Maddie and I met through the wedding of our dear friends, Landon and Savannah Donahoo. The night of the rehearsal dinner, Maddie was posing for a picture with her imaginary wedding date when I finally worked up the courage to ask her if she would let me fill in for a few pictures. Our friends in the wedding party scrambled like middle schoolers and began to fill each of us in on the finer details. I remember receiving a text saying "I heard Maddie say she likes you". In short, we found each other on the dance floor the night of the wedding and we've been dancing ever since.

On many occasions, Maddie had mentioned that she wanted to be proposed to under the big Water Oak at the beach house. Naturally I did not want it to be completely obvious so I took her down to the beach the week before and acted completely oblivious to any notion of a proposal. When the day of the proposal actually came, my family had told Maddie that we had dinner reservations that evening and we needed to clean up a little. They stalled so that Maddie and I would get ready before them which is when I said that Maddie and I should take the dogs to "Dog Island" and let them run around. When we returned to the dock, she saw that pictures of us had been set up along the boardwalk and figured out what was happening pretty quickly. We walked under the big old tree and I got down on one knee and almost forgot what I wanted to say. Her family and friends got to see the whole thing as they had been hiding in our next door neighbors house drinking cocktails for nearly an hour. Maddie is a hard person to surprise and won't admit how much she may have known but I think we pulled a few sneaky ones on her.