Engaged!

Just in case you hadn't heard. Esther and I got engaged this past weekend. In light of this fact, I'll spend this week's post relaying the story of how that went down since people always seem interested in such things and I don't have anything better to rant about given the heavy nature of the last two posts.

So last Friday was the 6 month anniversary of our first date. I've been thinking that would be a good day to propose for awhile now. To start off the day, I got up early and bought Esther flowers which I gave to her with a card which worked exactly as I planned. :-) I figured if I didn't get her anything other than a card she would be thinking that either I'm in idiot or I'm up to something. She loved the flowers and quickly devoured the card (as in read it, she didn't actually eat it). We then went to church as we usually do on Friday, spent the afternoon lounging around resting, went up to a worship time on the roof with friends, and finally went to dinner together. We went out to a nice Indian restaurant that we both like and just enjoyed dinner together. While at dinner we realized that in 6 months this was only our third dinner date by ourselves (though I just realized that it was actually our fourth since the picture above is of a dinner date which was not included in our count). I guess that is what happens when you have two extroverts. Anyways, I didn't do it there either. We went home to find that Esther's roommate had some friends over so we sat and chatted with them for a bit. Eventually they left and Esther went to turn the A/C on and get on her computer in her bedroom. I took this time to prepare by putting the ring in my pocket and getting out my second card that I had hid away. I went in to her and told her that I had another card for her. She thought that was sweet and as she went to open it I told her that she couldn't yet. I told her that I had one more small present to give her first. I then got down on one knee and proposed. In retrospect, her reaction was hilarious, at the time it was a bit scary. Every one of the thoughts she went through for the next 5-7 seconds was shown on her face. It started off with the "are you serious" thought which she actually muttered the words to as I got down on one knee and proceeded through a large amount of emotions before the ending, happy, yes came. My diversion worked, she had no clue I was even thinking about it all day. You could tell the whole thing had her pretty shocked which leads me to my pro tip of the day for all future proposing men: 11pm is a dumb time to propose, she is going to be incredibly wired right after the proposal and if she can't sleep, you can't either. I was dragging pretty bad come 3:30 am when we finally got all the people called that we absolutely had to call immediately so that she could announce it publicly. That was probably a good thing though as she probably would have had a hard time keeping it a secret as evidenced by the fact that she was in a daze for the next two days and kept muttering "were getting married" randomly throughout the day.

So yeah, I'm marrying a truly wonderful woman...eventually. No date set yet. Setting a date is a tricky balance of needing to save money to have a wedding and navigating MCC's policy on getting married on top of the usual challenges of doing this normally challenging enough activity. Prayers would be appreciated.