And now, his side of the story.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... my groom.

So, just to get this cleared up, this blog post is not being authored by Lindsey.

Before you get upset (like when you go for a book with some famous author and then you see it is "with" some guy the hide in a corner who actually wrote the book), I will go ahead and tell you this post will be mostly centered around and directly involving Lindsey. Which should be the reason that you're reading here, so a little break from her autobiographical perspective should be a welcome respite. Think of this as the curveball to offset the 98 mph heat that she normally brings.

So, why have I gotten this chance to put my words where no man has before? Because, in case you've been living under a rock, she now has a rock on her finger. Typically, this follows with a wedding, so with the promise that I'm not starring in a hidden camera documentary called "Runaway Groom", I have been allowed to tell my perspective on our engagement story.

Now, she has already written briefly about this very subject. But, as you will soon learn as our narrative unfolds, Lindsey is at DEFCON 2 of wedding planning, and has been at this state of alert since about 8 minutes after the ring was on her finger.(Side note: if you don't know what DEFCON 2 is, google it, or read a Tom Clancy novel) So due to her activity level, her post was a little less involved than I imagine even she would have liked, and certainly not what the adoring fans would want. Seriously, you should see the fans reactions when she walks out into public. It's Bieber-esque. 

So, I'll break down what happened on my end to get this big ball of marriage rolling down toward May 19. (Oh you didn't know it was happening on May 19th? Either get on the bus or get out of the way, that's when it's going down).

I won't go all the way to the beginning of the relationship, that has been documented well enough. But needless to say, even for as short a time as we have been dating, I've known that Lindsey was the One for a while. I'll spare you the mush, although there is more of that than an average Alaskan sled dog goes through. But I sat there wondering a couple months ago, "How do you go about this whole proposal process?" It was an intimidating thought, because knowing Lindsey like I do, it would need to have even more sentimental value and resonance than the average girl. Plus, since I had already told her months before that she was the One, and we had discussed getting married in early summer, there was a pretty small time frame for me to pull this off in. Lindsey is not exactly dull, as we all know, so attempting to get her somewhere traditionally romantic would set off all sorts of alarms inside her. Needless to say, I had a challenge ahead of me.

Now, in trying to figure out where to propose, I had very real issue of us having dated long-distance the entire time that we have known each other. Thus, there really isn't any special place that is "ours". No proposing on campus of a shared college hangout, or the place we met (which was a bar, to my mothers eternal chagrin), or any other "us" spot. So as I thought about it I realized that really the best place to propose would be her very own church, for several reasons. One, it already has built in significance. It is where we will get married, and no matter how many times I come back to it after we do get married, I know that I'll always remember the wedding day and all that it meant. So it had that going. The other major factor proposing in the church had over any other potential location had to do with what it would represent. We get married in the church because it is a bond between two people coming together for the glory of God, and our relationship needs to be founded on those same principals. So making that commitment to each other in the actual house of God seemed extra significant. Plus, her dad had a key and it would be private, so what was there to lose?

Before any of that could happen, I had to stare down the frightening gauntlet of getting Tim Hays permission. I was at the disadvantage of knowing how long our little chat needed to be. I could have done it while I was staying up in G-ville and Lindsey was in the shower or something along those lines, but that seemed like it was putting an artificial time limit on it in the event we had more to go over than one shaky question and a monosyllabic response. So, I stole his cell number out of her phone, and the day before Lindsey left for New York, I called him to see if he was available the following evening. Our convo went pretty much exactly like this:

"Mr. Hays, hey, it's Alex"

"Alex, what's going on."

"Not much, I was thinking if you didn't have anything going on tomorrow night, I was going to come up there after work, I think you and I need to have a chat."

"I didn't kick your dog, did I?"

After reassurance that no harm had befallen any of my pets, I told him I would arrive after I drove up after work the next day. So I when I arrived, I am greeted by his dutiful secretary, who motions me back into his office, where Tim is waiting with a seat directly across from him, and he is in full coat and tie. We go through our chat, and afterwards he bestows great wisdom upon me, most of which has to do with keeping the upper hand in a marriage. This was done with Cheryl sitting not 5 feet away, who seemed to be allowing this silly boy talk to go on only to stroke both our egos. All in all, a solid win on the road to marriage.

So, with a plan in action, now all that has to be done is to execute it. The ring that I bought has both of my grandmothers engagement diamonds in it, plus one that I bought. It is amazing how close the two grandmother stones are. When I told the jewler that I had two diamonds, he looked at me pretty skeptically, as if there was little chance of them coming close to matching. But it is incredible how close they really are, they are within .02 carats of each other, same cut, and very similar clarity and color.(+1 to me for knowing my diamond C's. Someone did their homework). So the Sunday before I was to propose, I went and met my mother in Cullman, where she delivered the package to me safe and secure. The week that followed took...f...o...r...e...v...e...r. I was nervous about how the proposal would go, having the final "this is what you want to do, right?" battles in my own head, and probably counted entire whole flocks of sheep waiting to go to sleep.

Now, for the past month or two, Lindsey had been increasingly open toward wondering why her ring finger was still so barren. So with each passing weekend she was becoming more sure that the next weekend would be the weekend when the proposal would be happening. That Friday was our official 6 month anniversary of when we officially started dating. I told her I wanted to do something special to celebrate, attempted to put the thought into her head that I might propose. The idea behind that being that when I didn't propose on Friday night, she would be totally unsuspecting when the bomb dropped on Saturday.

Friday I was pretty worthless at work. I drove up right after work, and she had gone to Huntsville with her mom, leaving me and Tim to watch football and Alabama basketball by ourselves. This is just right in both our wheelhouses, and we sat quite content. However, Lindsey was concerned that I was sitting waiting on bended knee for her, so she was very apologetic when she returned, finally, at 10:30 that night. Since that Saturday was when Bama played Georgia Southern and Auburn played Samford, neither game was even on TV, freeing us up to go and do other things. So we went for a hike and picnic up in the Guntersville State Park. As the afternoon progressed, we eventually made our way back down to her house around 3:30, where she started doing prep work for some orange rolls she had planned on cooking. I don't know how much she noticed, but she did not receive as enthusiastic of help as she normally would have, because all three of us were waiting for that to be done so we could get the real show started. 

Finally, we got done baking, and she went downstairs to shower. This kicked everything into motion, I went and showered myself and shaved, Tim left to go ahead of us to go and prepare the way, and I can only assume that Cheryl went back to either a) watching bad reality TV, or b) keeping the entire house running. When Lindsey got out of the shower, I was already dressed and in the basement watching whatever college football was on. This seemed to be her cue to not dry her hair, put on sweat pants, and flop down with her computer. I can't control everything, folks. So when her dad makes his planned call telling her to come to the church, instead of telling her that he needs me to come and help move some stuff at the church as we had planned, he ad libs and decides to tell her that she has to come RIGHT NOW so that she can practice. This sends her into quite the tizzy, stomping around the house, drying her hair in a fury, and generally being upset with the way the world is tilted against her.

Previously, I had been nervous she would be able to see the ring in my pocket. This couldn't have been farther from the case. I could have worn it in and she wouldn't have noticed. We swept into the church, and walked all the way up to the front. Perfect. So Tim disappears to "go find Ken." We're standing up front, and the last of my nerves hold me off from diving right into it. So Lindsey starts messing with the decorations at the front of the church, and then turns and asks, "Why is there a camera set up?"

This causes me to look down, and sure enough, set up maybe 5 rows back is a video camera looking right at us on its tripod. Now, when I had talked about potentially filming the proposal, I had been told that they video the service, so we could use that. So I expect this to be a very panoramic view of the church from the balcony, and that you wouldn't be able to get right up in my business. There really is nowhere to go from her asking why she was being filmed, so I launched into what I can assure was at one point well thought out. Instead, I'm fairly certain that there were a couple things I had wanted to say that didn't get said, sentences got jumbled, and I fumbled my way to the point where I got down on a knee. 

She, of course, said yes, which is why this post can even be posted here, and I'm not off wandering around lost in the woods like some crazy person. I will say, it was a taste of what I imagine the wedding day will be like. Once the proposal actually began, I can't really tell you exactly the order things happened. All I know is that either 15 seconds or 5 minutes after I started talking, I was down on one knee, and oddly enough looking her almost directly in the eye. It is weird to be doing something and have the knowledge that you will tell some form of this story and remember what went on the day for the rest of your life. I never want to watch the video, because with each retelling our story sounds a little more romantic, and my fumbling and her fuming get lessened. And if I'm ever going to have my proposal elicit an "Awww" out of a listening audiance, some of these hard edges are going to need to have been rounded off. But we got it done, and now I can step back into the background and smile and nod as she plans the next 3429308 things that have to get done so we can make this thing official. 

So to sum up what you need to know, it was a beautiful sunset proposal filled with dancing and merriment and no one could ever fathom the depth of the joy that permeated the room and allowed those that were previously lost to believe in love again. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.