The Night of the Engagement - Part I

So from the get-go we knew that the kids wanted to be involved in the asking of the all-important question. They had been bugging us for months about getting married, and they knew that we were talking about it. They knew that we had taken the time to go ring shopping, so they knew that it was going to happen sometime soon.

And they wanted in on the action. Bad. They begged and pleaded to be there when he asked me to marry him. We love our kids. A lot. And we understand that there are times when you have your kids around. The night that you ask a girl to marry you is not one of those time. That doesn’t mean that we don’t love our kids. It just means that we also understand that there are times that you DON’T want your kids around!

But it was important to my fiancé that they be involved somehow. He took that knowledge and made a whole, extravagant proposal night that melted my heart. If he hadn’t already owned it lock, stock and barrel, he would have after what he did to propose to me. Let me tell you the story and see if you agree…

The night that he asked me to marry him started off as a date night. You see, I’ve been working a lot on the new software system that our company is installing at the beginning of the year. And when I say that I’ve been working a lot, I know that you might be thinking of a few late nights and maybe a weekend or two. Not so in this case. I’ve been traveling a minimum of three days a week since last May. I work two days a week in Austin, and three days a week in Dallas. Sometimes I drive, sometimes I fly. No matter what, when I’m in Austin, I have my daughter and when I don’t have my daughter, I’m in Dallas. That’s how our life has been for the past seven months. To keep our sanity and romance alive, we started doing date nights a while back. Nights without the kids, where we go out to eat and maybe see a movie. A night away just for the two of us.

So the first week of December, we only had one night with me being in town and without the kids. It was December 4th. And my fiancé asked me if I wanted to do a date night on that night a few days earlier. Now, I have to say that between the end of September and this time, we had picked out a ring, and I knew that he was trying to tie down the details of how/when/where to buy it at and all, but he had led me on a merry chase of having trouble getting the ring. This is all to tell you that I didn’t really suspect anything on our date night on 12/4.

We had been in training for the new computer system all morning. We got out of training just before lunch and decided to have a date lunch before I had to work that afternoon. We went to this little pizza place on the square in San Marcos that we hadn’t been to in forever and shared a pie with a pitcher of beer. So nice!

After that relaxing lunch we did some Xmas shopping and went home. I had to work and he relaxed a bit. Before long, I was instructed to stay upstairs for a bit while he wrapped a Xmas present for me. When asked why he didn’t just wait until I wasn’t there to wrap it, he told me that it was a present for me to open that night. I argued that we weren’t opening presents early and he told me that this was something that he thought that I would want to open early, something that I could use in the next few weeks before Xmas. When I continued arguing about getting a present that night, he finally told me to suck it up and deal with it. That I was opening the present that night, even if he had to call it a date night present.

Yeah, this was just the beginning of “Sandy being Difficult Night”…stay tuned for more details.

Yes, I'll marry you, but not right now...

It all started almost a year and a half ago. My fiancé and I were on the phone one day, after we’d been dating about six months. I was driving to my daughter’s day care to pick her up from school and he was driving home. It was “date night” for my daughter and I - so my fiancé and I were enjoying a quick phone call before I spent the evening with her. During the course of the conversation, marriage came up. I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but a part of me knew that it was a semi-serious question.

I didn’t say yes. But I also didn’t say no. I said not now. We had only been dating for about six months. But there was a part of me that wanted to say yes. I knew, deep down in the bottom of my soul that this man was the one for me. That he was the man of my dreams – the one that I had spent the last thirty years looking to find. And I wanted to say yes. And I know that I would have said yes if it had just been me. I would have married him in a heartbeat.

But the reality of my world is that it wasn’t just me. I had someone else who depended on me to take care of her – to make the best choices since now all of my choices also affected her. And my reality was that I had a five year-old daughter who had spent the last year coming to terms with my divorce from her father, and she was still having struggles with seeing me date. If it had just been me, we would have gotten engaged that day. And she was doing very well with me dating my fiancé, but there were moments that you could tell that she just wasn’t sure about the whole thing.

So I said not now. But at that moment, I knew that I loved him. Not just enough to date and be with for a while, but truly, deeply loved him. I knew that I had found someone who would stay by my side each and every day, giving into the relationship just as much (if not more) than I did every day. Someone that I cared for more and more deeply as every day passed.

From that moment on, we started planning the logistics of WHEN all of this would happen. Maybe we couldn’t talk about the marriage aspect of things yet, but we could talk about our life together and how we would take care of this or that. We started to plan what each of us wanted to do with the house that he owns, how to improve it and make it better for the four of us to live in. We talked about money and finances and our personal thoughts on debt and credit and how to handle major purchases. In short, we started to merge our lives. Slowly but surely, we made plans for the future and for the day when we knew that my daughter would be as ready as we were to take the next step.

So we talked all around it, but never really talked about the actual event. By that I mean that we talked about the day that we would be married, but not about the actual day that we would get married. We talked about everything except the wedding. Most of you girls out there are wondering how we could skip over the most important part of getting married, but it just wasn’t what was on the forefront of our minds. But all of that changed this past September…stay tuned for those discussions….