Best Geocache EVER!!!

Dear Susannah,

Here is the video that captures the moments around the tipping point in my life. After years of searching for you, you finally found me. I'm so glad...

I may have had more than a sliver of hope that you would say yes after I asked you to marry me and be sealed to me, but you can clearly see by my body language that I knew how important those few minutes were.

I kept telling people, "Saturday is either going to be the best day ever or the worst day ever". Thank you for making it the best day ever and saying yes to embarking on this journey with me.

Love,

Ben

Dear faithful and not-so-faithful blog followers,

Susannah has wanted me to post on this for some time now. I guess the one post a month isn't gonna fly.

Here is the video of the day that I proposed. I'm sure you've all read the previous posts that my fiancee so eloquently wrote about how it went down...but here is the video that our good friend Will put this together. The whole thing went smoothly thanks to Will, David and Ryan. Thanks guys!!

Quick recap of the back story of the proposal:

• Suz didn't know I had the ring (all signs pointed to me being a slacker and not taking action on my desire to marry her because I didn't have the ring) .
• We planned to go geocaching on Saturday morning.
• Friday prep: picked up ring, picked up ammo canister, took to florist to prep
• Saturday prep: picked up ring/flowerbox, met Ryan, David and Will at 8:30am, bought portable power supply for speakers, hours of camara/audio set up by R-D-W, prepare secret codes via text and phone to ensure timing.
• She thought something was up the night before, but events on the morning of (allowing plans to change, making waffles before leaving and me not knowing exactly where to go) pointed to just another day having fun geocaching.

Well...here it is. The best Geocache EVER! Went there with my girlfriend and left with my fiancee.

Marriage!

A few weeks ago my 4-year-old niece, Catherine, was visiting from Georgia. She had learned about temple marriage in church recently, and was approaching every member of the family and assigning them a spouse. I gave Ben a huge hug when he came over to my house that day, and Cat saw us and yells, "MARRIAGE!" while pointing at us. This settles it: 4-year-olds can predict the future. Or control it. Thanks, Kit Cat!

I am so incredibly happy. I don't want to speak for Ben, but I'm pretty sure he's satisfied with life right now, too :)

My Reaction

When I saw the amo can:

1. I guess this is the cache what we've been looking for!
2. Shouldn't caches be hidden?
3. There are yellow flowers inside. Who would hide yellow flowers?
4. Wait... I like yellow flowers.
5. Why is Ben kneeling next to me and not taking pictures?
6. Could this be for me?

When the song started playing:

7. Yep. This was planned.

When he pulled out the ring:

8. Oh my goodness... He has the ring!
9. When did he get the ring?!
10. It's gorgeous.

When he proposed:

11. UTTER SHOCK. Hands fly to my face.



I am so happy!

The Rings! (Yes, that's plural)

Ben covertly organized a lunch with my mom the Tuesday before he proposed. At the end of their conversation she gave him her engagement ring for me. Her ring is a beautiful pear-shaped diamond surrounded by 12 emeralds in flower petal fashion set in a thin, custom-made silver band. She and I have planned for a couple years now that I would use her ring when I was ready to get engaged. To keep it special for her and personal to me, we agreed to have her emeralds (which had been her favorite part) replaced with diamonds and made into their own new piece of jewelry.

Mom was so supportive she even dropped the ring off at a local jeweler for Ben while he was at work. He called them that afternoon and they said it would take 1.5-2 weeks to have the diamonds ordered and put in. Ben told them that was NOT ACCEPTABLE! He called 10 more jewelers and finally found one that had some time available to finish it by that Friday-- a short 4 days later! The new jeweler sent a runner to pick it up from the first Tuesday night. They ordered the stones Wednesday, they came in Thursday, and they spent all day Friday (literally until 5:30 pm) making it.

WOW.

I have had two years to wonder what that sentimental, beautiful ring would look like with the adjustments made. The new ring (MY ring) hardly resembles the original at all! It is gorgeous, unique, and very personal and special to Ben and me.


A LOOOOOOOOOONG time ago I heard that after David Beckham proposed to Victoria she turned right around and pulled out a ring for him saying, "If I'm wearing a ring, so are you. Girl power." I've always thought that was awesome. The Sunday before a newly-engaged couple at our Single's Branch was joking about how the man didn't have to wear a ring but his fiance did. Hahaha... perfect.

I ordered this ring for Ben a couple weeks earlier (come on... was anyone surprised we were getting engaged?) and gave it to him Saturday night at dinner.

It's a funny picture, but I promise he was really excited!

Awwww aren't we so cute?

The Song

When I opened the can and Ben pulled out the ring box the song Love Story started playing from the woods. I was SO IMPRESSED. It was the perfect extra touch, and I had no idea how he pulled it off. That wasn't really on my mind, though :)

Taylor Swift's Love Story is one of my favorite modern songs. I think it's fun to sing along to, I think it is really cleverly written, I can sympathize with the "narrator" (what girl can't). It makes me happy.

Ben had it queued up to a part at the end that goes like this:
"I said, 'Romeo, save me. I've been feeling so alone. I keep waiting for you but you never come. Is this in my head I don't know what to think.' He knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring and said, 'MARRY ME, JULIET, YOU NEVER HAVE TO BE ALONE. I LOVE YOU AND THAT'S ALL I REALLY KNOW.' "

That part of the song has always made me smile and helped me look forward to getting engaged while I was in less-happy relationships in the past, and here Ben was making that daydream a reality.

The Flowers

Ben called around to find an amo can on Friday, picked it up, waited for my ring to be finished at the jewelers, and took them both to a local florist to have the can filled with yellow flowers and the ring hidden inside. He told me he'd be at my house at 5:45 that Friday, and didn't get there until 6:30 because all those errands took so much time. I really look forward to seeing him after work and that night had even been waiting by the window. I thought he'd been in an accident or something! I had no idea he was late because it took longer than he thought organizing my proposal :)

I am the LUCKIEST girl.

I LOVE yellow.

How perfect is this??

The Plan

Ben and I both like geocaching, but we've never been together. He bought a special iPhone app which downloads caches in your area, and we made a date to test it out Saturday morning. At the last minute I had an idea to do something else, but Ben would NOT budge! He never acts like that. A couple other little things were out of the ordinary. Something was up....

We got out of the house at 11:30 am, and in the car Ben told me we were heading to the RiverWalk to search for caches. He pretended like he'd never been there before; checking his GPS, almost missing the turn-off, etc. We finally got there and he pulls out the geocaching app and shows me how it checks the coordinates and gives you a compass to follow. (He had even gone through the trouble to submit a fake cache to the general website so the app would look more real, but the site administrator wouldn't approve it even after he said he needed it for a proposal!)

He said we were looking for an amo can hidden in the large rocks which seperate the walking path from the Congaree River. He'd convinced me that he had never been here and nothing was planned, so I went ahead and really focused on finding that cache. I was looking under rocks, towards the woods, everywhere!

He finally turned me back toward the rocks and I noticed a large, green, lunchbox-looking thing out in the open at the end of a large rock jutting into the water (I guess I didn't really know what I was supposed to be looking for all along).

I handed him the camera we brought along and said, "Maybe that box is what we are looking for! Here-- take a picture of me opening it just in case and we can blog it later." I walked out, sat down, opened the lid, and found it filled with yellow flowers.



I asked him to pose for these pictures...


Little did I know he was pretending to pretend!