11.22.00

In light of Mickie's recent post showing off her sparkly clean wedding ring set and sharing her comical proposal story, I thought I'd give into her request and share my proposal story and share some old pics. Again thanks to my eGo photo archive I was able to upload these old scanned photos. Can you believe the above photo at Stephen's high school graduation was taken 15 years ago!!?? That was about 4 weeks after we started dating back in May 1995. Gosh we look so young....and thin. LOL


Fast forward 5 years to 2000 and here we are celebrating our 5th anniversary at Sea World, me anxiously hoping Stephen will pop the question because I was ready to be engaged. But he didn't. And months pass by. We talked about getting married but he still hadn't popped the question!

So we went on with our normal, happy boyfriend/girlfriend lives...Stephen was working at Backbay restaurant in South Coast Plaza and I was attending Cal Poly Pomona and working part time with Bassenian Lagoni Architects. We spent our weekends hanging with friends and eating at our favorite Mexican Restaurant, Mario's (pictured above). The holidays were upon us and we were invited to our friend's engagement party mid-November. After the party I distinctly remember Stephen bringing up us getting engaged and how he thought it still wouldn't happen for awhile. I won't lie, I remember feeling crushed!

The following week was Thanksgiving, and the tradition in our town of Fountain Valley is for all the alumni to gather at Silky Sullivan's Pub the night before Thanksgiving, on this year being 11.22.00. I remember heading home after work looking forward to a fun night seeing old friends. Stephen called and told me to go home and change into something nice - that we were going out to a nice dinner before going to the pub. So I did just that and he came to my parents and picked me up to take me to Duke's right on the beach.

We had a delicious dinner! And after it was done I thought we would head over to the pub. Stephen suggested we walk down by the sand - you have to understand it was November, very cold and windy in Huntington Beach so I was being a party poop er and declining the suggestion. But Stephen kept prompting me so I finally agreed. We headed out towards the water passing the life guard tower and I remember sensing Stephen was behind me, so I looked back and there he was down on one knee next to the life guard tower. I don't even remember his actual proposal word for word because I kept saying, "you're joking! you're joking!". He asked me to marry him and I of course said yes! I started jumping up and down. We headed back to the car calling my best friend and our parents.

All of our closest friends met us at the pub to celebrate. We partied into the night. The next day at our families Thanksgiving gatherings we shared the exciting news. And I proudly showed off my engagement ring - Stephen did an awesome job designing it with our family friend jeweler, Lynda. The 5 old Miners Cut diamonds (1 on my engagement band and 4 on my wedding band) came from Stephen's great-great grandmother's wedding ring set on his mother's side. I feel so special to have inherited them.

He did good.