Est. 1.4.2020

We met in our ACP Bio class in high school, and grew together from there. After one of us thinking we were going on dates (Bailey), and the other thinking we were "hanging out as buds" (*cough cough*, Jacob), an art project was made that sealed the deal. The rest is history, and with our joint love for belting out Disney lyrics off-key, art, food, and our three little pups, here we are!

The date we both said "I love you" for the first time...with a lifetime of "I love you"s to follow

When it comes to the proposal, she has told me in the past that it doesn’t matter where or how I did it, but she would say yes. Despite knowing what her answer would be, I wanted to make this as perfect as possible. I first had to decide on what I was going to do. Back in late 2016, I thought a really cool proposal would be with an animation of us and ending it with cartoon me proposing to cartoon her, thus queuing me to propose. I liked this idea but given the time that it would have taken me to pull this off alone while in school, we wouldn’t have been engaged until 2023. So, I thought back to when we first started dating. Back then, we made blanket forts at least twice a week, little tortilla pizzas, and watched Frozen, Jurassic World, etc. That’s when I had my idea. I was going to propose in a blanket fort. I saved up enough so I could create a floor to ceiling fort with black fabric. Then, to make it even cooler, I printed off 159 pictures to hang up within the fort. Knowing that this was cool, I still felt like it needed something else. One of our favorite things is art and making little things for each other. Taking our love of art and mixing it with my original cartoon idea, I turned this blanket fort into a gallery of our best moments and in the middle is a new artwork. A drawing of cartoon me proposing to cartoon her. After getting suited up, I eagerly waited for her call saying she was coming home. As she pulled up, I unlocked the door, quickly ran into the blanket fort, and waited for her to walk through. Before she arrived, I had planned a speech of how I was going to ask her to marry me. Wouldn’t you know, the second I saw her, I forgot every word. I almost forgot to ask, “Will you marry me?” because I was so happy to see her. Though what I said was the short and sweet version of what I’d planned, I wouldn’t change one word.

I had joked with Jacob since our first “I love you” that I had to have my nails done in order to say yes to a proposal, for the ring pictures. Flashing about 2.5 years down the road, my semester was ending, and two of my best friends (Ashley and Jess) and I decided to get our nails done as a celebration. Before I left the house that day, I jokingly told Jacob, “Now’s your chance, my nails are gonna look GREAT!” and he gave a casual response as always. That night, I called Jacob on the way home from the salon, and he told me that our sliding door was broken, and that I would need to use the front door. I thought nothing of it, until I opened the door. Hanging from the ceiling by strings were rows and rows of photographs of the two of us from all of our moments together for the past, each with the date of the moment written on it. Through the strings of photos, I walked around our kitchen to the end of them, and was greeted with a black curtain with a sign reading, “Enter this awesome blanket fort.” So I did just that. Inside the fort was Jacob, the love of my life, in a navy suit with a Mickey Mouse tie, down on one knee with a bouquet of red roses...and a ring. All around him were walls of black fabric covered in photos of our moments together, and beside him was a hand-drawn silhouette of his proposal, reading, “Marry Me?” When the words left his mouth, I couldn’t think of any coherent words, so I nodded, hugged him, and said, “Yes!” After our coinciding tear-fest, he started showing me around the blanket fort and describing the photos, and at that moment, one photo fell from the wall. When we went to go pick it up, we turned it over, and we both started crying again. It was the single existing photo of where we began, where we spent time together for the very first time, at a bowling alley in Wabash, on April 17th, 2016.❤️💍

https://youtu.be/k9Q1M12RJ9A