They met during the summer at Texas Roadhouse (home of the best rolls & butter ever!). “She trained me, which is probably not something she’ll want to take credit for considering I was easily the worst server of all time,” Griffin said. “After falling out of touch for many years, we reconnected via Facebook with her living in Denver and me in Indiana. Our first date was lunch at Jimmy John’s in Colorado after she picked me up at the airport on my first visit. She’ll probably tell you it was dinner that night, but this is 2016. Lunch counts as a date.”

“He was kind of the ‘one that got away’ in a sense,” Jamey said. “Whenever I looked at my life after a failed relationship and thought ‘who is right for me?’, it was always Griffin that I thought of. We had been really good friends, we could talk about anything, we had a ton in common, and he had always been very protective of me. Even though we had never dated, I always pictured myself with someone like him and I always strived to find someone like him. So once we reconnected, it was just kind of obvious that he was the one.”
Jamey & Griffin are two sweet souls who have such great respect for each other. They were such a pleasure to get to know and I’m so excited to photograph their wedding this fall. They were back in Iowa over the weekend and we met up at the Oakdale Campus in Coralville for their engagement session. Despite the wind, we were lucky to have a rain-free day.

He proposed a few months ago when they went to Michigan for the weekend with two other couples who they are close friends with. “By the time we got there, it was well past dark so we decided to just grab some pizza and stay in for the evening. We ended up just sitting around playing games for a bit. Well, we broke out Telestrations, but my friend had let her marker dry out so we played a round or two with great frustration trying to get the markers to work.

“Finally, Griffin said, ‘One more round and I quit.’ So we did one final round and I am horrible at drawing so I chose something easy like ‘parking lot’. My book was passed around and then we it came back, we all took turns going through each book as a group. I held my book up and showed that my word was ‘parking lot’, then my picture of what I thought was a fairly good rendition of a parking lot. I flipped the page and my friend Jimmie had guessed ‘will.’ Confused, I flipped to the next page and rather than a drawing it said, ‘you.’ Next page ‘marry’, next page ‘me’, last page would have been Griffin’s ‘Jamey.’

“He got down on one knee, held out a beautiful ring that he had designed, and said what I’m sure were really nice and meaningful things, but I have no clue what they were after, I’ve thought long and hard about this and it’s clear to me that you are the one for me.’ There was an awkward silence when I totally forgot that I was supposed to answer him and he said, ‘Well?’

“And then I said, ‘Do I have to?’ But what I meant was, ‘Do I have to write out an answer?’ since the markers sucked. He gave me a funny look and said, “Well, I guess not.” I realized then how that had sounded and said, ‘Sure, I guess!’ We still have the book.”

Doesn’t she look just like Pippa Middleton? She said she’s never heard that before and I just can’t understand how I’m the first one to notice this!