The proposal/engagement/marriage story
By
Brock Norton
Its been a few months since it happened, but I’m going to do my best to recall the story as far as I remember it on my end. Ashlee and I had decided to get married in what seemed like a very fast fashion. We had spoken to our singles ward bishop, bishop jibson, just about a week or so before we decided to get married. I remember that the night of deciding to get married that I could not sleep to save my life. I was on the phone with Ashlee and decided to go to bed and when I couldn’t fall asleep I called her back and hesistantly asked if she was still awake to which she responded she was. I asked her what she was doing and she, “What do you think?” I responded that she was looking at rings and she responded in the affirmative. From the conversation drifted into honeymoon destinations.
We didn’t budget or anything for it. I’m the numbers guy and in hindsight maybe we should’ve looked into setting a budget for everything before we just dove into the plans. I’m happy though with how everything turned out. We discussed going to…New York City, California, Florida, Hawaii, doing cruises, going down to South America, going to the Bahamas, going to somewhere in Central America and none of them worked for either of us. I finally mentioned what about going stateside somewhere on the coast and that just naturally led me to think about us going to Texas. I grew up in Texas and had always wanted to go to Corpus Christie/Galveston/South Padre. Ashlee had on her bucket list to go to Texas someday and that is how it worked out that we ended up on South Padre Island for the honeymoon.
We then started looking into flights and hotels. Expensive. We had found some flights for the dates we were looking at, but didn’t book them right away, which was probably just cause of the jitters of it all. When we did finally go to book the flights for whatever reason the first try didn’t work. I tried it again and BOOM the prices had gone up $300 bucks. Needless to say I was pissed. Like a lot. We booked the flights and hotel and then started into the marriage plans.
Now what day to get married? We wanted as much of the family to come as possible so we called parents and siblings and worked out a few times. Ashlee and I had always joked while we were dating that we could/couldn’t do such thing because we’d be married already by June 23rd or June 24th. Well turns out that those days weren’t exactly a weekend, but we were looking right around then. June 18th was an option, but my parents got married then and were doing their anniversary things and wouldn’t be able to make it out for the wedding. The original june time wasn’t a go because my dad had some speaking engagements he was already committed to and we weren’t about to extend weeks after the forth of July weekend because we knew we didn’t need/want that much time to prepare. July 2nd worked perfectly for all the family and it was also the holiday Ashlee likes the most and so it worked perfect also for the honeymoon.
I called and booked the temple asap because we knew times would be getting snatched up at the slc temple quickly cause all those crazy mormons love getting married in the summer. Lucky for us we got the sized room we wanted and at the time we wanted, which was 12:20. Not too late, but not so early that we would have to wake up at the break of dawn to go to the temple.
Then the question of how do I propose. I had thought of several things, like going to a fondue restaurant and then going on a walk and actually proposing without a ring cause our ring situation was so ridiculous. I thought of booking a hot air balloon ride and proposing then, but that was freaking expensive so I nixed that one. Finally I decided on going to a nice dinner downtown at an Italian restaurant, which I can’t remember off the top of my head, but we went there for dinner. I’ll jump into the rest of the proposal. I picked her up, we went to dinner, but before I had gone to the bank and cashed a check that my dad sent me for being the first Norton boy to get married since he proposed a challenge that to which ever boy got married first he’d give a thousand dollars. I cashed it out in one dollar bills. The teller and their manager didn’t really have any beef with me doing it at all. It is impressive by the way to have two bricks of $500 in your hands. Kinda fun. Anywho I picked her up and had the money in the glove compartment just inches away. The one thing that really had me nervous about it was that the place where we parked the car was right by a park downtime that has a lot of sketchy people and so I was semi worried that someone would break into the car and steal a thousand bucks just like that.
Dinner was good. It wasn’t very private though and it was weird to sit there and want to talk about stuff, but there are people almost elbow to elbow next to you. At one point during dinner Ashlee asked me how I had managed to get Zales to get the ring sized quickly in time to have it done by Saturday. I just told her it took a little bit of magic/money and that’s how I did it. Funny thing though is that if she had kept pushing the issue my face would’ve totally given me away so I’m glad she let it rest after that. We got back in the car and headed to her apartment. There we parked and I told her that I had a surprise for her. That it was something she’d been waiting for for a long time and that it was in the glove compartment. She hesitantly opened it and I think she said, “Are you serious?” She pulled it out, handled it, took a picture of it I believe. I think we covered the money in a coat cause she was worried about just carrying it inside. We took it upstairs and told her sisters molly and Courtney what she got. They were surprised. By the way I told her the reason this money was something she’d been waiting a long time for was to pay off her student loans and whatever else she had outstanding.
So we left a thousand big ones with her sisters and I was a little frantic to get the show on the road and go on our agreed upon walk before it got too dark. We walked up to this park that overlooks the capital, salt lake temple, valley, and had a setting sunset. I had talked to my brother, kyle, and had him set the empty ring box and a dozen roses on the park bench overlooking everything. When we walked up to the bench, and luckily we did when we did as there was another couple heading straight for that spot, Ashlee first spotted the roses and asked, “What is this?” She then scooted forward and spotted the ring box and then said, “WHAT IS THIS?” about two or three times. I told her to go ahead and pick up the box, which she did. As she was doing that I was slowly getting on my knee and when she opened up the box, and I’ll never forget this, her face just kinda dropped in the way that she always does it. That is when I pulled out the ring, was kneeling on one knee, and asker her if she would marry at which point she said she would and then we hugged and kissed and hugged some more. It was fun. She had a huge smile on her face and on the way home she couldn’t stop looking at the ring. For several weeks after that she’d always be checking out her ring.
It was a fun proposal and in hindsight it was good that I did the thousand cash cause she wasn’t thinking a proposal was coming up after that. When we got back to the apartment and as soon as she opened the door she said to her sisters, “Guess what?”. They said let us see it referring to the ring. After talking about how they knew she was about to get engaged and how I did it we just sat down and then realized we needed to start telling people about it so we started calling people and letting them know. What was fun, and hopefully we still have it, but Molly wrote down funny things that people said when they were told she was engaged.
From there we started into the wedding plans.
Ashlee liked Coral for the color of the wedding, which to this day I couldn’t tell you what the color actually is. We had that color for the guy’s ties and the girls wore pearl bracelets with that color. At first I wanted a big reception so that I could say hi to friends and family, but after analyzing money from both of us and the family it became apparent that it wasn’t going to happen and after some talking with Ashlee it became more and more apparent to me that doing something smaller was the route both of us wanted to go.
It was funny and a little sad to hear stories every once in a while of people saying that they really thought we ought to do a big thing and it kinda came across as entitled to come to our big day.
We ended up on just a small family and close friends dinner at a restaurant at the mouth of cottonwood canyon.
Another thing me and Ashlee spent a while talking about was what to do with our living arrangements. We thought about living in my uncle’s basement, living in Ashlee’s apartment, and living in many different types of homes that we wanted to buy. I’d actually already been looking at homes/places to live for a couple months before we decided to get married and so it was nice to have Ashlee’s input to finally settle down and pick a place. How we got to that point to come up with the money to do so is kinda funny.
Ashlee had a really nice car that was a tremendous gift by some close friends of hers. We decided that we would trade in the car and free up some of the cash in it to use in our down payment of a home. Turns out the lendor I went through didn’t even allow that money to be used to qualify as part of the down payment, but it was good to have as we had pretty big credit card bills from the wedding and the ring that I wouldn’t have been able to pay for otherwise had we not traded in the car. We first went to Carmax and they offered us 12k cash for the car. We went to Tim Dahle Nissan and traded in her 2010 Chevy Cobalt for a 2006 Chrysler PT Cruiser and we also got about 4200 in cash. We hate the pt cruiser. Although it has been somewhat handy to get a fridge from Roy to SLC and to also pick up yard equipment like a mower and trimmer. It is also good for a drive in movie if you don’t have anyone parked in front of you with a big vehicle as the pt cruiser isn’t very high off of the ground. Eventually we are going to part with the PT with sadness as we remember how much it did for us by getting us into a house and moving important stuff around that we needed as previously mentioned. My mom thought we were crazy and kept telling Ashlee that she didn’t need to do that as she was afraid I was pushing Ashlee to do it without her really wanting to. Luckily Ashlee was more for living in a house for the both of us instead of having a really nice car. On top of that we dropped Ashlee’s insurance premium each month from 170-180 range down to 17 dollar range, which I’m not complaining about either. My mom was surprised at how quickly we seemed to be acting together as a couple. Ashlee is great is why we were able to do it even though she won’t admit it. So that is pretty much the house. We’d like to keep it as a rental and have it supplement our retirement one day. In the meantime it is a nice love nest and a bit of a project, but a fun project at that.
Ashlee rented her dress versus buying one, which I love cause it looked fantastic as they custom tailored it and it probably ended up costing us a third/fourth of what it would’ve been had she bought one outright.
We took engagement pictures before we were actually engaged. Ashlee paid her friend 95 bucks to take them for us. She took thousands and there were just handful that we thought were just ok. Neither of us were really in love with any of them. Weird. You’d think you would, but no. Hindsight we’d have told her more of what we thought we wanted and we would’ve looked specifically/directly into the camera even though it didn’t seem like it was really necessary at the time, at least not for me. I’m a weirdee I know. Ashlee picked out someone who did some really nice announcements for us. They turned out great. I disliked getting all the information needed though to send them out. That was not fun for me. Which reminds me. Next time Ashlee and I get married I’m not going to do a gift registry at Bed bath and beyond. It took forever and we got like two and a half things out of it. Next time we’ll just tell people what we want if they ask us.
We closed on the house about two weeks before we got married. I couldn’t wait to close and couldn’t wait to get her moved in. It was quite the project to get her moved in. We had all my siblings come help and hers too. I think Andrew and Lincoln were busy with some other stuff and so they didn’t come that day, but it still took forever even with everyone we had helping. Funny how that is with just two people…I’m scared when we have a bigger family and how much moving will be going on.
The night before the wedding we had Ashlee go through the temple. I forgot (nobody ever told me) my new recommend and had my old one. They had me sit and wait to get permission for me to go in even though I was getting married the next day. It was good to go through the temple. Peaceful and it was fun to have my family there. They were great for doing so. Ashlee had her dad’s parents there and some family/friends as well. It was good. We went and got Café Rio afterwards. It was delicious.
The day of the wedding I woke up and packed my car with the very last of whatever I had at Uncle Dave’s as I had been moving stuff slowly over to the house that I knew I wasn’t going to need immediately. I got everything moved into the house and had nothing else to do as Ashlee and her sisters were getting ready for the temple so I just went to the temple straight away. Good thing I did cause I couldn’t find the underground parking to save my life. Eventually I did and sat in the waiting room for a little bit while family and Ashlee trickled in. My dad saw her first and looked over at me and kinda motioned with a head nod to have me come look. She looked amazing ya’ll. Not even kidding. She was just so cute and had beautiful hair and makeup and her dress was awesome. I was/am impressed with her. We didn’t have to check in her dress, but then had our escort take us downstairs. We parted ways and met back up together a little later and they walked us to where the sealer was and he talked to us/got to know us a little bit more and then we went into the sealing room. I’d never been to one so it was weird to see all the friends and family in regular church clothes and we were the only ones in our temple clothes. The one thing that stuck out to me that the sealer said was that the Earth would be utterly wasted if we didn’t do the temple work for the dead. Hopefully Ashlee and I can keep that up. After his words and us putting on our rings we stood in a line and said hi to everyone and hugged everyone. It was cool.
Afterwards we went and changed back into normal clothes and then came pictures. It was pretty disorganized. One of Ashlee’s coworker’s dad is a photographer and he took pictures for us. He had some helpers that had some light director shields that were blinding. So bright it hurt. We literally had to close our eyes until he told us to open them. Definitely a different experience as I’d never taken pictures like that before. We were all sweating during pictures.
After taking pictures Ashlee and I drove in the PT Cruiser back to the house and changed shirts to be in NOT sweaty ones. I hadn’t packed for the honeymoon yet and so we did that and then left straight away to the dinner. No fooling around occurred.
We drove to the place and took some more pictures with our photographer. Then dinner was pretty much ready. We all sat down and my dad said a few words, some more exaggerated than others, but words nonetheless. I can’t remember if my mom said some words, but Ashlee and I said a few things to everyone there and then everyone got up and said a thing or two about either/both of us. It was really sweet. I kinda wish we had video taped it, but either way it was just really really really nice to have all my siblings and Ashlee’s siblings there. We got some gifts and some money and desert was really good. It was a chocolate cake. It was rich and delicious, which is always a bonus for the desert lover here. After dessert we changed, paid the dinner bill which was about 500 bucks less then we thought it’d be and then left for our hotel. Molly drove us there and as we were walking into the hotel all I can remember is that Courtney yelled, “Have lots of sex!”
The honeymoon was great. Up until then we hadn’t really had good quality time together and it was just so nice to relax. Our hotel was right on the beach so we walked on it and went swimming in the ocean once. Other than that we went and swam in the pool and laid out at the pool as it was free instead of $25 for renting an umbrella and two lawn chairs that were absolute garbage. I do have to mention that we got an extra day of honeymoonage when our connecting flight from dallas down to Brownsville got cancelled due to the flight missing one pilot. That was annoying/good at the same time. I would’ve been really upset if we were out another couple hundred bucks for the hotel that we pre paid for.
Today is actually exactly one month of being married. I feel lucky in who I married. It is so nice to wake up next to her. I’m jealous everytime I do though cause she just looks so gosh darn peaceful and comfortable. There are more ups then downs in marriage and I’m confident that will become even more so as we learn each other and our quirks, but so far so good. It is a fun challenge and I’m a happy man.
Brock Norton
8/2/2011
No comments:
Post a Comment