I Love You Because...

To begin, I want to apologize for the delayed-ness of this post. But, as they say, better late than never!

For those of you that haven't heard....On Christmas Eve, Luke asked me to marry him. And I said yes! By popular demand, here is the story:

On Christmas Eve, Luke came to pick me up for our Christmas date. We sat and talked with my family for a while before we took off. I thought this was rather strange, seeing as he was later than we had originally planned and I had a family dinner at my aunts house at five that we had to be at. I thought that Luke would want to leave soon so that we had more time for dinner and what not, but he didn't seem to be in a hurry at all. That should have been my first hint that something was up, but I am admittedly thick.

We left for dinner and ended up at our old trusty Texas Roadhouse. We both love it there, so we almost always end up eating there when we eat out....something that I am completely okay with. We had a great, but uneventful, dinner.

We finished up with dinner around 4:30. There was some discussion of going for a short walk, but due to the cold weather outside-we settled on a short drive instead. We drove up towards the windmills and talked about various things. Little did I know that the reason for this drive was that Luke was waiting for his friends to get into position at the spot where he planned to propose. After a short while, we ended up turning around and heading back into town. Seeing as it was about 4:50, I assumed that we would be heading to my Aunt Jackie's now. However, Luke proposed that we go for a short walk around the river. This was when I finally started to realize that something was going on. I still didn't have the slightest idea WHAT it was, but I knew it was something. Because of this, I agreed to a short walk, as long as it was very short. We pulled up to the river and got out. We have a spot down there that we visit fairly often, and Luke headed straight for that spot. At this point, I'm thinking he has an extra awesome Christmas present for me, but I still had no idea what was really going on.

We stood by the river for a while. I knew that something was coming, but I wasn't sure what. Meanwhile, Luke was stalling to make sure that his friends that were going to be taking pictures were in position...so the conversation was kind of strained. After a little while I mentioned that we should probably get going to my Aunt Jackie's. He said, "Alright, we can get going, but before we do, can you do me a favor?" And I said, "Yes." He got down on one knee and asked me to marry him. Obviously, I said yes again. We hugged and kissed and such and then he got down on one knee again to put the ring on my finger.

After the ring was on my finger, we walked back to his car. At this point we headed to my Aunt Jackie's and I called my sister and told her to bring my parents and siblings outside so we could all talk. To my surprise, ALL of my siblings knew about the proposal already. This explained Camille's insistence that we paint my nails nicely earlier that day. Everybody was very happy for us and there were hugs all around. We then went inside to show my ring to all of the cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, great grandparents, etc.

After this we went to Luke's house to show his whole family. They all knew about it beforehand also, but were nevertheless very happy for us. We spent a while with them, ran to show a couple of our closest friends, then headed back to Luke's again.


All in all, it was the perfect proposal that I had hoped for...and he's the perfect guy for me! I couldn't be happier :). His friends were hiding in the bushes during the actual proposal, taking pictures and video. I'll post those as soon as I get them.

Thanks everybody for your congratulations! I'm extremely blessed to have such great friends and family, as well as an amazing fiance!