Engaged!

Well I can’t hold the secret in any longer (not that it was a secret), but I needed some time to tell my families that … I’m engaged!

Yes, The Chef asked me to marry him and I said yes 🙂 Actually I said “Are you serious!?” Then I said yes through my tears. You know how confused a woman can get at those intense moments :-)~

Holy Cow!!!

It all happened the weekend before Christmas.  The Chef and I drove down to New York City to visit some friends, one of which was graduating with her Master’s degree.  We took the day off, hopped in the car and made our way across New York State.  Traffic was light, which was great.

We saw some brief sights in the city including the tree on the side of the Macy’s at 34th.

We passed through the garment district which has lots of amazing store like this.  Beads and trimming as far as the eye can see. I’d love to spend more time in there.

There are a lot of little markets with wonderful items for sale.  This was a fountain we passed at one of the markets. Remember last year when I gave him an IOU book for Christmas?  He was redeeming some of the coupons this night including the shopping and night time walk.

It was so cold I had to stop at The Gap to buy tights to put on since I forgot to do that before we headed out.  After dinner we headed up to see the tree at Rockefeller.  This was on our agenda all along, little did I know what The Chef had in store once we got there.

Finally we arrived.  I love the tree, it’s such a special sight.  There were so many people, we had a hard time find a place to just stop at take in the sights.  When we were standing in this spot (where the photo below was taken), The Chef’s mom called and he seemed in a hurry to get off the phone.  I didn’t think about it too much, sometimes the crowd can make people a little tense.  Clearly he had something else on his mind 🙂

Then when we were walking around I thought we might go into some of the stores.

“Look honey, there’s Kenneth Cole, let’s go in.” – Me

“No, we’re not going shopping now.” – The Chef says to me.  Clearly he had a plan and poor Ken was not part of it. He had a firm hold on my hand and pulled me along to go around and see the other side of the tree.  OK then!  If you’ve never been to Rockefeller at Christmas, it is full of people.  Just maneuvering around is a chore.  Everyone is snapping photos, there’s the flurry of activity below on the ice skating rink, it’s quite a scene.

Here we are in the freezing cold.  How do you like my furry hat?  Since I know now what happened after this picture was taken, I can tell you that this was right before the big moment. I do love the self portrait, you know where you reach your hand out and snap a photo of yourselves?

See where these two people were standing?  That is the little corner we were squeezed into.

So there we were after a long day in the car, a long train ride into the city, a long cold walk up to 61st Street.  We’re standing close together, it’s cold {did I mention that?} and all of a sudden he starts saying all these things to me, like “Remember when we talked about being together and knowing what we want?” And I was getting kind of emotional being there and hearing him say all these sweet sentiments made me start to cry.  Little did I know what he was about to do next.

All of a sudden he pulls something out of his pocket, gets down on one knee, looks up at me and asks “Will you marry me?”

Oh my gosh, are you serious!?  Really that is what I said.  But what I said next was yes and the rest is history…..  🙂

We hugged, we smooched, we talked about how he planned this all out {he had it in the works for months that stinker}.  I can’t believe it, first my sister at Thanksgiving and now me. Wait until my mother hears this I’m thinking  The Chef and I are getting married!

And now I’m so glad to have written this story, I’ve been waiting for weeks because I wanted to tell people in person first.  Well as much in person as I could get, video chat is fun.  It was bad enough we were away from home and I had to wait more than 60 hours to tell my mom in person {I drove to her office Monday morning before work because I couldn’t wait any longer}.

Back to the romantic engagement night.  Of course after we went ice skating.  That was also an IOU coupon.

A funny part of the night is that there were 4 other engagements that happened within the hour and a half we were there. Three on the ice and another that we heard about while we were getting our skates.  The Rock is a popular spot for popping the question.

It is so beautiful there.  Of course I will remember what it looks like forever.

It was freezing! But we had fun on the rink. Here is another self portrait.

And Prometheus was there for all the action. Here he is posing with my new jewels 🙂 I get to wear this ring forever {insert squeely girl noise here}.