I do and the trash too!

Husband and I have been married for almost 9 years. However, our time spent together is much longer than that...almost 14 years. We started dating during our 11th grade year. He made the first move by asking me to the Homecoming dance.

I accepted.

The rest, as they say, is history. We've never broken up or taken "time off" during all of those 14 years. Pretty amazing, huh?

Anyway, Husband and I had been dating for 3 1/2 years and were in our 2nd year of college. We had been talking about marriage for some time. The year was 1997 and Christmas was approaching. Husband, being the sly guy that he is told me that we would be in engaged by Christmas that year.

Now, in my 19-year-old-wanting-a-beautiful-round-solitaire-diamond-with-a-platinum-band mind, when someone tells me by Christmas, I'm thinking CHRISTMAS DAY!

Contrary to my thinking, though, Husband really just meant during Christmas vacation.

So, Christmas 1997 came and Christmas 1997 went and the present I had been pining over and wishing for didn't come. I moped. I mean, really moped for days. Husband knew he was in the dog house. But, I still moped, and the ring box never came.

New Year's Eve rolled around and we headed to meet up with some of our friends for a fun, friend-filled night of ringing in the new year. In my mind, though, all the ringing that I wanted to do was to ring my Husband's neck because I wasn't happily engaged to be married to him yet.

I went. We had fun. We rang in the new year. We left.

Husband drove ever so slowly down the dirt road that my parent's live on. He passed the driveway and I knew. I knew that the moment was now...oh what would I say? What would he say? Would he get down on one knee? Would fireworks explode in the background?

He stopped and asked me to get out of the truck. He led me by the hand to what I later remembered was the place where we had our first kiss (some 3 weeks after we had started dating thank.you.very.much). Forget the fact that the place that we had first kissed was right next to our family outside trash cans, this was romance, people.

And so he asked me and produced a beautiful round solitaire diamond set in platinum. I said yes and the rest...well...here we are 10 1/2 years later (we had a 1 1/2 year engagement) and our love grows for each other more and more everyday.