Then and now…

The two of us met at law school in fall 2012, after being introduced by a mutual friend (thanks Bharath!). Soon enough, we realized that we were both from San Diego, overlapped for a year at Cathedral Catholic High School, and that our brothers even played soccer on the same team for a few years. Before long, we’d been on a few dates and really hit it off, deciding to make things official in early 2013.

Over the years, we celebrated a lot of big life accomplishments together, from graduating law school and passing the Bar, to landing great jobs after law school. However, the biggest change in our lives probably occurred in March 2016 when we decided to bring a little puppy named Finnegan (aka Finn, Finny) into our lives. Since then, we’ve become pretty obsessed with him, as you might be able to tell from our engagement photos.

These days, we live about 25 minutes south of San Francisco, in San Mateo, CA. We take trips down to San Diego to see family as often as possible, and sometimes we even bring Finny along.

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The Proposal

We got engaged in August 2017. Joe had been planning this for quite some time, but as they say, the best laid plans never work out. Originally, Clare thought that she’d finally convinced Joe that we should have a photo shoot mostly for Finn. We would be in a few photos, but that Finn would really be the star. Turns out, Joe was trying to coordinate with the photographer to have this be a surprise proposal that he’d catch on camera and lead into a photo shoot. 

Well, when some of the details weren’t coming together leading up to the weekend, Joe decided to change moves and opt for a nice, quiet proposal on the beach in Half Moon Bay the weekend before the photo shoot was supposed to take place. It was a big surprise, and of course she said “yes”, and then they spent a fancy night at the Ritz afterwards to celebrate.

We ended up using the photo shoot the following weekend as our engagement photo shoot. And as you might be able to tell, Finn was still the star of the shoot.