Extra, extra, somebody's getting married!!!

Yay! Josh and I are getting married! It's now officially official (though it's been unofficially official for at least a couple of weeks). I could go into lots of detail on the back story of how we met and fell in love, but for present purposes, I'll just give our engagement story. :)

So, Josh and I have known that we wanted to get married pretty much since we met. Actually, I knew on the second day we exchanged e-mails. But THAT is another story. So, we made a definite decision on the ring last Saturday and went ahead and bought it then. They needed to size it down for my tiny fingers and told us it would be ready on Tuesday afternoon. The original plan was to make sure the ring fit on Tuesday before it was shipped off to Josh's mom in New Mexico. With the ring out of sight/out of mind, Josh would get his wish of surprising me and officially/formally asking me to marry him. To me, he was [and is] my surprise, so I was sort of ambivalent about the whole surprise-official-proposal-business. Well, we both got exactly what we wanted (both in each other and in the proposal process).

So Monday afternoon, Josh called and told me that Kruger's called and that my ring wouldn't be ready until Wednesday morning. In another phone call, he told me that since my mom would be in town, his friend LyAnna had arranged a tour of the capitol dome for us Tuesday morning. The dome has been off-limits to visitors without special permission since 9/11. With the recent fiasco at the governor's mansion, we were told that it's strictly off-limits. So, the fact that we got to go up into the dome at all was pretty special (many thanks to Mark, the state trooper who came up on his day off to lead us up into the dome).

We met inside the capitol around 11:00 am, took the elevator up to the 4th floor, and then had to call for permission to go above that. Mark led us through a barred and locked door on the 5th floor and we began the twisty ascent upstairs. After climbing hundreds of stairs, we got to a small room at the top. If you've been in the capitol, you've probably seen the star with TEXAS surrounding it on the top of the dome. We were eye-level with that star. Above that, there is another windy staircase to the very top. Josh said, "I want to go all the way up. You coming with me, Babe?" I replied with some witty comment about descending into the tomb of Thutmoses the III and then having the electricity go out (in Egypt; yet another story), and that I was surely climbing all the way to the top of the capitol. Mom was complaining about her knee, and LyAnna claimed to be afraid of heights, so they stayed behind while J & I headed up together.

I was completely oblivious to even the thought that Josh would be asking me to marry him when we got up those stairs (probably because it was so hot and we'd been doing so much climbing). However, as soon as we got up, he turned me around, took my face in his hands and said, "OK, Babe, now it's just the two of us up here," and THAT'S when I realized what was going on.

I'll leave the details of that conversation between us...

However, I did, of course, say yes, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Please check out our photos on Picasa. We're very happy and excited! Thank you for all your well-wishes!