At a wedding in October at The Hermitage, Cody and I met as we were both working. I was there coordinating and he was there working with the caterer. I didn't know this at the time, but one of his coworkers asked him if he saw any girls there that he thought were cute. His answer was "Yeah, that redhead is kinda cute." I didn't see him again for a month. During this time, I later found out, Cody was asking to work every event at The Hermitage and says he could not get me out of his head. Thankfully, at the beginning of November we ended up working another event together and he swore he was not going to miss his chance to ask me out. He waited till the very last minute of the evening and nervously, yet somewhat smoothly asked if he could take me out to dinner. Of course, I said yes because little did he know, I noticed him that first night too.

The morning of July 10th I asked Shannon if she wanted to go to Ruby Falls. She couldn’t have been more excited! As we drove down, Shannon and I talked about the James Arthur concert we wanted to see next weekend. She began to look up details and realized, to our surprise, that the concert was that night! We decided we should be able to get back in time. As we arrived, I proclaimed I was "starving because we didn't eat breakfast." Shannon gave me the funniest look because I had forgotten that earlier that morning she had made pancakes! Woops! We had a perfect day and were headed back to Nashville to get to the show. On our drive back to Nashville, Shannon kept pestering me as I had become quiet and I just kept ensuring her I was fine and nothing was wrong. The truth of the matter was I was nervous because my plan to propose just got moved up 5 days and I was a little unprepared. We got back to the house, freshened up, grabbed a bottle of wine, and headed out to the concert. Since we didn't have tickets we thought we'd just listen from the pedestrian bridge, which happens to be where we had our first kiss. The concert started and we couldn’t hear a thing, so we walked down closer, which still didn't help. Some persuasion and two scalped tickets later, we were standing at the very back of the lawn in the amphitheater able to hear and see perfectly. We were loving the music and he started to play his last song, which happened to be our song, "Say You Won't Let Go." As the song finished, I told her that today had been the perfect day, and that the only way it could get any better was if she would marry me. I pulled a box out of my pocket and dropped down to one knee. She immediately said "No No No!" followed quickly by "Oh My God YES! A thousand times Yes!" She proceeded to collapse into my lap for a few minutes completely shocked until I was able to put the ring on her finger. I managed to surprise her. It was perfect.