so how’d you get engaged Queue?

Everybody is talkin love lately.The holiday season has passed and with it a prime season for marriage proposals. One of the bloggers I read got a sentimental and was wandering down memory lane, and While my street is a bit different it don’t take much to get me to stroll it. Shall we? Okay lets.

My husband and I met – you guessed it – on the internet, then in person at the art museum.  

We’d make a pretty spiffy Match.com commercial.

We did the whole dating thing for a while, and yes it was me who brought up the “M” word. That’s another blog for another time.

But the proposal. Well, dude.

Lets backtrack a bit.

When Jerry and I first started dating he was very romantic. Or first Valentines Days was easily the most romantic thing anybody had ever done with me. Then after some time, i.e. after we moved in together, he was decidedly less romantic. (cow/milk thingy I suppose) Once Jerry and I decided that yes we were gonna get married eventually, Jerry was very insistent about the whole ring thing, due to the stories I had from previous relationships, he was determined taht I have one before we were ‘official’. I was grateful, and tickled that he cared this much about it. Lets be honest most guys don’t exactly care.

So one day Jerry’s friend Kitt, asked us out to dinner – she was working for a company that had these functions all the time. So we said sure, it was supposed to be at the Art Museum.

“Great! I love the art museum!” I said “we haven’t been in ages Jerry!” <–STOOPID

Anyway we went through the week and got ready to go and headed on up and on the way, I remark to Jerry some off handed statement how nice the glass building in the Gardens is (as we live near the local botanical garden and I had convinced myself that, THAT was where he was gonna propose) he’s like “yeah that is a great place…” small talk yada yada yada. So we get there and Kitt’s like “I gotta go in and help set up you guys wanna walk around?”

Me (<–STOOPID) “yeah there is the exhibit I been dying to see!” so we are walking around and Jerry has this unhealthy desire to see the Egyptian display that we have seen at least a skabillion times before, and I’m like “I wanna see the new photography exhibit upstairs.”

“That’s too far away from Kitt, we should stay down here…” Jerry says, all the while walking me in circles pullin back past the same display over and over again. And we’ve been through the same area maybe twice, three or four times, under the guise of looking for a particular piece, before I get him to go to another wing, where my dad calls me and I’m like “Yeah we’re putting through the Art museum.. in the Victorian section… yeah just walkin around.”

Never occurred to me why my dad wants to know where I am in the Art museum.

So we come around this corner and I see my aunt, GRINNING her arse off, and I’m like “Hey Aintie what are you doin here?”  Then I notice my dad, and his girlfriend, and my mom and my granny, my brother and sister and her then boyfriend – basically everyone in our immediate everyday life, Bora, and Justin, and Friends and all manner of people from our life. Granny has Cammy who by the way has decided to sleep through her parents moment.

“hey what is going on here?!?!?” They are all grinning ear to ear, and Jerry promptly dropped to one knee, a proceeded to ask me to marry him in the sweetest speech I’ve ever heard. And then he gave me the ring. The ring its self was larger than I expected, and it was really, really prettier than the pictures made me think it was. I was stunned. This was all not supposed to go down for at least another month. I was also totally, totally surprised.

Why you say? In our relationship – Jerrys has never really been able to keep a secret. Just that one time for Valentines day 2002, but other than that, he tells me everything, and not in a I’m trying to spoil the secret way, but more in a I want to share with you way, which coincidently spoils the secret so I never thought he’d be able to pull something like that off. Besides, my family is not known for their ability to not tell a secret. My aunt, I love her – is a total blabber mouth. So needless to say I was stunned that he- and they had pulled this over on me.

And I said so. “I can’t believe you got me Jerry!”

My brother always the helpful one was like – “Actually this is where you say ‘yes’.”

And so I did.

I was stunned speechless,  and those who know me will tell you that’s not a regular occurrence. Jerry says he was hoping for tears, I think its kinda hard to get tears on a proposal you know is coming. I was really, really, impressed that he’d tricked me. And that he’d thought up such a thoughtful proposal. I spent the first hour after trying to figure out all the things I missed that would have given it away that something was us, the strange phone calls, the walking in circles, the dinner invite from Kit- looking back wasn’t that solid, but I’m trusting and gullible.

He took me to dinner at the melting pot where he had roses waiting at the restaurant for me. And more friends there to greet and congratulate us. We had a baby sitter that night and got to enjoy the evening sans child. It was a great, great evening. I am a lucky girl.