To provide some background to the whole story, I’m going to start back at the beginning of December. Because, if you’re going to understand Sarah’s reaction, you need to know what I’d been doing leading up to the whole event.

I’d been saving for the ring for several months, knowing that I wanted to pay for it outright and not have to worry about another payment on top of my student loans. Sarah and I had gone ring shopping once, mainly so I could find out what size ring she wears, but also an idea of what she really liked.

On December 3rd, having asked off for the following Friday to run some errands, I went ring shopping. Not expecting to buy, I ended up doing so anyway. With Sarah coming into town that weekend, I knew it was a perfect time to lift Al’s (her father) cell phone number off of her cell.

The following week I arranged lunch with Al and went on my merry way of confusing Sarah about the chances of our engagement. Our lunch went well and with the blessing received I then started to figure out how exactly I would pop the question.

While we had talked about getting married regularly for months, I wanted the engagement ring and everything associated with it to be a total surprise. This required me to keep Sarah a little off balance on the subject. And I do think I probably enjoyed this a little too much. At one point she thought it wouldn’t be for another few months at least.

Due to the distance between us (I was still living in Louisville), we had a limited amount of time we spent with each other every week. And as those weekends are often planned out one way or another in advance, an easy opportunity other than right around Christmas was not apparent. Christmas had the up-side of her thinking that I would never propose around this time of year (though I had only promised it would never be given in lieu of a gift.)

The question was, how do I do it? Being the uncreative type, the only thing that came to mind was the stocking. The ring box would easily fit inside it and I could pile all of the other items on top of it. For the first time I was thankful that I hadn’t protested doing stockings at Christmas.

Since I still didn’t trust myself fully with the idea, I ran it by a couple of people, mainly my friend Jessica and my sister, to see if I was completely insane to do it this way. With the validation, I went ahead with my plan all the while continuing to make Sarah feel like there wasn’t a chance it would happen anytime soon. (Yeah, I know I’m mean.)

So, finally we get to the day it happens. Luck would have it that Louisville got hit with 6-10 inches of snow the day and night before and I had been stuck in my home since Tuesday the 21st. After spending more than an hour digging my car out of the snow I made my way cautiously to Lexington for dinner with Sarah’s family that night at her house. After putting everything into the stocking in a back room, I hung it up and waited, and waited, and waited.

Due to the weather Sarah and I had agreed to open our gifts and stockings that night so we could leave early in the morning to make the trek to my parents (a 3 hour drive in normal conditions.) Her parents seemed to stay there forever. All the patience I had over the previous weeks had been exhausted and I wanted her to get the ring.

After several comments by her mom that seemed to be hints that she was waiting for it to happen to, her family headed home to Somerset. After going through the presents and my stocking we got to her stocking.

She went through each item, put on the lip balm I got her and took her time until she finally got to the last item. When she pulled out the box she had this little look on her face and said, “Oooh, what’s this?” As she opened it up she had a look of shock on her face, tears welled up and her first comment upon seeing the ring was, “Are you kidding?”

After asking her to marry me it took a few minutes to get through her tears and say yes. I wasn’t worried at any point until that very instant when it took her a bit to get it out. She didn’t even remember me asking or putting on the ring for the longest time. I’m not sure if it’s still completely sunk in to either of us.