Speaking of dating, I don't believe I've every shared our How We Met story here. I had gone to Germany for my first summer in law school to work as an intern for the US Army JAG Corps. All interns were required to register at the Civilian Personnel Office in Heidelberg on the first day. I had completed my paperwork and was waiting for some friends to finish theirs when a handsome young captain came dashing through the door with an intern in tow. He escorted his intern to the registration room and returned to the hall to wait.
We started chatting, and he asked me where I was from. "Oh, I'm from a tiny little town in Florida that nobody has ever heard of," I replied. He said he was from Jacksonville, and I said, "Oh, well, then maybe you HAVE heard of DeLand!"
Heard of it?! Why he had spent 4 years going to college there. The rest of the conversation went something like this:
ME: "College? As in Stetson University? Hey, that's where I went too! I'm not really FROM DeLand though. I was actually born in Pensacola."
HIM: "No kidding? Me, too!"
So there we were, 2 Pensacola babies turned Stetson grads, flirting madly in the hallway of CPO, Heidelberg. Fred called me up at work the next week and asked me out on our first date, the burning of the Heidelberg castle. We went with some friends of his (who were also on their first date and who also wound up getting married--it was a VERY good date) and his intern (who had been filling out his registration paperwork when the sparks first started to fly) and spent the day hanging out on the banks of the Neckar river. Fred had brought along his Stetson yearbook, so we spent some time playing Did You Know So and So:
After the sun went down that evening and the flares and fireworks shone from the castle looming over us, it started to rain, which was the perfect excuse for snuggling in close together under an umbrella. We spent every weekend for the rest of that summer together and went on some really awesome dates: Frankfurt, Cologne, Munich, Switzerland, London . . . I returned to Germany twice over the next year, and when Fred was transferred back to the States that next summer, we were married in the chapel at Stetson.
Fast forward almost 2 years . . . It's January 1992, and I'm pregnant with Mike. Fred is in Kansas for 9 weeks, so I have gone to Florida to kill time while I wait for him. While I'm there, I go to spend a few days with Fred's parents. Fred's mom gives me his baby book. When I open it, his isolette card falls into my lap. I pick it up and read it and see . . . that we were delivered by the same doctor.
Cue the Twilight Zone music!
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