Hello Baltimore Bride world! My name is Ashley Sullivan and I’m engaged. Yay! I will be guest blogging for Hitched throughout my wedding planning process and I’m excited to have all of you along for the ride. Our wedding is probably going to be a little bit different than most because we’re only having between 50-60 guests and I’m planning the wedding in three months. To most of you out there who are wedding planning right now, this might sound a little crazy. And well it sort of is, but I have a secret weapon. I’m actually a wedding photographer (Ashley Michelle Photography) in Baltimore so I already have the inside scoop on vendors and venues. I have also been to enough weddings to really know what I want and what is important to me. And on a side note because contrary to what some might believe, wedding photographers don’t really carry their cameras around with them everywhere so many of the photos I will be sharing with you are not my professional work.
So, a little about us. Eric & I first met how most people meet nowadays . . . online. We went on our first date in May of 2013. The date went well, but Eric went on vacation right after that. In the meantime, life just got in the way and a second date never happened. Almost exactly a year later we both found ourselves on the online dating site again. We reconnected and went out on our second first date on May 20th of 2014. I am very open and get to know people right away while Eric is more cautious and opens up slowly so it took a couple of months before we really found our niche with one another. Thank goodness I found him so good looking because otherwise I might not have been as patient. But slowly and month by month, our relationship grew and between trip to Costa Rica, Peru, Cancun, and many other places throughout the US, we discovered that like was slowly growing into love.
We had obviously talked a lot about our future together and what we wanted out of marriage and our relationship. When we decided marriage was something we wanted together, we looked at rings (which was really exciting by the way). Eric was nervous because I see sooo many elaborate proposals because of my job. I told him that I didn’t need or want anything like that and I just wanted it to be thoughtful. And thoughtful it was! I knew he was going to propose before Christmas so we could celebrate with our families. Because of our schedules, I was pretty sure I knew the exact weekend it was going to happen. I thought he was going to give me the ring as my Christmas present. He had been trying to throw me off all week by saying different things.
Friday, December 18th, he came home from work and said he wanted to exchange Christmas gifts (we were originally going to do this the next day). I thought this was it! Well it wasn’t. He gave me a bike and wasn’t going to be able to hide it from me until the next day. Saturday rolled around and he was acting completely and totally normal. It was just a regular Saturday–eating breakfast, working out, lounging, etc. The plan was to go to his parents’ house at 2 PM to celebrate Christmas with them. At the last minute, I said we should go have the pups’ picture taken with Santa (which was happening in our neighborhood). He said sure and once again, wasn’t in a hurry or a schedule for anything to happen. I almost texted my sister and told her I didn’t think it was going to happen that day. We came back from pictures with Santa and I had to freshen up before leaving for his parent’s house. When I came out to leave, he had a bag of ornaments in his hand. He said he had found them in his car and that we must have left them there and forgotten about them. Backstory: His parents had given us a bunch of ornaments to put on our tree so this was a totally believable story. He said we should put them on the tree now. I said sure. He handed each ornament to me one by one to put on the tree. The third ornament he handed me was THE ornament that said, “Will You Marry Me?” I’m pretty sure I immediately started crying when I saw it. Eric said some really, really sweet things and then got down on one knee. Eric even started crying which of course made me cry even more. Eric knows how sentimental I am (and he is too by the way) so having an ornament that we can put on our tree each year and remember Saturday, December 19th will be so wonderful. It was absolutely perfect!
Next week I will share with you how we chose the venue. A touch choice when there are so many amazing venues in Baltimore.
