Rachael Grant & Henry Hughes

There I was, at the Aviator Bar in Montgomery, Alabama, successfully avoiding show casing my terrible dance moves, when this tall handsome man walked up and asked me to dance. After pretending to not want to and hoping he wasn't in town for SOS, I eagerly said yes. He then proceeded to use those Cotillion dance skills and swung me around, making me look like I actually knew what I was doing. We quickly determined we both flew something, naturally, and proceeded to the bar to find out if we struck out with tanker pilots.A few Jack and diets later, I was completely captured by his stories and precise use of hand gestures. We then exchanged numbers, not fully realizing the terribly inconvenient relationship we were about to embark on. The next few months were spent constantly on the phone, wondering how in the world we were going to meet up again to see if our attraction was purely routed in dim bar lighting and good angles on facetime. After a few perfectly timed layover rendezvous on work trips, we finally made this happen and decided it was as real as it gets. I then decided it was time to add the next most opinionated person into the fold, my son Oliver. After a few weeks of hilarious communication, they quickly overcame the language barrier of Henry's southern accent and Oliver's baby talk, and began figuring each other out over long hours of monster truck battles and hot wheels color sorting. Seeing them bond over the next few months and watching Henry face a completely foreign parenting role, was and always will be, one of my favorite parts of our story as it continued to develop. Things continued to progress quickly over the next few years. Our relationship took the form of funding Deltas profit sharing program, avoiding COVID in NYC, Henry getting no sleep at Weapons School, me limping C-17s around the world, dating with a toddler in tow and matching up unpredictable schedules only to see each other once a month. Through all of this, and as busy as he was, Henry continually made Oliver and I his top priority, using his high priced problem solving skills to fix all the problems I continually created. Hoping it would make our life less complicated, this man then took a huge leap of faith and left the South and the Alabama Air National Guard for the beautiful state of New Jersey and the Jersey Devils to commit to my hereditary procrastination and gross lack of sense of time. As they do, complications didn't go away, they just took a different form and Henry proved himself once again. He carried us through a huge move into the city, nailing down two airline jobs, and navigating Oliver's ever growing personality, all without losing the hair he had left and, surprisingly, without running out of stories.For some reason, in the middle of all of this, Henry decided he wanted his life to be complicated forever, so he proposed. When he asked me to marry him, on November 19th, 2022, it was the easiest yes of my life, but just to be sure I tested his resolve even further. Buying a house in the suburbs while wedding planning, changing schools, and raising a toddler (who is just as lackadaisical as me) along with one surprise guinea pig purchase, a bad haircut with bangs, and two deployments later, Henry still smiles while cleaning the leaves out of the pool I wanted, three times a day.