My little sister is engaged!!
     Julie and Mitch knew each other from high school, but didn't start dating until after they had both returned from LDS missions. (Mitch - Guatemala, Julie - Jamaica) Over the coming weeks their relationship grew and I found out they had been ring shopping. It was coming!! Mitch and I began to plan out how he was going to propose. The original idea was to set up some pretty scene with lights and pictures at the Draper Suspension bridge. We even went as far as to hike up to it (Mitch, Danny, Jones and I), take pictures and hike back down. We went the long way and ended up hiking 2.5 miles round trip. All the while Danny and I kept falling in the snow! My apple watch was so proud of me that day! Ha! But then the very next weekend, a mutual friend of Julie and Mitch proposed to his girlfriend in that same spot! Mitch wanted somewhere unique. The ideas bounced around and we settled on Bell Canyon Park (where they had their first date and DTR'ed) same set up as the bridge, only with a snow cove. Then it changed to no snow cove, and then over to setting it up on Mitch's deck with lights. Poor guy kept running into hiccups with her schedule, but mainly it was with the ring! He had it custom made and it ended up taking a whole month longer than quoted. 

     Finally Mitch had the ring - but Julie was nannying a family for 10 days with intense schedules and no way to get her out of the house without her knowing what was going on. We had already started wedding planning, so Mitch really wanted to surprise Julie with his proposal. Finally we had a plan. Mitch would request work off on Monday (President's Day) but not tell her that he had gotten it off. (They only hung out on Tuesdays and Saturdays between their two schedules.) I would get her to the Draper Temple - under the guise of helping me with a blog post and then Mitch would be up there and boom! Proposal!

      I called Julie up on Sunday and asked if she'd be my human tripod and take some headshots of me the next day. She told me "probably" but that she might be hanging out with her best friend, Ashley. After I got off the phone with her I got ahold of Ashley and filled her in on the details. We were a go. Monday rolls around and I show up to my parent's house at 5 to drop off Jones and pick Julie up. She wasn't home yet. When I finally got ahold of her she said she was coming, but she "didn't look cute" and giggled. I thought, "oh crap! She knows!" Playing it cool I asked why it mattered if she looked cute? This whole time she thought I was taking headshots of her! I corrected her and said, "The headshots are for me! I don't care if you look cute!" Crisis averted. She came home and off we went. Apparently she had forgotten all the key points to our convo we had on Sunday because she asked where we were doing the pictures. I didn't want it to sound suspicious that we were going up to the temple, so I told her that I was working on a blog post about growing up LDS in Oregon and wanted to take pictures at the temple since everything is so dead and it's where Danny and I got married. She bought it. Knowing Mitch wanted to have rose petals at "the spot" I decided to lay a bit of ground work on our drive up there. I told her that my friends who I usually shoot with were all busy - that's why I needed her, and that funnily enough, one of my friends had shot bridals there this morning. 

     We arrived at the temple and I parked on the predesignated side. Needing an excuse to get to my phone, I had Julie do an Instagram story with me saying how we were going to take some headshots! Then while I was tagging her in it, I flipped over to text and let Mitch know we were there! We started casually walking up the sidewalk. I'd find some good light and have Julie stand there while I metered and got my light right and then we'd switch and she'd take my picture. We did this a couple of times before I said I wanted some in front of the temple. As we neared "the spot" we could see rose petals scattered about. I laughed and said something along the lines of, "oh how funny! My friend said her bride squished a few flowers on her bouquet while they were up here" Julie agreed and commented on how weird that they hadn't blown away! ha. While we were in position and waiting for Mitch, nothing happened. The wind and snow were too loud for them to hear our voices. I started stalling big time, saying that "my camera was extra slow in the cold," "let me just check my settings," etc. At one point I even had her do a high school musical jump in the hopes that Mitch or his sister would see that we were there. I finally had the bright idea to blame my dogs. I told Julie my watch notified me of movement in Jones' room and that I needed to check to make sure the dogs hadn't gotten into something they weren't supposed to. I quickly texted Mitch, "Ready?" to which he responded "Yeah. Go by the roses." I led Julie back to the flower petals and said something like, "It'd be funny if you threw a bunch of petals in the air and then started twirling." My clueless sister unquestionably obliged. As she spun, Mitch popped out and walked over to her. When she registered what was going on, she yelled, "You're not at work!" Mitch got down on one knee and asked for her hand. They were engaged!! We hung out for a bit to take pictures and then we went our different ways. They were almost down the hill to 13th when I called and made them come back. The sun had peaked out of the clouds and was lighting each snowflake. It looked like a glitter storm. They came back and we took a few more pictures. We are all so excited to have a new brother in the family! Congratulations Julie and Mitch! We all love you!