Our Story

Once Upon A Time...

Despite going to the same high school, Fern and Nathan didn't meet until they embarked on a Kentridge Music Department trip to Disneyland in April 2017. It all started when Nathan got on the wrong bus at LAX and found himself surrounded by choir students he didn't know. Seeing that Nathan was out of his element, a friend of Fern's introduced herself and they exchanged Snapchats. From there, Fern officially met Nathan outside of the Indiana Jones Ride inside the park.

Following their return to real life, Nathan asked Fern to go on a date to watch a new romcom, How to be a Latin Lover, which did not go as Nathan planned. Despite Fern's hesitation to go on another date with Nathan, she gave him a second chance on a date to Denny's, where Nathan claims that he won her over with his impressive pancake eating. On their third date, the lovebirds met at the Kent Ice Rink to go ice skating and play mini golf. That is where Nathan asked Fern if she wanted to make their relationship official on June 4, 2017.

As a young couple, Fern and Nathan attended multiple school dances together that got better and better over time until they reached a peak at Fern's senior prom (in Nathan's junior year). Fern was a part of Prom Royalty and they had one of the best nights of their lives. The high of that night quickly subsided when the following morning, Nathan started feeling symptoms of a sickness that he hadn't experienced before. These symptoms along with others, like extreme lethargy and fatigue, persisted until Nathan had an echocardiogram, which showed an abnormal mass in his chest. This mass ended up being lymphoma, which took the form of a softball-sized tumor. It was a difficult season for them since Fern should have been experiencing all the excitement that came with high school graduation, yet Nathan was about to begin the hardest journey of his life.

Between June 2019 and February 2020, Nathan and Fern saw each other on the weekends and Fern was a bright light shining during dark times of Nathan's life. Through everything that they went through together, they made the best of every situation and used little things like at-home spa days and chicken nugget sandwiches to find joy. Meanwhile, Fern thrived through her first couple quarters at the University of Washington while Nathan underwent several months of chemotherapy and tried to maintain a normal senior year. Even this "new normal" came to an end when March 2020 brought the Coronavirus, along with the ever-so famous quarantine. After two months of being apart, watching Once Upon a Time on Netflix Party, and long FaceTime calls, Fern and Nathan were finally able to reunite. While the distance was difficult, in this case, time apart did make the heart grow fonder.

The challenges of Fern being at school, Nathan going through cancer treatment, and the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to resolve in May 2020. Both Fern and Nathan had school online from Spring 2020-Summer 2021, where they made lots of memories at home and abroad. They took their first couple's trip to Las Vegas in August 2021, where they experienced new things together and got awesome sunburns while doing so. Then, during the 2021-2022 academic year, Nathan and Fern rotated weekends of Nathan staying at UW and Fern coming home so that they were able to see each other every week.

Following Fern's graduation from UW, the grown up couple had an extremely eventful summer of 2022. In mid-July, they went to Maui with Nathan's family, where they had an amazing time and created wonderful memories. A couple weeks after they got back to Washington, Fern and Nathan moved into their very first apartment in Capitol Hill, right next to Seattle University. Finally, in September, Fern and Nathan went to Disney World with Fern's family. While in Disney World, Nathan felt it would be poetic to propose during the firework show in Magic Kingdom, given the fact that they met in a Disney Park five and a half years prior. Accomplishing this feat was much more difficult than he'd anticipated. He knew that he wanted to propose in a private part of the park so that it wasn't a public event, which is something Fern expressed was important to her in the past. Convincing Fern to walk half-way across Magic Kingdom may have been more difficult than any other part of pulling off this secret proposal.

Given the fact that you are on this site, however, shows that it all worked out and made for a magical moment and defining point in Fern and Nathan's love story.

The End