My Engagement Story

So it is Day 3 of Mama M's Valentine's Day Extravaganza and the topic is Engagement Stories. 

As I mentioned in my post Sunday,  Russ & I met in September 2002 and started spending a lot of time together.  We started dating in November (more on that topic on Thursday!) and by the time the new year rolled around we were pretty smitten.  (As Russ quoted at the time from the movie 'So I Married and Axe Murderer' "I am smitten, I am in deep smit.")  I don't remember the exact timing on this but I figure it was probably sometime Marchish--I asked Russ if he saw this relationship going anywhere because I didn't want to waste my time if he & I weren't on the same page.  It was due to that conversation we began discussing the possibility of marriage.  Looking back now I am shocked at how quickly we got to that point (especially considering how cautious I am as a person and had been about relationships in the past) but things with Russ just clicked so naturally and felt so comfortable & right that I had none of my typical reservations.  He was surprisingly open & excited about the idea of marriage and we just sort of started working under the assumption that we would be getting married soon.

We weren't officially engaged so I was worried about what people would think when we had our picture taken together for our church's pictorial directory but we planned to use those photos as our engagement pictures and I knew that by the time the directory came out that we would be engaged so I tried to overcome my self-consciousness about it.

In April Russ & I took a trip to Rapid City to attend an Easter Passion Play that my former church was putting on at the civic center there.  While there we were going to look at rings.  It wasn't a very pleasant day--our communication was off all day and we went home empty-handed.  Easter Sunday, April 20th, 2003, we were spending the day at my parent's house.  Just before lunch, Russ asked me to come with him to the basement for a minute.  While down there he asked me to marry him and gave me his grandmother's diamond wedding ring and told me that I could wear that until we picked out a setting of our own choosing to put his grandma's diamond in.  (A couple weeks later we chose the setting online from Shane Co that became my ring.)

And that's when we became "officially" engaged and began telling all our friends!