Beginning of the Beginning

        November 18th 2010 is Paul's birthday. Me, attempting to be the "Amazing Girlfriend" had planned a wonderful set of festivities to celebrate Paul's birthday with. I planned a scavenger hunt that would lead him to several places around cedar city that we had spent time at. At each location he would receive a gift as well as a clue to his next spot. The last clue that he found would send him back to his house where I had a birthday cake waiting and had planned to cook BBQ pizza with him.
        I had convinced my roommate Bambi Hilliard to go just ahead of us and set everything up, little did I know she was in league with Paul planning something much bigger than I had expected!! After we went to the three locations that I had set gifts at, we returned to Paul's apartment to start cooking the pizza. The last gift that i had given him was an apron to match one that I had. We put on our aprons and started cooking. But to my avail I realized that I was missing an ingredient that we needed for our pizza. I wasn't extremely worried about it because we could get it later, but for some reason Paul was very insistent that we go to my apartment and get it immediately. I was hoping that we could find the needed onion powder somewhere in his apartment, but he firmly told me that we needed to borrow Bambi's and that it had to be done that very instant. So frustrated and confused as ever we walked across the lawn to go and get the "oh so special" onion powder that awaited in my apartment.
        When we walked in to the back door, all the couches had been pushed aside and all of the lights except for one small lamp had been turned off. There was a path of flower petals leading from the kitchen to a coffee table in the living room. On that coffee table were two dozen roses all fanned out and a note sitting on the top of them. I turned to look at Paul questioningly and he told me to read the note. So I began to read the note. It talked about how much Paul loved me and all this lovey-dovey gushy stuff, ending with how much he wanted to spend the rest of eternity with me, and that I needed to turn around. Before I turned around I said very much out loud, "Paul, if you are faking me out, you are so dead!" To understand this, you have to know that Paul had fake proposed to me about 3 times before the actual proposal, so I really didn't want this to be another one of those oh so sweet moments where I would find him on one knee asking me to tie his shoe for him.When I finally turned around, there was Paul on one knee looking as shaken as ever holding up a ring box. I could tell he was nervous and I can definitely say that now that I was looking at the for real thing, I was nervous too! Paul then asked me to marry him and I decided against my better judgment that I guess I could marry him. ;) He then walked over to the T.V. stand and turned off the video camera that he had been using to record the engagement. I just had to laugh at the fact that he caught me rebuking him on tape! We went back to Paul's house where all my roommates and Paul's roommates were waiting for us. They had all been plotting against me and I didn't even know it! After much rejoicing Paul and I decided that we were hungry so we finished cooking our amazing pizza and had some cake.

        I did tell Paul that I was quite frustrated with him for spoiling all of my plans! I had really wanted to make his birthday special and he had to go and out do me by proposing! I do love him for it though. I am glad that our engagement day will be a day we can always remember as we celebrate Paul's age.

The Challenge

Last post I forgot to mention that while I was meeting Paul's crazily intimidating family, his wonderful grandpa gave each of us $20 dollars to plan a date for each other. We were told that it had to be as creative as we could come up with, and the winner was.. well.. the winner. Now if you don't know. both Paul and I are extremely competitive so, naturally, we both really really REALLY wanted to beat the other person out. Thus the challenge had begun.

I don't know how much thinking and preparation went into Paul's creative date, but I know that I sure spent a lot of time trying to plan the best date that I could. I wrote a huge list of all the possible date ideas that I though would be fun to do, then slowly compiled a few of them into a, (what I thought to be), AMAZING date! You don't get to hear about my date yet though. It was paul that went first.

Now, I do have to say that Paul's date was quite creative, but as to who one, you will have to be the judge because we still fight over it. :) Paul told me that I was not allowed to eat anything for dinner. Well 7:30, 8:00 rolls around and I am starting to get hungry. Finally he comes over and picks me up. We drive (in the dark) to the 4 story parking garage at the Heritage Center in Cedar.

You can imagine my confusion, right? 8:00, no food, and we are at a parking garage. Yeah, that is definitely a good place to find food. So, we drove to the very top of this parking garage. Upon arrival you could see two little candles faintly glowing. These two little candles also gave light to show that a table had been set for two, along with a beautiful harp just waiting to be played.

As Paul took me to my seat our waitress (Heather Richardson) came out and welcomed us to our roof top restaurant and introduced our Harpist (Jordana Galvez) to us. Jordana began to play beautiful music on the harp while Paul and I talked and waited for our food to be brought out to us. I will insert here that I was shocked and astounded that a boy could plan a date like this. I couldn't help smiling pretty much the whole time because it was cute on top cute on top of more cute.

The waitress brought out our dinner and guess what it was? My favorite meal ever! Paul had planned for us to eat lasagna that night. Yeah, Paul had just earned about 100 brownie points. After dinner we had desert. It was to my liking as well because it included fruit! When our meal was over Paul, being the gentleman that he is, asked me to dance. Our harp music was still playing in the background. Together we danced under the stars, over looking most of Cedar City, to incredibly amazing harp music. We waltzed and slow danced and I think we attempted several other dances, but we might have failed at them.

At the end of our dance I was escorted back to the car and Paul drove us home. He didn't end the date there though. When we got back to his house, I was informed that he broke into my room and stole my scrapbooking supplies! We sat on the floor of his room and did 2 or so pages in our venture book before we called it a night.

Well, that is the end of Paul's date. It was great, but you haven't heard my story yet, so don't make up your mind just yet.

Now my date was pretty intricate. It took a lot of planning, and thank goodness for Grandpa, but the $20 dollars was very useful. I was student teaching at the time and did not have school on the day of our date. While Paul was at his last few classes for the week I did all my shopping. I ran to Home Depot and got some PVC pipe, connectors, and glue. I went to Wal-mart and got marshmellows. Then I went to Joanns and got 2 white tee-shirts. I laid everything out so it would be in an easy to get, but not so visible place for when Paul got home from school.

Sure enough Paul came home from school and I was ready to get started. First things first I told him the low down of what we were doing so he would have some time to plan. Then we got started. First, we had to build our weapons of destruction. Yes, we were making marshmallow guns! Now you are probably wondering how in the heck we cut the PVC pipe, being poor college kids with out any tools eh? Well, I had thought of that too. I asked my neighbor Carling Barlow if he had any I could borrow (because he works construction).

Slowly but surly we designed our guns, and maybe, possibly tested them on each other in the house (I won the test runs). After our guns were built they needed to dry, and we needed to make our war get up. I gave Paul the small tee-shirt and I took the large tee-shirt and we designed a shirt for each other to wear during our fight. During most wars you want to blend in, well this one, I wanted us both to stick out! Whit shirts with neon paint was the best way to stick out, I thought. Our shirts were painted and now we just had to let them dry for a bit before we could go to war.

An hour later we decided they were as dry as we could stand it, so we put them on, split up the mallows, and headed to our doom. 2 minutes up Cedar Canyon is a little alcove type place that lots of people go paintballing. I though this would be the perfect place for our little marshmallow war. We gave each other about a minute to hide and get all settled in. Then, the war began. Marshmallows were flying everywhere! I thought I had found a good spot to hide, but sure enough Paul was spying on me from above and I was on the verge of being mallowed to death! I took off running to find a different spot, all the while Paul is hitting me with mallows. I finally find a spot and start to fire back. Now its his turn to run. He goes behind some bushes and I actually tried to shoot him through the trees! I get smart and decide to fire 2 and 3 mallows at a time and I actually get him a few times. Eventually I ran out of marshmallows!! Paul still had quite a few, so I knew I had to find cover quick! I bolted for the unlocked car! I got there before Paul and locked myself in! I was safe... until Paul pulled out his keys! Oh no! he would get me while i had no shot of defense!

Luckily I am a girl and have a few useful means of persuasion on boys like Paul. After he shot me several times while I was stuck in the car, I was able to woo him into submission to call it a game. We both decided that I won by a long shot! Okay, maybe thats a lie. We argued about who won and decided it was a tie (mostly because neither of us wanted to admit that we had lost).

After we had arrived at home we saw lots and lots of deep puddles in the parking lot, (it had been raining the whole time of our war). Being the kind of wreckless children Paul and I are, we decided to jump in the puddles and try to splash each other to death. I got Paul pretty good. But I will admit that he certainly beat me out. I was completely soaked! But it was well worth it.

That was the end of my planned date but we did a few more things that day. After soaking the kitchen floor trying to cook dinner in our wet clothes, we decided it would be best if we changed out of them. Paul ran home and I changed as well and we cooked some dinner. After eating, decided it would be insanely fun to carve a pumpkin, (it was around Halloween). So we trekked off to Smiths to get our pumpkin.

Home, with the pumpkin, we put on a movie to carve as we went. Three hours later we finished our pumpkin, and the movie. We took it outside and put a candle in it so that we could show all the world our beautiful art. When the candle was aglow you could see Mario's face in our pumpkin! We were both so proud!

Paul told me that we needed to go somewhere. I was getting kind of nervous because I didn't know what was going on. We started driving somewhere. Paul parked by a random apartment complex and drug me half way across campus to a bunch of statues. He sat me on his lap and started to tell me how much he loved me (at this part I was secretly freaking out because I thought he was going to propose and we hadn't talked about it much), and how much fun he had had with me today, when out of the blue Lisa Walters (my bestest she-friend) jumps out of the bushes!!

You can imagine my surprise I bet. I was thinking I was getting a proposal and instead I got a best friend! I was really quite excited. Paul and Lisa had been texting and planned the whole thing out as a surprise for me. I thought I was doing most of the surprising today, but Paula beat me out again!

Now, lets jump back to the beginning of my story and recall the two creative dates that occurred. On the one hand, we have Paul's roof top dinner and dance. Both creative and romantic. On the other hand we have my gun making, war inducing, date. Which was VERY creative. It was never completely certain who one. Paul's father said that Paul won the romance and I won the creativity, but only one person can win! Who do you think should win?

The Beginning

In August of 2010 I was a student at SUU doing my student teaching. I had moved into a duplex with my friend Bambi Hilliard. I had no male prospects and big goals and places that I wanted to be going in life. After graduation I planned to move to Hawaii and become a teacher. I wanted to go out and Live my life there for a little bit and then I would eventually settle down and find someone to marry. Little did I know, my husband was waiting just a back yard away. Our little set of duplexes had a grass patch in the back yard along with another set of duplexes that shared this grass patch. In that duplex across the way, a boy named Paul Burnett moved in. I was there at his house the day he moved in. After saying hi and introducing myself I left to go home. As I was walking across the grass to my house, a thought came into my head that said, "Kylee, you are going to marry that boy." I said to myself, "there is no way I will even date that boy, let alone marry him!!" We started hanging out because he was my neighbor and I started to feel a sense of ownership for Paul. At church when he would sit by other girls or talk to other girls, I often felt kind of jealous. I had to continually remind myself that I didn't like him, and that I wasn't going to date him so he could date all the girls that he wanted to. Slowly I started to realized that maybe I did like this kid, and maybe if he did ask me out I would probably say yes. A few weeks down the road he FINALLY asked me out on a date. I can't say I jumped for joy exactly but I was very excited that Paul and finally gotten up the guts to ask me out.

On September 1 2010 Paul took me on our first date. It was a very fun date. We started our date with a prayer. I am so grateful for this, because as we began our next steps in a relationship, the gospel was always at the front of our minds. After our prayer we had a delicious picnic on a roundabout in Cedar City. After our wonderful picnic, we made oreo cookies. But, we both had disabilities. Paul blindfolded me so that I could not see what the heck I was doing. He, himself had his hands tied behind his back so that he could not use them. Together we worked through the trial of making cookies and frosting them. I loved that we had to test our abilities to work together right from the start. It took teamwork to accomplish what we did and luckily for us, we could both work together. I think Paul was just trying to test all my abilities in one date, the cooking skills, the spirituality, the child like qualities and the working together part, (he probably had his answer to marriage after one date!).

After making cookies, our date was not over. We made a fake car out of cardboard boxes and went to a drive in movie on Paul's deck. We watched, "The Notebook" of course, a classic love story. I was so impressed though that Paul would actually watch this movie with me. Most guys have the "tough man" complex and can't watch a chick flick to save their life. Paul, however, will watch almost any chick flick I suggest!!

After the movie was over, we prayed to end our date. (Don't worry, no kissing was involved on the first date!) He walked me home and that was the end of our first date. It was not the end of our dating experiences though.

A few days later Sep. 3 2010, I took Paul on our second date. We both needed to drive up to Salt Lake for a weekend with our families. I had planned a little adventure for us to get started with. Our first stop was in Parowan. The fair was in town and I wanted to stop for a ride and some cotton candy. After getting lost in the tiny town of Parowan and finally finding the fair, we road one ride, "the zipper" and almost throwing up after it, we bought our cotton candy and headed north. When we got to Cove Fort we stopped again. We had arrived at Cove Fort just before they finished giving tours, so we were able to have a tour from the Couples missionaries serving there.

While on our tour, one of the Elders asked us if we were married. We laughed and said no, and he asked if we were engaged, we said no again, and Paul finally told him that we were not even dating yet. The Elder said we sure seemed like it and we just laughed at that thought. We decided to hold pinkies from then on because holding hands just makes you look too serious. :)

After Cove Fort we drove up to the Draper Temple. I asked Paul to dance with me to our song and we walked around the temple grounds. We talked for a little bit then Paul asked me to be his girlfriend. I kind of knew this was coming but I didn't expect it to happen so fast. I kind of thought about all that would happen if I dated just one person, and I finally said yes. Yes, we were an official couple. Paul worked up the courage to kiss me which was kinda cute, and then we set off to take me home.

The rest of the weekend included Paul meeting my family as well as me meeting his pretty much WHOLE family. It was kinda, slightly, REALLY intimidating, but, I am still alive to tell the tale, so I guess it wasn't that bad.

This, is the beginning of the beginning.