I started blogging a few months after Dustin and I married, so I never got to blog about our engagement or all of the festivities surrounding our wedding. Our engagement took me by surprise (kind of) and so if I would have had any clue about it, I would have worn a different outfit haha!
To give you a bit of history, Dustin was still living and working in southern Mississippi by the time our relationship got serious and we were ready to take the next step. Because of his job field in wildlife science, jobs in this area weren’t readily available. We I had had lots of talks about getting engaged, and I offered to move to MS after we married to teach there (but inside praying he would say no), and he told me to keep my job since it was in such a great school system (hallelujah!) and that he wanted to move back home anyway because all of our friends and family are still in this area.
I’ll never forget the date of our engagement. It was June 15 and I had texted my old college minister the news of Kim Kardashian’s daughter, North, being born, and I was going to tell Dustin whenever he got back into town from attending a men’s conference with his church. #noshameinmyloveforkim
I was expecting to get engaged that summer, but I just knew it wouldn’t happen on Father’s Day weekend for 2 reasons: Dustin was gone Friday night and most of Saturday. And Sunday was Father’s Day so I knew we’d be apart spending the day with our dad’s. Plus, since he still lived in MS, he’d be driving back down there Sunday evening. I told myself that there was no way he would propose because I would assume he’d want to spend the majority of the weekend with me. Apparently not.
But one thing did kind of tip me off to something….that Friday night I spent the night with my friend Lindsey and her little girl because her husband was with Dustin at the men’s conference. So when I got home to my parent’s house that morning, my mom had steamed a dress for me. Umm what?! She never did stuff like that! I had been texting with Dustin that morning to confirm our date plans that night after his nephew’s birthday, and he said we weren’t going anywhere fancy, so I told my mom that I was just wearing shorts and a tank. Not that dress. Then my mom and my sister came into my room to talk me into wearing the dress. If you know me, you know I like dressing up and it doesn’t bother me to be overdressed somewhere, so it made sense that I wear the dress.
Fast forward a few hours, Dustin got to his nephew’s birthday party late and we ended up leaving it (after he finished watching some baseball game which caused us to be behind schedule 😡) and ran to his parents’ for him to change clothes. He came out of the house on the phone to his mom talking to her about her cell phone that she lost. He told me that she said she was down by the pond earlier that day and must have lost it there. (Side note: Dustin’s parents, brother, and Dustin all have tracts of land next to one another…the pond was on Dustin’s land.)
He wanted me to go with him to look for it. I told him no, that’d I’d wait on him at the house because I had on a dress. Then he told me that we’d drive out that way so I had to come with him. When we got to the pond, I told him I’d just wait in the truck (since I had on a dress) and he could look. Looking back at this, I know he was probably sweating since I wasn’t following his plan haha! He said we’d find the phone faster if both of us were looking, so after getting out of the truck, I told him it’d be better if we split up around the pond.
That’s when he moved me to a certain spot and then told me a bunch of sweet stuff that I don’t remember before he got down on one knee!
He had set up a game camera to capture the proposal since he knew I didn’t want people hiding out taking pictures. I’m checking out my ring above and the donkey wants in on the action, too!!
Dustin chose to propose on his land because we’ll build a house there someday and he knew we’d want that memory 😍
After he proposed, I knew I’d call my mom and then assumed we’d still go out to eat. (I was really hungry at this point!) Then he told me that we needed to go tell my mom in person. My mom and step-dad’s house was 30 minutes out of the way, so I was complaining about being late to eat. As we topped the hill to their house, I saw a ton of cars and instantly knew that he had planned an engagement party!! He told all of our friends that they were there for a different reason so none of them knew we had gotten engaged. It was so fun to be able to surprise everyone there that night!!
He had us a cookie cake to celebrate since he knows cookie cake is my absolute favorite!
And I pulled this off FB from my bff’s page–little did she know that she would be engaged less than a year later!!
