My Side of the Story

So, I figured I would tell my side of the story of my proposal......wasn't quite as peachy and worry free for me as it was for Lauren.

Lauren and I had been looking at rings for over a year. We both knew that a wedding would probably take place next summer, and this made surprising her with a proposal a little more difficult. We had also said we wanted to be engaged for somewhere around 6-8 months, so I figured that once we got near that window I wouldn't be able to breathe funny with out her thinking I would pop the question.

Side note: Although Lauren did expect a proposal and was some what jumpy a few times (thinking I was going to propose) she was much better than some of our other friends who were recently proposed to. These girls would freak out and start crying if their boyfriend took a wrong turn in the car because they thought they were being proposed to.

Back to the story. After grasping all the details of what Lauren liked in a ring I started talking to a jeweler near College Station, TX that a friend had used and really liked. As I got into this process I learned that it was going to be very difficult to custom build this ring (and very expensive) with all of the specifications that Lauren wanted. Chuck, my jeweler gave me a great idea.......to just buy a great diamond and propose with a solitaire ring and then the two of us can go back in and design the final ring together. After much complementation I decided to go with his method, mainly because it reduced my stress level a great deal.

All this time Lauren and I had been planning on taking a trip that weekend in July.....neither of us knowing that this would be the proposal weekend. Once I got the ball rolling on the ring I decided that this would be the weekend, but I still didn't know the location. I had tossed a couple of ideas around with my mom (Paris was what I really wanted to do, but it was going to be outlandishly expensive) so I finally settled on Napa Valley.

Jumping to the day before the proposal....on the Wednesday that we were leaving for California I still hadn't received the overnight package with the ring in it. This was the first large obstacle of the weekend. I worked all morning and then picked up my mom (a lot of people thought it was weird that I was taking my mom to propose, but it worked out wonderful for her to video tape ((although the video looked like the sequel to the Blair Witch Project)) and we really enjoyed having her there) from the airport around lunch time and rushed home hoping to find the package with no luck. What I did find was a note on my door that said I had missed the FedEx man by about 5 minutes and he would be back at the end of the day to drop it off at the front office. This didn't work because we were heading to the airport around two or three. After calling FedEx and pleading my case they said they would try to contact the driver but that was all they could do. I was so desperate that when my mom and I were heading back from a quick lunch and I saw a FedEx pass me on the other side of the highway I sped around and tried to catch up with it, with no luck. The first hurdle was jumped when the FedEx driver, out of the kindness of his heart, showed up at my door soon after lunch.

My mom and I were meeting Lauren at the airport around 3 PM. My mom and I both though it would be a good idea to for her to put the ring in her bag because she had plenty of room and there is no way Lauren would stumble up on it accidental that way. As we were on the other side of security we hear a loud, mean voice say "whose bag is this" and of course my mom had left her bag, with my ring in it, laying on the table and didn't even put it through the bag scanner.

Once we finally grabbed the bag and got through security we also waited as flight after flight left the airport full. This is the one downside of my flight benefits. I only get on if there are open seats. When a flight got canceled in the morning it really messed us up for the rest of the day. We finally got some of the last seats on a flight, but the plane was to Fresno, CA. This meant about a 3 hour drive to Napa which put us there around 1 AM (which was about 3 AM our time). Needless to say we were wiped out.

At this point I was happy to be in the correct city with the ring! From this point you can pretty much go back and read Lauren's post because everything went about the same for me. The only addition I would make is a glass of wine at the first winery we went to (I proposed at the second) really took care of the nerves.