I got married recently, to who I view as the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on. Some say that it takes time for love to grow, for two people to share a love, before it is finally complete and everlasting. However, in my experience, that love is never finished. We have worked at it since day one, and we will always have to maintain a steady work effort with good ethics in order to make our love transcend all else. I proposed to my wife after we had been dating for three months. I took her to Fort Walton Beach in Florida for the proposal. I planned on leading up to it with a long speech on how much I’ve come to realize that she was the one for me, how I truly loved her and how I placed her heart above any other priority in my life, but I froze. There was no speech, no leading up to the moment. It was about 7:00PM on June 19th, 2011. We went out and ate at a very nice (and expensive) restaurant, the name of which escapes me at this moment in time. We had to wait in the bar for about an hour, because I was unaware we would need reservations. As we were there at the bar, I had a whiskey sour (my drink of choice, of course) and she had some mixed vodka drink, which I cannot remember the name of, but SKY vodka was used in it, I know that much. We kept ourselves entertained the entire wait, until we were finally seated in the restaurant. I was nervous the whole time, one because I wanted to get to the beach before dark and two because, WOW, I was about to ask this girl to marry me. We both ordered steak and crab legs, which was my first time ever trying crab. I have to admit that it was good but I doubt I’ll ever eat it again. I’m sure that throughout the dinner, she could tell something was on my mind (other than the obvious of a romantic getaway to the beach). As we ate, I honestly couldn’t even tell you what we spoke about. There were always so many things (and still are) running through our minds and our conversations. We did have to ask the waiter to take our picture, as we sat at the table. That very picture is framed in our living room now, just to the left of me as I write this. After we ate, (we had already spoken of getting to the beach and spending some time there before getting back to the hotel for the night.) we made our way to the beach. The skyline was perfect, the sun was going down, just barely crested over the horizon, the sky was a neon pink hugh. I honestly couldn’t describe how beautiful it was, or even how beautiful she was in her blue dress, which perfectly complimented the blue tint of her eyes. I choked on my words on the long speech I had prepared in my head and I merely told her that the day had been perfect and that she was, in every way, perfect at that moment. That’s when I knelt upon one knee, pulled the ring box out of my pocket, opened it ever-so-slowly, and asked her to marry me. She said yes, and my heart was beating so fast and from being so nervous, all I could do was smile. Well, it was less than a month after that, we found out that she was pregnant with our first child. At the time of this writing, he has still yet to be born but we are 19 weeks into the pregnancy and we know it’s a little boy. His name will be Grayson Isaiah Powers. There was much arguing over the name between her and I but we finally came to the conclusion and that will be his name. We learned that she was pregnant on July 13th, the very date of my birthday, I believe it was somewhere around 6:00AM. We later moved the wedding date up to September 24th, where we got married in front of many of our friends and family, in our yard, under our pine tree. I’ve had many happy moments in my life, but between the engagement, the pregnancy, and the wedding… this year has to have been, by far, the happiest year of my life.