Who are we?
If there were only 1 thing I'd get to say about myself - it's that I love Disney. Typically when I explain to others the extent to which I love Disney, they'd either jump up and down with excitement (rare) or they'd awkwardly laugh and slowly step back (less rare). I work in finance and am still building my career into corporate finance. During my MBA candidacy at a global business school, I was known as the Disney girl. My final project for Financial Statement Analysis was on Disney. My professor gave me an A, possibly out of fear that I'd kick down his door and talk more about Disney had he given me a lower grade. I'm 4' 10.5", but I tell people I'm 5' tall, because honestly who's going to whip out a measuring tape and demand accuracy?!
My DF is in banking operations, and to sum it up, he's fabulous. I hope he reads this and notes that I called him fabulous... he he... but truly he is! His tastes in movies range from Japanese horror movies to My Best Friend's Wedding, and his tastes in music range from heavy metal to Josh Groban. Do NOT get him started on his man love for Josh Groban.
How'd we meet?
In high school. Cue ::awwww:: and/or ::stick finger in mouth and make gagging noise::. I remember meeting him in sophomore English class. I'd just given what I thought was a stellar book report presentation about some book that had something to do with yams (yes, yams), and I'd spent the previous night immortalizing the significance of yams into this giant Marvel comic style rendering of a superhero named Yam Man. My teacher verbally slapped my attempt at making a boring book interesting in front of the whole class, and I was about to throw the poster away when this curly haired band geek came up to me and asked if he could keep it. If you ask Jordan now, he claims he liked me the second he met me. But I'm almost positive that's a lie, because I slightly remember tossing him the poster, muttering "Yeah whatever sure" like a mopey little baby, and stomping out of the room.
How'd he propose?
I'm not sure what the average time between meeting and getting engaged is, but for us it was 7 years. At the time, I was trying to figure myself out career-wise and was doing barista duties and some marketing for The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. Anyone who's worked in the food and beverage biz knows what it's like to start work early. I was getting up at 3:45AM to open the store by 5, and once I got home in the afternoon, I would not so delicately pass out face first on the bed. One Saturday, soon after I'd face planted, Jordan strode into the room and started throwing workout clothes at me. "We're going hiking!"
Hiking.
First off, I'd finished a long early shift at the store.
He should know this... Secondly, I'm like 4 feet tall, and climbing even regular steps at the mall makes me feel like a toddler crawling upstairs on her hands and knees.
He knows I don't hike... So after much pushing off the bed and cajoling, DF finally got me dressed and into the car. After a bit of driving through the rolling hills of Austin, DF parked at the base of a well known viewing point called Mount Bonnell, which has this long, long staircase you have to hike up in order to get to the outlook that looks over the city. I feel for the older couple walking in front of us - it wasn't my finest moment in terms of verbal poetry, but we'll just say that I mumbled verbosely all the way up that hill. Once at the top, I walked to the edge and peeked out. It was beautiful, but I felt something was up, and DF seemed off. When I turned to look at him, he said he wanted to bring me here to look at the view but to also ask me something. He pulled a ring box out of his backpack and dropped to a knee, and asked me to spend my life with him. I remember bawling/gasping before his knee hit the ground, and he started crying a split second after. Hahah! I was actually talking to him about this yesterday, and he said he was telling himself "Don't cry, don't cry", which apparently went out the window the second I lost it.
One of the best parts of this was that there was a group of geologists at the top surveying the area, and one took this photo of us and was so kind to email it to us later. Another geologist came up to us, asked to see the ring, and said "That's a great rock! And we know rocks, we're geologists."
Why a Disney Wedding?
Both of us love Disney. I was raised on Disney, and Jordan liked Disney movies as a kid but didn't realize its full awesomeness until we went to Disney World as adults. When we started talking about weddings, I'd already been researching Disney Fairy Tale Weddings and their potential costs. It made sense. Plus we've been engaged now for over 4 years (school and life got in the way), so we've had a bit of time to mull it over. We went from deciding on the Wishes wedding to the Escape wedding - much of our family wouldn't be able to make it to that side of the country due to costs and time off from work, so the Escape package seemed more doable. I was wanting an easy ceremony at Epcot and then a dessert party later that night during the Illuminations show. We were set on that package for a while until it dawned on us that we'd still need more time to save up for it. After being engaged for 4+ years, neither of us wanted to wait any more. Then we thought of the
DCL wedding. Affording that was much easier, we could book it as a wedding and honeymoon in one go, and we'd give people an easy out since taking off work, flying to Florida and paying for a cruise would be costly and time consuming for them.
So DCL Wedding it is. Easy peasy!
Why would you do this to a cat?
I didn't, don't worry.
But I think the real question should be "Why would you do this to a cat?! AND a perfectly fine piece of pizza?"