2nd Time’s a Charm

Today Kelly is hosting Show Us Your Life – Proposal Stories so I’m linkin’ up.

A few days before Easter weekend in 2006, my man asked if I wanted to fly out to Colorado Springs to visit my parents. This is nothing out of the ordinary because my mom is a flight attendant so we get flight benefits and often pick up and fly out to visit them at the drop of a hat. Of course I jumped all over the opportunity.

On Easter Sunday, we were all dressed up and went to church and then the four of us were going out to eat at this new restaurant. My dad and hubby dropped my mom and I off at the door and we’re waiting and waiting for them to go park the car. The parking lot is not that big and we saw plenty of open parking spots towards the back so we’re wondering what in the world is taking them so long. Finally 30 minutes later they come in and we proceed to our table to eat. Afterwards, my dad is really wanting to drive to the Broadmoor to show us the new townhomes they built, but my mom and I decide we’d rather go home and change out of our church clothes and take a nap and then later we’ll go hiking at Garden of the Gods and go to the Broadmoor.
So, we finish hiking and are at the Broadmoor and hubby asks me a couple times if I want to get out and go into the hotel and walk around the lake (we had our first kiss on the bridge that crosses the lake). I say “no” because you’re not supposed to be in there unless you’re a guest and we were in sweaty hiking clothes so I didn’t think we could pass as guests at a 5-star hotel. He asks again and so does my dad, but stubborn me still says no.

Little did I know hubby had a ring burning a hole in his pocket and that the reason he and my dad took forever to get into the restaurant earlier in the day is because that’s when hubs decided to ask my dad for my hand in marriage and lets him in on how he wants to propose.

Well, after I foiled his plans, we fly back home. My dad lets my mom in on things and she of course says he should have let her know sooner because she could have gotten me to go into the hotel and walk around the lake. I’m still completely clueless at this point that I missed out on getting engaged because just a few weeks prior hubby and I were talking and he mentioned how he thought November would be a good time to get engaged because his campaign for re-election would be over and we could focus on wedding plans then. So, in my mind, it’s not happening until November at the earliest.

Back to the story…

So, now my mom is in on it too and she works with hubby to scheme up something else to get me back out to Colorado (he really wanted to propose on the bridge were we had our first kiss because we love laughing about how as soon as we started kissing the geese started honking their approval). A few weeks later, my brother was leaving for India for a short-term missions trip so they decided to throw him a “Bon Voyage” party (on May 6, 2006) at a pub connected to the hotel.

That day we were just bumming around the house so I was in pretty casual clothes. I mentioned I wasn’t really going to change because it was a casual pub, but while I was upstairs freshening up, my mom came in and said that hubby had changed so maybe I wanted to change too so I did. I thought that was a little strange, but still didn’t think too much of it. Then, mom asks the two of us to go ahead to save seats because my brother is running late so we do.

We get there early enough and hubby asks me again if I want to go walk around the lake. I said yes this time since we had time to kill and we were dressed nicer. So, we’re on the bridge and looking around and hubby starts acting kinda weird (like he’s refusing to take his hands out of his pocket). I turn around and there he is down on one knee with a ring asking me to marry him. I honestly couldn’t tell you a single word he said because while I was so excited, the whole time I was really thinking “This is so great! But, I don’t want to spoil Brock’s Bon Voyage party because it’s supposed to be about him and not us.” Of course I said yes and we walk to the little pub. We’ll turns out I could have been paying a little more attention to what hubby was saying because my whole family was in on the ploy this time and it was really a small engagement party for us, not a Bon Voyage party. To this day hubby won’t tell me what he said (I think he was so nervous he doesn’t remember himself) so I guess I’ll never know.

So, it took two tries to get me out to Colorado so hubby could propose the way he wanted to, but in the end it worked without a hitch…well, almost. There is the part about the ring.

The first time hubby wanted to propose (Easter weekend when I didn’t cooperate) he had his grandmother’s ring. All along he planned on using it as a place holder until we could go and look at rings together. Well, the 2nd time he realized a few hours before the main event that he forgot to bring the ring this time so he asks my dad if there’s a place close by where he could go get a ring. My dad says, “Well, there is a pawn shop around the corner.” So, off they go and hubby gets this tiny little ring. Now I’m not one who really cares about the size of the ring, but this thing was TINY – the band was so thin I thought it’d snap in half and you could barely see the marquis diamond (my least favorite cut) it held. Plus, it was like 2 sizes too small.

When hubby proposed, he told me shortly after he put the ring on that we could go get something else together. Well, I didn’t know if he really was wanting to do that all along, or if this was really the ring he picked out for me and what he could afford. Thankfully he let me in on the whole story so a few weeks later we went to the jeweler his family has always used and looked at rings together. I narrowed it down to a couple settings I liked and then left. He then picked out the final setting and the center diamond and I was blown away when he presented me the actual ring a few weeks later. He did amazing!

 
So that’s my long engagement story. We always get a good laugh now about how he should have known I’d be so stubborn at times when it took him two tries to get me to cooperate so he could ask me to marry him.

Exactly 17 months later (see below for why we had such a long engagement) we were married on October 6, 2007.

 
We had a long engagement due to the fact I always wanted a fall wedding and seeing how hubby was up for re-election that fall it wasn’t going to work for ‘06. Plus we were originally going to get married at Princeton’s chapel (where hubby graduated from) but they required you to book over a year in advance. That changed too when we ended up holding a three day party at a dude ranch in Colorado for our wedding instead. Changing plans is a way of life for us, but we always laugh over how we started our journey together…