proposing...plan b

kenny and i had talked about marriage. we both knew it was just right, but i have to say that it was still all a surprise.

kenny flew to arizona for my birthday (december 26th) and we were able to spend the next week together. we stayed in arizona for a few days, then we drove back to utah. his family had planned on staying at the homestead in utah, which was a lot of fun and wonderfully beautiful. we were in evanston wyoming for new years eve, i know sounds exciting huh...well it was very exciting...

kenny had been bothering me about going snowboarding on new years day. i was not at all excited about it. the west family is really good at snowboarding and i am not, plus i am not a huge fan of being cold...they all wouldn't leave me alone about going snowboarding. i told kenny if he wanted to go that i of course would go with him.

on new years eve we were at his sister kimber's house. before i knew it, only kenny's brother-in-law, jeremy, and i were left in the front room watching the time square count down. i knew something was! i could hear kenny chatting in the kitchen with his mom and sisters - that is never a good sign.

they all came into the room and kenny asked if i wanted to go. i thought he didn't want to kiss me in front of his family...haha. so we went to a park. it was absolutely freezing. we got out and skated around on the frozen lake and then warmed backed up in the car. when it was midnight we got out to watch the fireworks and before i knew it he was on his knee - in the snow - and he proposed. i was so shocked that the first thing i did was take a few steps away from him!!! haha

of course there was a lot more 'mushy' stuff that went along with the proposing, but we will keep that between kenny and myself.

now why i say this was plan b was because he wanted to propose while we were snowboarding. he wanted to wait until the last run of the day, when i was all tired. while we were on the lift he was going to drop a box that looked like the wedding ring box. we were going to have to snowboard down and find it somehow in the trees and snow. i'm really glad he went with plan b!

we were both so excited and we spent the rest of the night informing family and just enjoying being engaged!

meeting, hiking, and dating

here is the beginning of our story, and the rest is yet to come...kenny and i seem to have a few details which we disagree on; however, this is the jest of it from my side.

kenny and i met in 2005 in flagstaff arizona. at the time, i was living with his sister kristen (formely known as krissy) while attending northerna arizona university. kristen came home after a weekend in utah all excited about some network marketing thing. i didn't really understand, but she would lay awake all night telling me how we were going to be rich. krissy was holding a big network marketing meeting and kenny was coming from salt lake city to do the meeting. she kept saying that i had to meet him and hang out with him. i went to the meeting and didn't really stay too long. kenny later called and asked if i would go to breakfast with him the next morning. well to make a long story short i didn't go.

we kept in touch very little for the next few years - he was in salt lake and i was in flagstaff. kristen mentioned him a lot, and kenny says that he was chasing me for all those years. he said that he liked me from the first time we met. i guess i was stubborn and i now admit that i made a mistake.

in september 2007 my aunt anna and uncle troy had their two adopted children sealed to them in the salt lake temple. my aunt lana, cousins jamie and jana, my mom, my sister michelle and i made the treck to utah. kristen was once again my roommate and insisted that kenny and i hang out. i decided it would be fun, even though we were only in salt lake for less than 24 hours.

kenny picked me up and we went driving up some canyon. we started hiking up a mountain that supposedly when you get to the top you see the whole salt lake valley. now lets catch up on a few things, kenny was just in a pretty serious car accident the day before, his head still had the staples and he was really sore. it was now 10 pm and i had just driven all day to get to salt lake, and i had to be up around 4:30 am to go to the temple. i would say not the most optimal situation for sparks and romance. so we got to the top of the mountain and we discovered we were on the wrong mountain. there was absolutely no scenic view of the salt lake valley, in fact we just saw another huge mountain. we laughed all the way down the hill. when i got back to the hotel room my mom asked how the date went, i told her that it wasn't a date and we were great friends, but that i had never laughed so much. i said that my face was still hurting from smiling. (in fact almost every day i have to stop and relax my face because he is making me laugh so hard)

well that was the beginning of the end. we luckily got to see each other a couple of times in the next few weeks )with a lot of setting up from krissy) and one night after talking on the phone for over 4 hours i realized i was falling for him. although we were far apart, we decided to date exclusively and see how it would all work out. we spent thanksgiving together with his family in rocky point and things were going well and heating up!