Engagement Story

On May 29th, R and I had planned on celebrating our One Year anniversary. One of our favorite places to go and walk around is the lighthouse in Palos Verdes so we planned to go there and have dinner at our favorite Mexican place afterwards.

Little did I know there was an ulterior plan for how the day would go!

We got to PV and I asked why we were parking in a new place. R said our usual parking lot may be filled since it was Memorial weekend and I figured he was right and didn’t give it another thought.

He then had us sit down on a bench and proceeded to show me the most romantic and thoughtful gift, it was a scrapbook of the past year. Pictures of our adventures, ticket stubs from the movies we’ve seen, even facebook comments that stood out to us! I cried. It was beautiful and one of my most cherished items I’ll ever own.

We go up and walked a ways before he stopped me and said he wanted to share his favorite love song with me on our 1 year. I listened to Brian McKnight’s “The Only One for Me” as we continued to walk. It’s a beautiful song that I will forever associate with this day.

As we walked a bit further, R pointed out a post with a bright neon paper and a picture on it. I looked and saw it was our first picture together. This is the moment that I knew this wasn’t just our anniversary. My heart started racing as we continued to walk to find more pictures going through the last 9 months, 6 months, and then the most recent… and then I saw a group of people holding bright neon signs and my mind went blank. This was really happening…

R and I had been talking about the proposal for several months leading up to this and R knew that I always imagined having people that we love involved. We even talked about who we wanted there, so please know if you were there (or were invited) we both wanted you to share in our special engagement day.

I want to give R as much credit as he is owed, because he planned every detail, even the trickery that was a false calendar date of July 1st that noted only “KEEP OPEN”. I assumed he was being obvious but figured knowing the date would make it easier to wrap my head around the idea. Silly me.

This is the point in the day where I broke down and just started crying my eyes out. You see, my best friend lived in Turkey and R still arranged for her to join us via Skype (and staying up until 1am Turkey time).

See the crying below:

I can’t describe the feeling captured in the remaining pictures.

Joy. Excitement. Surprise. Love. Overwhelming Happiness. Shock. Gratitude. Bliss.

For those who may still be wondering, we did still go to our favorite mexican restaurant…and we brought everyone with us!

Thank you again for all of your love and support. R and I couldn’t be more thrilled to share this day with those who could join us and begin our lives with one another and our beautiful community.