in Morgantown. I really didn't have much going on at school the next day so I had decided to go out to Crocket's Lodge Star City to have some fun. Holly was one of the friends that was planning to go out that night and was going to be my designated driver so I had taken the opportunity to get a head start on the on the evening festivities with a few "beverages" at my apartment. (I need to find a way to edit that part of the story before I tell Allie and Lauren.) It wasn't until Holly came over to pick me up, and I was several drinks in, that I found out that Amanda was going to come out with us that night. Just my luck!
Thursdays at Crockett's was typically karaoke night. Unfortunately, with a few drinks in me in those days I tended to become a performer. At the urging of some friends, performances far from worthy of American Idol or the Voice would come out. And so it was on January 26. 2006. So what was my future wife's first in person meeting of me? "Here I Go Again on My Own" by White Snake blared as I belted out the best off-key performance I could. When I was done I remember seeing Amanda for the first time and thinking, what the heck have I just done! Apparently not enough to scare her away! I was blown away by how beautiful she was. We talked throughout the night and she even stayed as I took the stage to belt out a little Neil Diamond. I don't know what she saw or heard in me, but I was already hooked. I asked her out over the next weekend and we went out the next week. I showed up to her house, in what she calls to this day the absolute worst sweater she has ever seen, to see that she had just broken a mirror five minutes before I arrived.
For whatever reason, she didn't accept the broken glass signal and we started spending a lot of time with one another. Only two weeks later we got tickets to see Brad Paisley, one of our local boys done good, who was performing at the WVU Coliseum. Amanda had been in Pittsburgh during that day with her family and was returning back to Morgantown in a snow storm. I was already at the Coliseum and parked when I found out that Amanda was nearly there. As luck would have it, I shockingly noticed an open parking place fairly close to the doors. For the next 15 minutes I stood in the snow in an empty parking lot getting yelled at by several people because I would not move out of the way, but I did save the parking spot for Amanda. I was already hopelessly hooked on my future wife. We were engaged by June and married the next August.
As we finished school, despite having several more lucrative teaching positions for her acceptance, Amanda decided to move with me back to my hometown as I had accepted a job as the law clerk for the Honorable Judge John Hrko in Wyoming County, WV. Amanda came along and experienced what it was like to live in the southern hollows and coal fields of Southern West Virginia. It was certainly a learning experience for her, but she stuck through it with me. I was fortunate enough to be hired by Bordas & Bordas for the fall of 2007. Since that time we have moved back to Moundsville and started our family. Starting work at Bordas & Bordas gave me the opportunity to raise a family and have the time I need to be with my young children as they grow. Allie was born in July of 2009 and Lauren followed in February of 2012. Lauren was actually born on Amanda's birthday, continuing the rather lengthy string of overlapping dates and anniversaries in our family. Lauren and Amanda's birthday is also my brother Brian and his wife Robin's anniversary. Robin and her son, Michael, share a birthday and I share a birthday with my mother in law. Finally, my wedding anniversary is also my father-in-law's birthday.
I could not have imagined what my life was going to be like when I saw the beautiful brunette looking at me and laughing as I belted out that classic White Snake tune back in 2006. Today I have the best, most caring, beautiful and loving wife in the world, who is a tremendous mother to our children. My children are incredibly smart and fun and I cannot wait to get home to see them in the evenings. I like the story of how Amanda and I met a lot, but I must say I like the day to day of life with her even more.
The best part of working at Bordas & Bordas is and has always been the firm's dedication to family. Through births and deaths the entire firm has stood behind me and given me the time to be the family man that I want to be and for that I am thankful.
