The ring!

Keeping with the theme of getting ahead of myself, I just realized I hadn't posted about my ring yet.

Here she is, with a crab... (messing around with my digital macro setting)




I know its probably shallow and materialistic of me, but I adore my ring. The FH (Future Hubs, as I will refer to him from now on) looked at rings together about three months before we got engaged. He took me to the Jewelry District in downtown LA.

I was a little skeptical at first - downtown LA is a little rough around the edges and finding a ring amidst all of the stores seemed like an unlikely prospect. We tried the California Jewelry Mart on Hill Street first. Eli's was the first and only store we went into. The minute we walked in, all of my nervousness about such a big purchase went away. Family owned and operated, they have been in the same building for thirty five years. They spent almost two hours with us, explaining the four C's, showing me different types of settings and stone cuts, and just generally being awesome. I found my ring that day and knew it was the one for me. In fact, the second thing I said (after YES!) to FH when he proposed was, "it is the ring from Eli's?"

A Very Good Place to Start

Hi there. It's been a long time. I'm a bad blogger, I realize.

But now I have a topic that is consuming me and I need to get it off my chest - wedding planning. I think way too much about it and read a ton of blogs, so why not write about it, too?

To begin at the very beginning, I am engaged!

Picture it - February 6, arriving at my parent's house after a long car trip. My boyfriend is already there, drinking a beer with my Dad (nothing strange so far). He seems a little squirrley, but, whatever, he gets like that sometimes. I tell him I'm going to do laundry, does he have any I can throw in with mine? He goes out to the car and returns with a laundry bag. At some point (this will be important later) he either hands me this bag, or I already have my bag in my hand.

We both come back in the house after retrieving said dirty laundry and he stops me in the dining room and starts talking. Once I realize where this talk is heading the ONLY thing I can think is that he is proposing to me while I have a sack of dirty laundry in my hand. I blurt out something inappropriate along the lines of "I'm holding a sack of dirty laundry!" In one fell swoop (it probably wasn't, but this is how it plays out in my memory of it now), he rips the bag of laundry from my hand, tosses onto a nearby couch, and gets down on one knee. I think he pulled out the ring after he popped the actual question, because I remember thinking for a *very* brief and shallow moment, wait, there is a ring involved, right?

Once he pulled out the ring and put it on my finger, I started laughing (I laugh when I get nervous/excited/overly happy) and couldn't stop. Then - even better than the ring, in a way - he pulled out two letters from his back pocket. They were from his kids, inviting me to join the family. I don't think I've ever been so overwhelmed with emotion and love in my life.