Our Wedding: The Proposal

For today's post I wanted to tell you all a little more about the actual proposal. Of course, I already shared with you all that Andrew and I got engaged mid-April (April 16th but who is keeping track), but I did not tell you the full story of how it happened. So here we go, read on if you're interested!

During the week of April 16th, Andrew started to ask what we should do for our sixth anniversary on April 24th. He threw out some ideas, including heading back to where we became an official couple, and also going to our favorite gardens spot in Pennsylvania, Longwood Gardens. We decided to celebrate our anniversary back where it all began so on April 16th we chose to go to Longwood to just have a nice picnic and spend the day. We used to go to the gardens all the time while I was in law school and it's one of my favorite. So here's where it began. We park and walk into the Longwood Gardens and I notice two things: (1) Andrew was wearing a jacket that was WAY too heavy for the temperature and (2) he kept patting his left side pocket....which was odd. Immediately my *engagement senses* started to tingle. I was expecting that he would ask on our sixth anniversary but I began to think maybe he tricked me and it was going to be at Longwood.  The map below shows all of the gardens. The purple are the flowers and fountains and GORGEOUS conservatory (which includes some bonsai trees!!) and the green is a "meadow" which is basically just a field you can walk through. I put the red heart over the spot we chose for our picnic.

We actually never had lunch there before and I'm not even sure it was open before but we found it that day and it was perfect. It had a bit of fence around it and only one entry and exit so there it was the perfect spot--no one was in there. We went in and sat on a couple of the flower beds until a single woman decided to get up and then we stole her spot for lunch. Here is a pre-engagement photo of Andrew. He doesn't actually look nervous in it!!

We had our lunch (which he ate in all of two bites) and then he kept saying "Want to just sit here for a bit?" Of course I said yes and then finally he grabbed my hands said he wanted to ask me something and then dropped to a knee and pulled out a ring box. My.heart.stopped. I knew what was happening but I still cried, said yes, and then that was the end. Funny story: he just kept putting the ring box near me until I asked him if he was going to put it on me. Apparently he thought the lady takes the ring out of the box and puts it on herself. LOL. He finally took the ring out of the box and slid it onto my finger. And there we go, engaged!

After all of that excitement we just walked the gardens and I took some photos. Here are a bunch:

An added thing for the day of our engagement was....we walked to where the meadow began and we witnessed another couple get engaged. Andrew isn't the only one who thinks Longwood Gardens makes the perfect engagement spot!

Pardon the creeper shot! I just had to. I wish I knew who they were because I would totally give them this photo.

We then went out to dinner, stopped home to tell my parents (and show them the ring of course), called my sister to get her out to the restaurant they were all at, and then came home and toasted our engaged status. 

Let the wedding planning begin!