"Wait, You Said 'Yes' Right?"

My (now) fiancee and I had been together for a little over a year. With the latter part of that year sprinkled with questions of when am I gonna ask THE question. No pressure, right? I told her I was waiting for the perfect moment. She claimed I was sticking to tradition, which dictated that perfect moment. (I do believe her specifically asking for a princess cut solitaire diamond atop a white gold band as rather traditional, but I digress.) Little did she know, I had already bought the ring and my plans were already in motion...but now I was gonna push up the time table a bit from the 24th to the 3rd.

The ring had been sitting for weeks, in it's box, in my desk drawer. The same desk my fiancee sat at almost daily. Hidden in plain sight they call it. Well, one night she came into my office and we began the "when and where" game regarding a proposal. I kept tapping my fingers near the desk drawer, smiling, and telling her I had a plan. Here it was:

We have 7 kids. Hers from a previous marriage. Being that it was Christmas-time, I used presents to mask my intent. Seven presents in all, each with a black napkin (more on that in a minute) with one of the seven words "A___ L___ C___ will you marry me?" written on them. The presents were wrapped in white paper and topped with a white bow. They looked like wedding gifts, yet my fiancee never noticed them under the tree the few weeks they sat there. Hidden in plain sight, remember?

The black napkins were symbolic because when we met, we worked on a TV show. She was an actress. I was a prop guy. The first thing I ever gave her was a black napkin. When asked later how many napkins I handed out that day, I told her, "Only one that mattered." Anyhoo...

So the next day after our talk, we were headed to pick up the kiddos on a Friday. One of them was about to have a birthday that Saturday and I used a little psychology to implement my present proposal scheme into action. I told my fiancee that I always felt bad when the littler kids got sad that they also didn't get gifts on someone else's birthday, so to fix that, we should give them all gifts the day before to make everyone happy. She said she didn't know. I told her to pray about it.

Sure enough, she finally thought my idea was good and, before dinner that night, I asked all the kids to gather around the Christmas tree to open a present. As they did, "will" was the first word opened, followed my "marry." These were wrapped randomly, as to make her piece the question together with the kids like a puzzle.

Once it was revealed, she looked up at me with tears in her eyes. I was on one knee, ring extended. I asked her to marry me and the room erupted with "oohs" and "ahs."

I put the ring on her finger, gave her a kiss and we hugged for the longest. Suddenly I looked at her and asked, "Wait, you said 'yes' right?" In all the confusion, and me pretty much being on auto-pilot, I hadn't heard her answer.

It was 'yes.'