Unlucky 13?

Boy I HOPE NOT!!!!!!!!!!!! Thirteen years ago today, much to their surprise and great happiness, a confirmed bachelor and a confirmed SPINSTER (don't you love that legal term!!) tied the knot. Thanks in no small part to a HUGE conspiracy. You see the love story goes VERY something like this..... Once upon a time there was a VERY struggling VERY junior associate dentist who was working diligently to earn student loan AND car loan AND and rent and food and well you get the idea...MONEY. Her good friend Agnes decides to invite her to an "ARTWARE" party (read Tupperware but with paintings!) and said young dentist begs off due to poverty. Friend Agnes will hear nothing of the declination and assures the starving associate that she is not expected to buy a thing...just act as part of the body count for Agnes to earn points towards her purchases. When the socializing time of the party arrived, the young dentist was torn between the younger crowd in the living room or her friend Agnes (who was considerably older than she) and the older crowd in the kitchen. Opting for the kitchen, since the living room was filled with talk of nursing and diaper creams, the young dentist found herself being very pointedly steered back into the living room by the kitchen crowd. Finding this all too much to bear, the young dentist decides to take her leave at which point her way is barred by friend Agnes! "Before you go I need to ask you a favor?" her dear friend Agnes asks. "Sure, anything!" the silly young dentist replies. "I have this brother-in-law who would really like to ask you out. Can you just meet him for coffee or something just for my sake?" asks her friend who KNOWS DAMN WELL that young dentist SWORE OFF blind dates many, many years before due to statistically overwhelming negative outcomes!!!!!! Sigh, sigh, sigh....but they are good friends...and the rest of her family are great people...so? How bad could it be? She had never heard mention of arrests or imprisonments....but then again where has this brother-in-law been for the past 15 years of their friendship?? Now the fact that said brother-in-law is completely oblivious to this whole plan does not seem to hamper the friend Agnes!! Two days later, while the young dentist was babysitting her 4 month old niece who was screaming her head off for her Mommy to get home from school to ease her hunger pains since she refused to take a bottle, the friend calls with said brother-in-law on the phone! What a great first impression...... Long story short, I had been lured to that party to be 'inspected' by my FIVE future sister-in-laws who spent the evening at the kitchen table trying to figure out a way to trap...oh I mean bring Patrick and me together. They were sure we would like each other and that nature would take over from there. Matchmaking is BIG over in Ireland and FOUR of my five sister-in-laws were from Ireland. They had a wealth of experience in this matter and they were RIGHT! By our second date we were pretty sure our single days were over and five months after being introduced we were married! So this morning our anniversary started with surprises from the girls... homemade cards.... and homemade cupcakes! According to Auntie Peggy, who supervised their production, the girls worked really hard to pull this surprise off! Here we are on October 26,1996... and together this summer...much grayer and fatter but happy as ever to be granted the blessing of finding each other. Even if it took a posse of matchmakers to push us into each other!