the story

Dear friends,

Lots has happened between my last post and now...do you want to know how much?

that much.

Would you like to hear the story?

I thought so:

Rewind to 

Friday March 18th

Caitlin invited David and I on a group date to take a tour of the Conference Center in Salt Lake.

Why would I be suspicious?  Totally normal.

David had "group meetings" till 4:00 so we decided to put a few more holes in the o-zone layer and take three different cars up to Salt Lake.

The tour guide took the six of us all through the center and showed us paintings, sculptures and told us the history of the building etc etc...

Finally we made it up to the gardens on the roof.

The group dispersed (and I apparently tried to follow the tour guide), but David tugged me over to the corner of the balcony asking if I could see if any flowers had popped up along the edges of the walls...
(I also did not find this suspicious at all for some reason)

I scanned the flower beds, but everything was pretty much dead
(it is still March after all),
and was just about to turn back to find the group

 when all of a sudden David gets really serious.

Which of course freaked me out.

He told me he had taken me up on the roof for another reason and that actually Caitlin hadn't planned this date.

He told me he'd asked her to invite us to come to the Conference Center because he wanted to ask me a question...

To which I responded,

"What?  REALLY?  Now??"

And, well, the rest is pretty self explanatory:

Somehow I overlooked his hiding place for the ring box...

The proposal.

And, after being paralyzed with pure shock for a full 5 seconds,
I said yes,
(well actually I said 'yeah,'
and David may never let me forget it)

And there was lots of celebrating:

It turns out everyone was in on the scheme except for me - even our tour guide knew!  Either all these people are very good actors, or I am ridiculously gullible.
Probably the ladder.

 We also couldn't resist leaving our mark on the Conference Center's guest books:

I was all ready to run off to dinner with the rest of the group as we had previously planned, but I was then informed we drove 3 different cars up to Salt Lake on purpose.

Apparently we had a reservation we had to hurry off across the street to.

Please note I called every member of my immediate family at this time and I left messages on all their machines except for one of my sister-in-laws who was kind enough to pick up and pretend she had no idea I just got engaged.
This might have been suspicious if I'd been thinking clearly.

At The Roof on the top floor of the Joseph Smith Bldg.

I also didn't fail to mention, to almost every person we passed on the way up to the restaurant, that we had just gotten engaged.
That might have been kind of embarrassing now that I think about it...

After dinner we took a stroll around Temple Square:

And I couldn't take my eyes off my left hand:

To wrap up the night I told David we should go to his parent's house and tell them the news.
He thought that was a great idea.

When we drove up to the house all the blinds were drawn and the lights dimmed - I thought they'd already gone to sleep.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Every member of both our families
(mine flying in all the way from CA to surprise me - hence the phones having to be turned off)
were squished in the Nemrow's front room to celebrate our engagement with cheesecake and Martinelli's.

It was the loveliest night,
and I may still be recovering from the adrenalin overdose induced by all those surprises,
but I just wanted to warn you that this blog may unintentionally now become a forum for all my wedding plan ideas for the next 5 months.
Starting tomorrow.

Consider yourself warned.

Love,
Carly