Marriage, Here We Come!

Patrick and I met for the first time at a local restaurant, Buzzard Billy's. I had recently joined a gym, CrossFit La Crosse and one of the members was celebrating their birthday there. My initial plan was to go get wings with another group of friends at a different restaurant but with my work schedule (bartending at the time), I needed to go someplace closer to work. For the dinner, we wound up sitting with one person in between us and due to our constant conversation, we decided to swap seats with the "middle man" so we could continue getting to know each other. We didn't end up exchanging numbers that night, however, we connected on Facebook about a week later and decided to go out for drinks. From there, the rest is history, as they say!

Patrick proposed on Tuesday, December 25th, 2018. We had spent the morning and early afternoon at my sister Jayme's house celebrating Christmas with my family. As any gal would, I had been anticipating that Patrick might propose at some point as we had been dating for at least 5 1/2 years at this point. However, as we all know, Patrick can totally play it cool! After we had come back from my sister's, Patrick had asked me what we should do with the rest of the night. I casually asked him "Well, don't you have anything planned?" To my utter disappointment, Patrick told me "No, Anna, I don't". From there, I said sadly, "Let's make margaritas" as we had a few new recipes to try and why not have some tequila?! We made a few cocktails, decided to cook up some hotdogs and I thought that would be our night. After about an hour, Patrick told me to go find something to watch on TV and as we would have wished for it, "Beat Bobby Flay" was on which is one of our favorite shows. I got settled in and waited for Patrick to bring the hotdogs in the livingroom. About 5 minutes later, he brought in the BEST hotdog spread ever (Ketchup, Mustard, PICKLES, Onions, etc.) and sitting right next to everything was the RING! He got down on one knee and began speaking to me, I went into shock! Tears, laughter and more tears to follow - we began our journey as an engaged couple. The happiest gal alive I've been ever since.