Res Ipsa Loquitur

He'd been working on the plan for months, wanting to surprise my daughter with her dream proposal....a very difficult feat since my daughter usually figures such things out in a heartbeat. He came to ask our permission on Christmas Eve....not realizing I was still at work. So he asked Mike's and swore him to secrecy. He came back Christmas night and asked for mine....which I gladly gave as long as they waited until after she graduates in the spring....and Mike & I became co-conspirators.

He told my daughter that he was going to Little Rock to spend the weekend with some friends, and my daughter's roommate was going to take her for a girls' night out. The plan was for my daughter & her friends to have dinner in a restaurant off the downtown square at 5:30. At 7, they were to all walk up to the square to see the Christmas lights, at which time he would be waiting with a horse-drawn carriage. At the end of the carriage ride, he would get down on one knee in the town square, where family & friends would be gathered, pull out the ring that he had designed himself and propose.

By the time we met him on the square, the child was a nervous wreck. My daughter had almost seen him in town several times yesterday while he was finalizing all the preparations; the ring didn't get finished until the last minute; and my daughter & her friends were late going to dinner. Which meant by 7 pm, the carriage & everyone was waiting but my daughter & her friends hadn't started eating yet....and there was a nasty rainstorm fast approaching out of Oklahoma.

Finally we decided I would go pull her out of the restaurant with some cock-and-bull story about how Mike was waiting up on the square with her remaining Christmas present. We thought she might fall for it because we do still have one of her presents because it's too big to fit in her car (it's a computer desk), I had told her earlier that we were going to see the lights up on the square that night, and she had mentioned to me where she & her friends would be eating.

She totally fell for it. Her friends caught on pretty quick & tagged along, telling her they wanted to see her present. (Though their waiter was totally confused when her roommate shoved her debit card in his hand & told him they'd be back, they had to go see something) All the way up there she kept saying how she knew we were just teasing about the size of her present and how she knew it wasn't as big as we said. I'm cracking up by this time, telling her she's right, it's not what she thought. At all.

We get up to the square where Mike is standing with his camera and my daughter says "Ok, now where's my present?" Mike takes a step back, I point to the waiting carriage where her boyfriend, resplendent in his suit, is standing with a big bouquet of flowers, and say "Right there." She's totally floored and delightedly gets in the carriage with him....not really noticing that there's a small crowd trying to hide in front of the bank to her left.

They take off, and we all stream over to the designated spot. After an interminably long wait, the carriage returns. They get out and my daughter notices the crowd of family & friends...she looks at her boyfriend and asks "What are you doing?" He gets out the ring, goes down on one knee and proposes. She starts crying and accepts, the crowd cheers. After all the celebrating ended, she looks at him and says admiringly "You're good. I had no idea"....then accusingly points her finger at me "Mom! I should've known you'd be in on this!"

Heh.

So all in all, it went fairly well. The storm held off until after the post-proposal get-together at his grandparents, the ring was beautiful, and my daughter was completely surprised with a romantic proposal that she's always dreamed of. And we're getting what so far appears to be a hard-working, intelligent, mature young man for a son-in-law.

Not a bad start for the new year.