Hi friends! Hope you’re having a great week! Our special guest post today is from Monica, the other half of East Coast Creative Blog. I’m so grateful BOTH girls were willing to share their stories cuz they are BUSY! (Have you entered Creating with the Stars yet??!) Monica’s story is such a great read – and you’ll never believe who her husband, Eric’s, first kiss was!!
Hey there! I’m Monica, the other half of East Coast Creative Blog. My BFF and blog partner, Jess, shared her How I Met your Blogger story last week and now it’s my turn. I was actually supposed to be the very first blogger sharing, but I had computer issues, and get to go near the end now. That might be a good thing, because my story is a tad unique… In fact, this might need to turn into a mini series on East Coast Creative, so I’ll try to stick to the basics for ya here!
1. How long have you two been together & how did you meet?
November 2013 will be our 12th wedding anniversary (Dang, that sounds like such a long time when I write it out! I thought only old people were married that long!) Eric and I actually met in my junior year of high school. It’s sorta funny… I was the new girl. I’d just moved to PA from Boston and I was NOT happy about it (that’s putting it mildly). I told myself I’d only have to be the “new girl” for one day and then it would be over. We’re in homeroom and the teacher calls “Eric Mangin” and then comments that this Eric Mangin fella is on vacation and won’t be back for a few days. Umm who goes on vacation the first day of school and great, now I’m the new girl ALL WEEK till I meet this bozo! My first impression of Eric was that he was the punk kid that skipped the first day of school! (I might add that we’ve vacationed the first week of school for the last 13 years now! Ha!)
I also have to spill the beans on something scandalous! My first day of school, this girl Jess was assigned to show me around school (her mom was the admissions coordinator, so she was stuck with the job). Well, that tour led to a life long friendship and to this day she’s my partner in crime (not real crime, I promise!) Here’s the scandalous part… Jess and the punk kid Eric had dated over the summer and actually were each other’s FIRST KISS! Yup, my BFF and now Husband were smoochy smooching before I was on the scene! I love to bring that story up and make both of them feel AWK-ward!
Eric and I didn’t actually become friends until our Senior year of high school. We started dating mid-year and ended up at the same college (I still insist I didn’t follow him there, but who knows what a girl’s actually thinking at 18!)
2. How did he propose?
I warned you that our story was a bit unique… Eric’s proposal to me wasn’t a huge shocker because we had found out a few months before that I was pregnant. It was an Oh Snap moment to say the least. At 19 we quickly learned to face reality, and that actions have consequences. Luckily for us, our consequences didn’t just mean leaving our university, scholarships, and moving closer to family, it also came with the bonus of an amazing little girl.
(Sorry, these were pre-digital pics)
But, back to the proposal… we were on vacation down the shore with Eric’s family. I knew it was coming soon (or at least I sure hoped so!), but I wasn’t thinking proposals happened on family va-k. We spent the day on the beach and then just the two of us went to an amazing restaurant right on the water. Eric ordered seaweed soup without knowing it and it was nasty! After dinner we took a walk on the beach, climbed a life guard chair to chat for a while, and he popped the question. With our situation it was a really sweet proposal… it wasn’t just a commitment to love me, but it was a commitment to love our family, and the crazy, and challenging years that laid ahead for us. We might have been young, and looked even younger, but that night we promised to each other and before God that we’d journey through this crazy life together.
(There’s nothing like photo booth strips as engagement pictures! Ha! The ones on the right were the day of our engagement- yes, we looked like we were ten!)
3. What was your wedding day like? Any crazy stories?
Our wedding was about three months after we got engaged. Thankfully, I wasn’t too caught up in the details of it all, so putting it together quickly wasn’t a problem. It was your very typical, early 2000s wedding… we had about 200 people and during the church service we wanted to include a few of our favorite choruses. We had the words printed out and put in the program so the entire congregation could sing along. Well time time came, the worship leader started singing and not one single person in the church sang… Yup, we forgot to put the dang words in the programs. So, as you can imagine, Me, Eric and the wedding party (just the few that knew the songs) suffered through three songs with just us singing. I wanted to burst out laughing, but thankfully kept it together. It was aca-awkward that’s for sure!
One other funny thing, was that Eric was on a baseball scholarship in college and we’d invited a few of his closer friends to the wedding, but not the whole team. Well… yeah, not so much. About 75% of the team showed up in their Sunday best ready for a wedding- they’d made an 8+ hour trip! Oh, college boys kill me! Thankfully, we threw together an extra table and were really glad they were all there!
(yup, a few weeks before our wedding and we look like middle schoolers- especially Eric!)
4. What do you love to do together?
We love to go out to dinner just the two of us. Since we never had those kid-free years that most newlyweds get, we really love when we get time to just talk! We always joke about who brings more to the conversation table… we could talk and talk for hours and never run out of topics. Being 19 married and with a kiddo doesn’t lend itself to the “high life,” but over the past few years we’ve been blessed to begin traveling together. This past November, we spent 8 days in London and Paris and it was amazing. With the start we had to our marriage, I wasn’t sure if amazing trips like that would ever be possible for us, and many times during our trip I was struck by just how much God had blessed our marriage through the past decade!
5. What’s your favorite thing about him? What’s his favorite thing about you?
Eric is the hardest working person I’ve ever met. I don’t mean that he works like 70 hours a week (actually he has the best work schedule ever), but I mean that no matter what he’s doing he does it 110%. Our friends joke and call it “Mangin to the Max!” This is my favorite thing about him because he gives 110% to our marriage too. He’s constantly selfless and thinking of how he can be a better husband.
I asked E what his favorite thing was about me and his answer was “Crash Test Dummies”… I suppose I should explain… So Eric is referring to a side of me that only he gets to see… You see, I do these insanely spot on impersonations of all different singers. Pretty recently, my little brother made me an Epic 90s playlist and I might have busted out in a version of Crash Test Dummies that could have won me a Grammy. The reason he loves it, is because no one else on the face of the planet gets to see that side of me (actually, even my BFF probably won’t even believe it) and he apparently loves that I’m a complete dork just for him.
(We had to take a lot of selfies on our trip… total honeymoon-esque pics!)
Eric and my story could have turned out very differently if we hadn’t trusted God and relied on Him through the rough times and challenges. 11 years of marriage, and 4 kids later, it’s been quite an awesome journey… with lots more to come!
Thanks so much Beth for having me and for all of you (if you made it this far in my ramblings) for listening to a little bit of my story.
Want more EC2? Use the icons below to follow us!
**********************************************************
Monica and Eric, thank you so much opening up to us! Y’all are awesome! (And, if this does become a mini series on EC2, I would love to read it!) 
Pin It
I love. love. LOVE your story.
It is very uncannily similar to mine. My husband and I were married with a baby at 19 and in college. My husband had dated my best friend before we got together — not first kisses, but first “relationship.”
Now we are 7 years in and could not be happier. We are both complete goofballs around each other more than anyone else. I constantly joke that we might not have friends if people saw us when we were alone with each other.
So glad to have fallen into mutual weirdness.
We never run out of things to talk about and love going on super long walks and eating dinner alone together. It was rare when we were first married, and it is getting more frequent now.
I cannot wait to begin traveling now that we are finally no longer poor college students, newlyweds, and first time parents. We have a planned a coastal “California Love” trip that we are going on this summer as a pseudo “honeymoon” that we never got to have.
It is so nice to hear that other people in a similar situation to us have made it and are so completely happy too. I have seen too man young marriages crash and burn.
Kudos you two!
X Angie