Our Story - Part 4...(From Jenn's Point of View)

It's been a while since I posted a part of our story... So here goes part four...

So I barely slept that night. I was so excited that I was engaged to the man of my dreams! But the next morning when I woke up, it hit me - I was engaged and I was going to be getting married soon!

So of course the normal comments started coming when I told people that we were engaged. We got a variety of comments. Of course there were the normal "congratulations. let me see the ring" and the "when's the date?". But then there were the "wow! that was fast." comments too. But once people started asking, we responded with "Well, we're not sure yet. Ideally we'd like to get married this August (2008) but realistically it might not be until May of 2009." You may wonder why this was our response. Well, it was like this. I still had another year of school left and we weren't sure if our parents would want us to get married that coming summer or that we'd be financially ready to get married that summer. But, we decided to think and pray about a date. Then we'd ask our parents if the date was ok and we'd be ready.

So, we thought and prayed about it and picked a date. We were gonna aim for August 9, 2008. That was only 9 months from when we got engaged. There would be a lot of work and planning to do, but we figured it was definitely doable. We also figured that we'd be financially ready to get married that summer, and that there wasn't much of a point to waiting a whole nother year. So, we asked our parents about the date. His parents said yeah, but we better start planning. My parents said yes as well, as long as we were sure that we could plan it all and afford to live on our own by then. We assured them that we were and set our date - August 9, 2008. That would be the day that we would become Mr. and Mrs.

Of course there was a lot of planning to be done and a lot of decisions to be made. I knew that I wanted to be married in the church that I had grown up in, so that quickly settled the decision of what city we would be married in (Josh and I lived two hours apart). But there were plenty of other decisions to be made - bridal party, a reception location, a photographer, flowers, transportation, and the list goes on.... It would be a busy, but well worthwhile, nine months ahead of us. During these nine months we'd have the chance to grow closer to each other and learn to love each other even more as we planned our wedding...

-Jenn