Catherine and Jerry are getting married!

Ok, like my other fairly recent post of my current roommate’s engagement session blog entry, this one may be a little longer than the others…cause this couple is extra special to me!

The pretty lady in this picture is one of my best friends, and favorite people on the entire planet, Catherine Brooke.   Catherine and I met as freshman at Samford and have remained very close friends for the last nine years!  I have always told people that I wish I could be just like Catherine.  She is the most selfless, caring, generous, sincere and loving person I have ever known…seriously.  So you can only imagine how happy I am that this wonderful woman has found herself an amazing man to spend the rest of her life with!

Ok, so the first four pictures on this post are sort of a joke! Catherine thought it would be funny to play a little joke on Jerry.  They met me at my house and I told them I had a really great, new spot I was wanting to take some pictures.  As we were making our way down Lorna Road towards Aldridge Gardens, I pulled into this run down apartment complex where there are normally lost of hispanic men waiting on the corner for work!

Unfortunately since it was Sunday, there weren’t a ton of people around, because I had made a point to tell Jerry that since they are both fluent in Spanish and are very involved in the Hispanic ministry, that I thought it would be fun to incorporate some of that into their engagement pictures.  So instead of having swarms of people in the background which I’d hoped for, I just tried to find some really not-so-beautiful places to take photos. (notice the trash surrounding them in the top photo, and the few onlookers in the background of picture #2 in the middle of the parking lot!)  However, they are just such a darn cute couple that the photos didn’t turn out as terrible as I had wanted them to!

So even after asking them to sit by trash, stand in the middle of a parking lot with people in the background, and then in a random stairwell of the complex, Jerry didn’t act like anything was weird at all.  Catherine pretended to be a little hesitant with things, and he just kept telling her to “Trust Ann Wade.  She sees the light and knows what is going to look good.”  Apparently Jerry is too sweet and non-judgemental for this joke to have really worked!  At least Catherine and I had fun laughing about it….

So after the little joke we played on sweet Jerry, we decided to head down the road to Aldridge Gardens to take some “real” engagement shots!

Catherine and Jerry were set up about a year and a half ago by a friend in one of Catherine’s medical school classes.  They had a lunch double date with their friends, which soon turned into long emails and phone calls…watching Catherine fall in love has been one of the most exciting things I have witnessed in our friendship.

I’ve always thought that Catherine is a pretty girl, but like that country music song says, I think she truly “looks so good in love!”

I know by the way that Jerry looks at Catherine that he is going to take care of her, and cherish every minute he has with her!  I see alot of people getting married, and there are certain guys that I can tell are just smitten with their future brides.  Jerry is one of them….as if you couldn’t tell by these pictures!

Of course Catherine has an equally silly grin on her face when they are together, which makes my heart so happy! They just have a genuine mutual respect for each other, for the type of person they are, and for who they can be together.

Jerry proposed to Catherine back in April out on his family’s farm land in Roanoke.  They were both decked out in their camo because Jerry had told her he wanted to go hunting.  They were sitting under a huge tree and Jerry snuck around to the other side of the tree.  When he told Catherine to come around quietly, she found him sitting there holding this “glass slipper.”  He said he had a question to ask her, and he wanted to know if the slipper fit.

The significance of that is that on one of their first dates Catherine jokingly told Jerry that she needed to home by midnight or she would turn into a pumpkin.   Apparently Jerry had never seen Cinderella, so he didn’t really get the joke.  (Jerry was clued in and quickly he became her Prince Charming!)  So Catherine took off her boots and put her foot into the slipper that he had hidden in the tree the night before!  However, he did not propose at this point, but asked her to sit down.

Jerry pulled out a piece of paper with a list that he had written a few years ago of all of the qualities he wanted in the woman he was going to marry. He started reading them to her, and the list described Catherine “to a t.”  Even down to the fact that she would be fluent in spanish, and be a blonde bombshell And then he proposed to her in espanol and gave her his grandmother’s diamond on a necklace for them to go pick out a setting together!  They will be getting married in Birmingham next May and I am SO happy and honored about being a bridesmaid in her wedding!