How did I let it get to be the last day of January without telling you about Paul’s visit to America in December?!  Yikes!

Paul came to see me for fifteen days in December.  Let me tell you something about the British: they give their people incredible amounts of vacation time.  We decided that Paul would fly over here while I was in my busiest time at work so that he could sleep off his jet lag while I put in some long hours at the office.  I had a few busy days (think working long hours at my real job + shooting two weddings in two days) but, when it was over, I was off for almost two weeks.  We had a great two weeks together.  Want to see some pictures from it?  Warning: I took most of these with my phone.

Paul’s first day here, bonding with Snuggles and Cuddles.  Snuggles loves Paul because Paul hasn’t been here long enough to learn that, the more you throw Snuggles’ blue bone, the more he wants you to throw it for him.  It’s a vicious cycle.

We wrapped some Christmas gifts together.  This one is for my little cousin Ella, who lives in Chicago.  Fun fact: I’ve only met Ella twice in her five years of life but every single week, I write her a letter because I want her to grow up knowing me (for those of you who have read awhile, this is Aviean’s half-sister).

We drove to Knoxville to celebrate Christmas with that side of my family.  I’m not sure how this happened, but somehow, Marisa’s baby ended up in Paul’s arms and I got to snap a few quick pictures.

(Also, you should know: I’m counting down the days until my wedding not for the sake of getting married but to know how many days are left until I can start trying to have a baby.)

(Don’t tell Paul.)

(Or my dad.)

Christmas gifts waiting to be mailed to family and friends who live too far to see at the holidays.

A few days before Christmas, Paul and I went to Nashville so I could show him the Opryland Hotel.  I have a weird love affair with that resort.  I kind of want to spend every weekend there.

Paul and I had lunch at a restaurant at the hotel.  It was the best hamburger of my life.  I think I’m going to get in trouble for posting a picture of Paul with his mouth full, but thankfully, we’re 5000 miles away at the moment.

Here’s a blurry picture of me in a store at the hotel picking out an ornament for our first Christmas tree together.  My London-girl bangs are growing out, hallelujah.

A few days later, Paul proposed to me.  Here’s a picture of the exact spot we were at.  And yes, he really did get down on one knee on one of the stones right in the middle of all that water.  What a man, right?

My ring!  Oh my goodness… I love, love, love my ring.  I wanted something that looked “vintage” and he did not disappoint.

We spent Christmas Eve and Christmas day celebrating with both sides of my family.  Highlights included watching my mother and Paul talk at the kitchen table and then going to my paternal grandmother’s house for Christmas dinner that evening.  When we were opening gifts that evening, Paul was clearly overwhelmed with how much my family was blessing me and him.  To give you the back story, Paul is the only child of an only child.  And, his father died when he was an infant.  So, Paul is used to getting Christmas gifts from his mother… and that’s about it.  With me, he was opening gifts all day long.  At one point that evening, he was sitting in shock surrounded by wrapping paper.  Everyone noticed he was overwhelmed and he explained he just wasn’t used to so many gifts.  Without missing a beat, my brother put on his best fake country accent and said “This is ‘MERICA, SON.”  I laughed until I cried.

The day after Christmas, Paul and I headed to Asheville, NC to visit my friend Cara.  She had graciously given us tickets to Biltmore and we spent the whole day there touring the grounds and having the best lunch at a sweet restaurant.  I have always loved Biltmore, but I love it even more now that I’m obsessed with the tv show Downton Abbey.

When we got to Cara’s house for dinner that night, she had a huge basket of gifts waiting for me!  She and Cousin Cate gave me the sweetest engagement gifts.  See those bridal magazines in the back?  Two of them were the British versions of bridal magazines!  I was in heaven.

But the best part of the basket was the personalized wedding planner they had ordered for me!  Check out my soon-to-be new last name.  I’m so excited about my new name-to-be!

For our last few days together, we made the short trip to Chattanooga to use up some free passes to local attractions.  We went to the aquarium together…

… where we spent some quality time with the penguins.

Of course, we spent plenty of quality time just sitting on the couch and talking, too, but I don’t have pictures of that.  Other than the engagement, do you know what my favorite thing was that we did?  The night before Paul left, we watched tv together.  Yep, that was my favorite part.  It was my favorite because we don’t get to do a lot of normal things together like watching tv or cooking dinner together or even taking the puppies for a walk.  I am counting down the days until Paul can move here and we can just be a normal couple.  Fingers crossed, he’ll be here for good in June — but I’ll tell you more about that another day.

With Cousin Cate living in South Carolina now, we don’t get to see each other that often.  When we were talking the other night on the phone, she mentioned that she was going to get to come home for a couple of days soon.  This morning, I noticed that she had updated her Facebook status about coming home to Tennessee for a quick visit, so I left a quick comment about how Tennessee is ready to welcome her home for a weekend.  Within seconds, she had added a comment of her own to the status that explains so much about why I love her –

“Next Friday, I’ll be runnin home faster than a bobcat with a bur under his tail.”

“… even if it was no place particular in January

I would go on choosing you

And you would go on choosing me

Over and over again.”

- Sandol Stoddard Warburg

(Taken in July 2011)

Miss you this morning.

5:00 pm – rush out of work so you can call him (remember, it’s already 10 pm his time)

5:03 pm – rush back into the office because you forgot to send a time-sensitive email for work

5:09 pm – call your fiancé just so you can hear those first three words — “Well, hello there.”

5:24 pm – start dreading the moment where you have to hang up so he can head off to bed

5:29 pm – reluctantly say goodnight

5:40 pm – contemplate calling again, even though you know he has already fallen asleep

5:41 pm – vow to eat a healthy dinner instead of your feelings

6:03 pm – play Dr. Mario

6:14 pm – contemplate your recent habit of being on a Dr. Mario binge

7:15 pm – talk to your mother about the bridesmaid dresses she saw at a wedding last weekend

7:35 pm – Google “stories of women with ovarian problems ability to get pregnant”

7:47 pm – more Dr. Mario (you are ashamed, yet addicted)

8:13 pm – call from your Cousin Cate to discuss the number of hours, minutes and seconds left until she moves back to your town

8:47 pm – aimless Internet research centered around Google searches of “Who should be invited to a rehearsal dinner?” and “airmail themed wedding invitations”

8:49 pm – random Facebook page “visitations” to check up on college friends who you miss

8:54 pm – attempt to write an insightful Facebook status about how much you miss your fiancé

8:55 pm – backspace over half-written status because you don’t want to complain

8:56 pm – pull out calendar to count number of days until your fiancé comes back to visit (45, in case you’re wondering)

8:57 pm – try hard to be grateful that your fiancé can afford to visit you so often whilst simultaneously screaming “how am I supposed to make it forty five DAYS?!?!” in your head

9:03 pm – start getting ready for bed while noticing how cute it is that your puppies are sitting at the edge of your bed waiting for you to come to bed

9:04 pm – think, for the hundredth time, how you want to write a blog post about how having two little puppies helped to change your life without coming across as a crazy dog lady

9:13 pm – contemplate downloading something to read on your Kindle but decide not to because you’re trying to save money to buy a wedding dress

9:14 pm – suddenly remember how your fiancé calls your Kindle a “kadoodle” and nearly burst into tears because you just miss him that much

9:40 pm – write a blog post from your iPhone about your evening instead of having late-night conversations with your fiancé because he lives across the Atlantic, dang it

Over the last few weeks, as I’ve been trying to figure out which diet plan works best for me (more on this in upcoming posts when I decide it would be enjoyable to discuss my weight on the Internet), I decided to give Weight Watchers a try.  When you start assigning points to food, it can make you a little obsessive about how many points each food has in it — or at least it has made me a little obsessive, as demonstrated in the following story.

I have been trying to be very good at counting all my points and, to make that a bit easier, I bought some individual size cups of peanut butter the last time I went to the grocery store.  The other night, after throwing away the nearly empty cup, I went into the other room only to hear some mysterious noises coming from the kitchen a few minutes later.  As I walked into the kitchen, I realized that Snuggles had gone dumpster diving in my trashcan, fetched the leftover cup of peanut butter and was enjoying a little illicit treat.  Without thinking, I yelled the following –

“SNUGGLES!  Now we are going to have to add those points to your Point Tracker Plus!”

It’s been eighteen days since Paul left to head back to the UK.  Here’s what I’ve been doing:

1. Missing him.

Here is the thing: I can’t get overly emotional and sad about missing him because I happen to have a few friends whose husbands or boyfriends are currently overseas in the military and I’m very aware that they have it a lot harder than he and I have it.  Plus, I’ve waited so long to have someone that I don’t want to complain about our circumstances.  I’m so grateful to have Paul.  What’s a few thousand miles when you’ve got the rest of your life to look forward to, right?  (This is me sounding better than I actually am.  Most of the time, I just obsessively play Dr. Mario to keep from writing Facebook statuses like “OH MY GOSH, WHY WILL FLIGHTS TO THE UK NOT GO ON SALE?!?”)

2. Working on my business taxes.

This past year was the first “real” year of my photography business.  In March of 2011, I had reached a point where I needed a business license due to the amounts I was making.  I set-up the actual business in March and the year was very blessed for the business, especially when you consider that a lot of small businesses make nothing their first year.  I’m really grateful for it because, although I received a small daily stipend for each of my foster children, it wasn’t enough to cover a lot of their “extra” expenses, including wardrobes (they each came to my house with very little).  The extra money I made from my photography business last year helped me supplement my income to be a single mom to three and I’m grateful for it.

3. Booking weddings.

Any wedding photographer will tell you that January and February are the “dead seasons” — in other words, there’s no weddings to shoot.  But, the first few months of the year seem to be when most wedding photographers do the bulk of their bookings.  So I’m taking advantage of my dead time to try to book new clients, learn new shooting and editing techniques, etc.  I’m praying for a good, heavy load of weddings this year as that’s what’s going to help me pay for my own wedding.  I’m thinking that, by March or April, I’ll have a pretty good idea of what my business year is going to look like as far as weddings go.  I’m hoping for anywhere from 12 to 20 weddings this year (for those of you who don’t know, I work full-time, too, so I just do this on the side).

4. Losing weight.

I bought an elliptical and I’m on a diet.  Obviously, this deserves a post of its own, which I’ll have to write sometime.

5. Planning my wedding.

Right now, I’m working on my guest list — figuring out who needs to be on it, getting addresses, etc.  Planning a wedding doesn’t scare me (I plan events for a living at my “real job”), but I am terrified I’m going to accidentally leave someone off the guest list!  I have tried to cover all my bases, from going through my cell phone, to going through my Christmas card list, to printing out my entire Facebook friend list and going through, name by name, to make sure I don’t miss anyone that should be included.  I’m just afraid that either I’m going to miss someone by accident, not see them in a list, etc. and leave them feeling like I excluded them.  At the same time, seating is limited in the venue we chose so I can’t over invite, either.  And, I don’t want anyone to feel like they’re expected to buy us a gift just because they got an invitation.  Fascinating stuff, I know.

Well, that’s my update on recent life.  What are you up to these days?  Tell me in the comments.*

*P.S. — I’ve started leaving comments open most of the time.  I had closed them a long time ago not because of critical comments but because I was going through a time where the good comments meant more to my at-that-time-low self-esteem than they should have and I wanted to focus on getting my approval, love, affection from God alone instead of wanting it from people in my life.  I still get that from God, just now with a healthy dose of British-loving too.

Don’t tell Paul, but I’m having so much fun planning my wedding that I’m already trying to figure out how I can have two or three weddings so I can use ALL of my ideas.

xoxo,

amy beth

P.S. — I couldn’t fall asleep last night because I’m so excited.

Gee golly, I can’t think of anything interesting to write about this morning.  I mean, I guess I could tell you about how I spent my Christmas money from my parents on an elliptical, new mattress and humidifier, but I think it’s pretty clear that I’m a dork at the ripe age of 27, so no need to provide further evidence, right?  Or maybe I could tell you about how my mom felt it necessary to text me this morning 45 minutes before my alarm clock was scheduled to go off because she wanted me to know she had just seen an advertisement for a chocolate fountain at a buffet restaurant and was now gagging in her bathroom?  That’s what you came here looking for this morning, right?

Well, I hate to disappoint you chocolate-fountain-story-lovers because, this morning, I’ll be telling you about HOW I GOT ENGAGED!

Paul arrived on December 15 for a fifteen day stay in the US.  I knew for a fact that Paul had the ring, but I wasn’t certain when he would be proposing though I felt it it would likely be on this trip.  One of the cons of long distance relationship is that you can’t really take a trans-Atlantic flight to surprise people and, since we don’t know when we get to see each other again (more on that later this week), I figured it would happen this trip.  At the same time, before he came over, he dropped a few hints into a conversation about having this perfect place in the United Kingdom picked out to propose to me.  He’s pretty good at keeping secrets in order to surprise me, so I knew there was a chance he might not ask me while he was in the US and instead wait until I come over to visit him sometime this spring.

I had a feeling that a couple of my friends, Cara and Cousin Cate, were helping him figure out plans and I thought I had figured out their plan.  There’s a small park across the street from Cate’s parents’ house, and I convinced myself that was where he was going to propose.  It would have been a lovely place for him to do it, but secretly, I wished he would do it at my favorite little spot beside the Ocoee River.  Don’t get me wrong; I loved the little park across the street from Cate’s house but it just wasn’t my dream spot.  One night, after we had went to Cate’s parent’s house for dinner and I caught Cate, her mom and Paul whispering in the kitchen, I knew that it was going to happen across from Cate’s house.  As fate would have it, I was wrong — but I didn’t know it yet.

Early on in Paul’s visit, after I had finished my insane four days of working for my real job and shooting two back to back weddings, we drove to Nashville so I could show him the Opryland Hotel.  I have this really strange love for that hotel; I mean, I love it.  With the renovations, they’ve included a waterfall that you can “walk behind.”  I later found out from him that, had he of had the ring with him when I took him to the hotel, he would have proposed to me right there behind that waterfall.  I think he was more excited than I was about getting that ring on my finger!  As we were walking back there, Paul remarked that he loves waterfalls and I said “Well, later this week I’ll take you up to the Ocoee River and show you a waterfall I like there.”  For Paul, it was the perfect set-up: he had wanted to propose at the river the whole time but didn’t know how to get me there since he doesn’t have a US driver’s license and all.

Fast forward to Christmas Eve.  We were headed to see my family later that evening but didn’t have too much to do that morning so I asked him if he might want to drive out to the river.  He said he wanted to and we started the 45 minute drive up to my favorite spot.  When we arrived, it was absolutely deserted and we started the short walk down a trail that leads to a little part of a wide creek where you have to walk across flat rocks to continue down the trail.  It’s one of my favorite spots ever simply because you can stand in the middle of the creek on a rock with water rushing around you and see a really gorgeous waterfall on one side and the river on the other side (you can see pictures of the exact place I’m describing in this post I wrote a year ago). I thought we would look at it and turn around, since it was December and all, but Paul started pulling off his socks and shoes, rolling up his pant legs, etc.  He wanted to go stand on the rocks to see the waterfall, so I followed him across the rocks until we were both standing in the middle of the water.  I looked off behind me, towards the river and, when I turned back around, Paul was on one knee, right there in the middle of the creek.

Everything was kind of a blur but I remember seeing him open the ring box and hearing him talking and then saying “Amy Beth Bullard, will you marry me?”  Right when he said it, a man appeared out of the woods and we all just froze.  He had been hiking in the woods and hadn’t seen us and, with the sound of the rushing water, we hadn’t heard him approach us.  All three of us were frozen in shock until I finally recovered enough to look at the hiker and say “I think my boyfriend just pulled out a ring box.”  The hiker, still frozen in his spot with wide eyes, said “I think you’re right.” He then stayed there to watch me accept the ring (“OF COURSE I WILL!”) and even attempted to take some (unsuccessful) photos with my phone, which I happened to have in the pocket of my jeans.  After he handed the phone back to me, he wished us well in life and started hiking back through the woods.  Paul and I both burst out laughing at the exact same moment before I began racing back to my car to call my family.  Unfortunately for Paul, I had to drive 30 minutes before I could get a signal to start the calls.  I say “unfortunately for Paul” because I think that was the scariest 30 minute drive of his life as I navigated mountain roads rather intent on getting to a cell phone signal.

We spent the rest of the day telling friends and family, having lunch at Cracker Barrel and then driving to several homes of friends and family to show them the ring in person.  I was kind of in shock the whole day long; I knew the proposal would be coming at some point but, to have it actually happen and to see a gorgeous ring on my finger just blew my mind.  I still can’t believe it if you want to know the truth.  This fall, I’m going to be a bride.  And you know what that means, right?

We’ve got a wedding to plan, Internet.