Us

I've been putting off this post for a long time...too long, really...but I figured its time for me to share how Chad and I got engaged.  Chad came home from his mission in Peru this last August and I went down to see him give his homecoming talk at church.  I took my sister with me for moral support, and once I got to his house, I sat in the driveway for a good 20 minutes before I got up the courage to go inside and see him.  Also, the drive ended up being much shorter than I had anticipated, and I didnt want to seem TOO eager.  I went inside and we hugged and it was awkward, but not too bad.  We went to church and he did a wonderful job on his talk and then later that night he had an open-house and tons of people came to see him.  At that point, I was feeling really overwhelmed, so I decided to go home.  A few weeks went by and we started talking on the phone every night and then we were finally back up at school together.  We had decided that we wanted to keep on dating each other and then I got all dramatic and told him that I wanted to slow things down and blah blah blah.  After a while of this, I finally got to a point where I realized that Chad is the best person for me and that I just needed to let go of whatever insecurities I had about our relationship and "getting to know each other again".  We talked about marriage and the logistics of it all and then went ring shopping.  A few weeks later, Chad had a friend of his and her boyfriend invite us on a "double-date" to go hiking at a place that Chad's ward had been earlier in the semester.  We all drove out to Harriman State Park on a sunny Saturday afternoon, and as we walked, I could tell that Chad was nervous about something.  He was being very quiet and awkward and I could tell he wasn't really listening to anything I was saying.  Suddenly, a wood bridge appeared in the distance and Chad started squeezing my hand so tightly that I thought one of my fingers would pop off for sure.  When we got onto the bridge, Chad stopped and gave me a journal that he had written a love letter in.  At the end of the letter it said, "Kelsi, will you...(turn around)" and when I turned around, he was on his knee and asked me to marry him.  We were both floating on air the rest of the day.
For being engaged and planning a wedding, I did surprisingly well in school; better than I had done while Chad was on his mission.  However, being engaged has been much harder than I thought it would be.  Not because of the stress of planning or anything like that, but because of the way other relationships changed.  A lot of the time, I felt like an outsider in my own apartment.  I know that a lot of it was my own fault because I was hanging out with Chad all the time, but even when I wasn't, there was a distant tension with my roommates.  I hardly talked to anyone about wedding plans, and really didn't want to after a while.  I always imagined that when I got engaged and started doing things like picking colors and finding a wedding dress, that it would be this happy and exciting thing that my friends would be involved in and supportive of, but I ended up doing a lot of things alone or with Chad and it made me kind of sad.  Transitions in life are hard, both for the person making the life change, and the others involved.  When I look back on this last semester, there are some things I wish I would have done differently regarding my friendships, and while engagement hasn't been everything I always thought it would, Im one step closer to being with Chad for eternity.  In 80 or so days, I will be sealed to my best friend, and there's nothing more exciting than that.