The Story

(As told by Joy and Timmy with photos from our friends)

Every year our Illini family (group of college friends) gets together to celebrate New Year's. This year we decided to spend it at my house in Houston, Texas. After a nice, filling hot pot dinner, it was time for our white elephant gift exchange. The rules for our gift exchange were that the gift had to be under $5.00 and you had to be creative. Unbeknownst to me, the whole exchange was set up so that I would end up with a one special gift.

My sister Kimmy helped rig the game so I would be the first person to select a present. After choosing one gift and having it stolen, I eventually selected one present that was neatly wrapped in green. I thought for sure that it was Denise's gift and I was really excited to see what was inside. When I opened it, I found a box stuffed with a bunch of tissue paper. "What is going on?" I wondered. At the bottom of the box, I found a CD case with the instructions, "Play the video on this CD immediately."

At first I wasn't sure who the gift was from exactly, but I followed the directions and popped the CD into a laptop. We all proceeded to watch. This was the video:




As I was watching the video, I felt my body temperature rise at a ridiculous rate. Finally when I read the words "Turn around" on the last slide, I whimpered, "I'm scurred!"

At this point, I was down on one knee with the ring in my hand. And now, I was really starting to get nervous. I was so stressed out about making sure everything up to this point worked out that I felt completely unprepared to actually propose to her. It didn't help that so many people were surrounding us with their cameras. In fact, at that very moment, I wondered why I even planned to do the proposal in front of all of them!




I don't even remember exactly what I said after she turned around, but I ended it with, "Will you marry me?" to which she responded, "yes!"







After hugs and group pictures, we went downstairs where Joy's parents had prepared balloons, cake, and champagne.





Finally, I remembered why I chose to do it this way - proposing and celebrating our engagement with our close friends and family was a true blessing. Joy and I were both super happy to share it all with them.





And that's the story. Thanks again to all who made this possible! And stay tuned for future posts!

Joy & Timmy