(Or Our Road to Engagement)
I can be very impatient. (And Mr. Hawk may think that is a gross understatement!) I mean, I S-U-C-K at waiting when it comes to something I really, really want. While my determination has served me well career-wise, it wasn’t exactly conducive to the whole engagement process.
When Mr. Hawk and I moved in together back in October of 2010, I wanted to make our intentions crystal clear. We decided that if we were going to cohabitate, it was a serious step in making a more permanent future together. I was incredibly happy and excited to be moving forward in our relationship until things didn’t follow the timeline I had somehow developed in my head along the way.
For a number of reasons, including the fact that our six-year anniversary was fast approaching, I had a feeling my beautiful ring, which I had chosen months earlier, was probably hidden somewhere in our apartment. Being a little bit crazy ridiculous, and not dealing well with surprises, I found myself browsing the areas of the apartment I thought were most likely to safely house her. After days of this browsing and pretty much exploring every possibility I had given up…until two days before our anniversary. While changing into comfy clothes after school, my eyes glanced up and I realized there was a heap of clothing Mr. Elk never touched at the top of the closet, almost completely out of my reach. I had never checked under this heap! I stuck my hand under, got on my tippy toes, and felt the edge of something hard…this was it!!! I couldn’t stop myself. In all my craziness I grabbed it and tried on the ring.
Personal Photo
It was GORGEOUS, and now that I knew it was there I could put it back and leave it be until the proposal, right? WRONG. I was so excited that, even though I placed the box back in its hiding spot, I found myself drawn back to try it on again. I reached up and grabbed it and…the box BROKE!!! AHHHHH! I didn’t know what to do. Mr. Elk was in the other room, and there was no fixing the box. I shoved the broken box back in its hiding spot and prayed that he would think he was the one who broke it.
The Three Rings of Marriage…ladies and gentlemen, we have them all!
Only kidding, but the bands are here! The only suffering was waiting until they came in! Tough cookies, right?
Image via Candle Cottage
We went out on a personal big limb and ordered Mr. Raccoon’s ring online from The World Jewelry Center on Amazon. It was a last resort, but it ended up being a completely stress-free transaction in which we saved $423. Thank you, holiday sales! We had visited a few jewelry stores in town, and none had what he was looking for. Being simple kind of worked against us here. Alternative metals are the big thing right now! They’re affordable, strong, and have many style options. I actually really like them, but we couldn’t get over their inability to be resized. We know that we’ll be wearing these rings every day for the rest of forever, and the chances of our ring sizes changing are pretty good.
Last year, Mr. Mole and I were living in Milwaukee. We moved there—or, more accurately, I moved us there—because I was offered a teaching job at a high school. To put a positive spin on things, I can say that the job gave me three things:
1. A supreme appreciation for the hard work that teachers do, both in and out of the classroom
2. A clear indication that teaching at the high school level was not the right career for me
3. An excellent excuse for a relaxing vacation at an all-inclusive resort
Little did I know that I would also be planning my engagement trip!
Spoiler!
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The Christmas season and presents have always been two of my favorite things! Now I might be a little biased, but Mr. Raccoon combined these two last Christmas for a one-of-a-kind, best proposal ever!
My gift was a personalized stocking with individually wrapped Christmas ornaments inside. He told the story of us as I unwrapped each one.
The ornaments represented things such as how we met at college. (We have a strange mascot.)
I am going to interrupt this planning journey to take a stroll back in time (over a year ago, holy cow!) to tell you the story of how the Porcupines got engaged. I apparently blacked out for a moment when I was telling you about how we met and how Mr. Porcupine got the ring. I just stopped there, and went right into our planning journey, without even telling you the story of how the engagement went down.
Well, for starters, it was my 25th birthday (never saw that one coming). I always thought it would be a more low-key engagement. Wrong! My birthday fell on a Sunday and we had gone out the night before with our friends. Here’s an idea of how the night went.
So, yeahhhh, it was a bacon, egg, and cheese/pure grease down my gullet kind of morning.
Mr. Porcupine had let me know he had plans to take me out to a nice restaurant in the city on Sunday (my actual birthday). He wouldn’t tell me where it was though. Only that I should dress up. I had a dress and everything. AND pearls. I was feeling fancy.
I don’t remember what I did that day.
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My dad was once eating Chinese food with some coworkers, and one of his friends opened a fortune cookie that said: “Don’t compare yourself to others, you’ll only be disappointed.” Sounds fine at first, but when you stop to think about it, it is quite mean! We always joked that it was the worst fortune ever.
Then my sister told me about a girl who opened a fortune cookie, and on the little slip of white paper there was not an inspirational message but instead an advertisement for American Airlines. Can you imagine the disappointment?! OK, maybe not everyone shares my level of excitement for reading their fortune, but still, that’s pretty lame.
Now that we have covered the contenders for the worst fortune ever (if you’d like to see more check this out), let me share with you a little story about the night I received the Best. Fortune. Ever! You may know where I am going with this, but just pretend to be surprised as you read on.
There are many things for which Mr. Dalmatian and I share a love. One of these things is General Tso’s chicken. Our passion for Chinese take-out blossomed during our sophomore year of college, when we started a tradition of ordering it every Sunday night. Since graduation, we haven’t stuck to our weekly regimen, but we are still frequent customers at our favorite Chinese take-out joint.
Our engagement story doesn’t involve flash mobs, rose petals or candlelit dinners. But according to Mr. Warbs, it almost did. Sort of. During the weeks leading up to the proposal Mr. Warbs started dropping not-so-sly hints. Whenever he has a surprise for me, he’ll ask a “discreet” question. When my iPod broke, Mr. Warbs called me to ask which model it was because he wanted to buy one for his dad. His dad who can barely use a cell phone, let alone a mp3 player. Riiight. So even though the actual proposal was a surprise, I saw it coming from a mile away.
The week of the proposal, Mr. Warbs suggested that we go to a Christmas boat light show in Naples the following Sunday. Lights, music and a spectacular show on the water? Sounded like the perfect scene for a proposal to me. That and the fact that he kept asking questions like “How would you want me to propose?” was a dead giveaway.
Hive, let’s get real for a minute. I have been reading wedding blogs long enough to know I am not the only person who had a pre-gagement. You know, it’s that time between when you’ve talked about marriage, decided this person is the one with whom you will spend the rest of you your life, and the actual, official engagement. Despite what movies and TV and romance novels would have us believe, the percentage of people who are blown-out-of-their-chair shocked by a proposal is pretty small. Enter pre-gagement.
For us, it was made even harder by the LDR. As I wrote about earlier, Mr. Aardvark and I lived seven-plus hours apart for over a year. That whole time we were very seriously pre-gaged. We never ring shopped, but we talked about rings. We never made wedding plans, but we talked about “when we’re married.”
Once he moved here, every day I was convinced that was the day he would propose, and we would start planning our wedding. Ladies (or gentlemen, but I assume it’s mostly ladies reading a wedding blog), this is no way to live. It made me irritable. It made Mr. A feel bad. It made me insecure. It made Mr. A frustrated. Clearly, impatient tendencies had taken all the fun out of our pre-gagement.
After a month or two I let it go (kinda) and told myself it would happen when it happened. Then it did happen! And it was more wonderful than I could have imagined. Looking back now, I have some guilt about how demanding I had been. I have never been a very patient person, and waiting for something I knew was going to happen sometime just amplified my inpatient personality. I think our long pre-gagement is one of the main reason our engagement will be relatively short, less than a year. Yay for less waiting!
This proposal gets me on so many levels! It’s at my alma mater (go Bruins!), and it’s got flash-dancing organized by Flash Mob America. As far away from our wedding as I am (over one year now), I still get all sappy over wedding proposals. No one wants to forget their proposal, but I’m so happy this couple gets to relive this moment and that we all get to share in their happiness through this video.
Video via YouTube
I am a Christmas nut. I’m that crazy lady that you see out shopping who is buying up all the Christmas stuff before Thanksgiving has even hit. The Christmas holiday season is by far my favorite time of the year. They are some of the best memories I have ever had with my family, and traditions are abundant. That warm feeling you get in the month of December—I wish I could bottle it up to save for a bad day. The holiday season is different for everyone, but here is what it is to me.
The day after Thanksgiving is the day I get my tree. As much as I can appreciate and understand the artificial trees, the smell of real pine seals the deal for me. My house is small but I always pick the biggest and fullest tree that I can find. The decorating is a full day process filled with freshly baked gingerbread cookies for a snack and Bing Crosby, Burl Ives, and *NSYNC Home For the Holidays hitting the airwaves. (What? You know you like it too.)
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So, when we left off, Mr. Aardvark had asked both of my parents for their blessing. My momma and I had had a girly-girl day getting pampered at the spa, followed by some serious shopping, and were on our way home.
The A-man had spent most of the day, when he wasn’t picking up the ring or playing phone tag with my dad, looking for daisies. You would not think that would be too hard to do in May. You would be wrong. He went to every flower shop in town and came up empty handed; he was scrambling and running out of time before we got home.
He finally found some flowers that looked close enough to daisies at a farm stand outside of town. He bought them out and headed back to the house to commence nervous pacing.
Personal photo: The daisies
In order to properly tell our engagement story, I must start at the beginning. As I understand it, this is the best way to properly tell any story, except maybe a murder mystery, but this is nothing like that!
In February after our two first dates, we had been seeing each other pretty much every weekend since then. (Remember, we lived about an hour apart so weeknight visits after class/work were still rare at this point.) We were very much in like with each other, and I had a pretty strong feeling it might be something more than that.
Image via Dry Fly Photography / See? Cold.
*SPOILER ALERT* You’ll never see this one coming, but we did get engaged! Mr. Porcupine proposed a few weeks into the jittery madness that overtook our home. That’s a short, presh story for another day.
Personal Photo / My side job in life is making horrible, unflattering facial expressions.
I realized that I don’t have a post about how Mr. PF popped the question. It’s only fair to give the guy some credit since he spent so much time orchestrating the whole ordeal.
Image via applesfortheteacher.com
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