...After The First Meeting

DATING...

It turned out that Nate and Jo liked each other . . . quite a lot. In fact, on their second (yes, second) date, Nate came out with the bold prediction that if he and Jo had babies, they would likely have very blue eyes. While Joanna agreed that this would probably be the case, she quickly informed Nate that people simply don't say things like that on a second date (while secretly thinking that it was pretty cute).

On that second date, Joanna made a picnic, which they ate at a local park, and where they also played catch with her football. Nate was pleased to find out that not only does Jo not "throw like a girl," but she can actually throw a pretty darn good spiral!

From there, things moved along quite nicely. Joanna met Nate's family a few months later, spending Thanksgiving of 2005 with them on Cape Cod. And Nate spent Christmas of that same year with Joanna's family in Vermont.

In December of 2005, Nate had finished the coursework for his M.B.A. and so left Rhode Island and moved back home to the Cape while he hunted for a job. He and Jo weren't happy to suddenly be 2.5 hours apart. But since Nate was looking for jobs in the Boston area, and Joanna would be going to graduate school in Cambridge the following year, they knew the separation would only be temporary.

When Nate found a job in Framingham, about 40 minutes west of Boston, they decided to look for an apartment together near Cambridge, so Joanna would be able to easily get back and forth to her classes. The move went well, and the apartment they found (in Arlington) was lovely. Both their parents felt supremely happy because Nate and Jo emptied their basements of unused furniture in the process of outfitting the apartment. And Joanna felt supremely lucky because Nate took great care of her while she was super-stressed-out by schoolwork. He did a lot of the cooking that year, which meant that she ate something besides yogurt, cereal, and carrot sticks.


THE PROPOSAL...

Joanna and Nate started talking about the future very early on (see the reference to the color of their children's eyes in the first paragraph of "Dating"). After nearly two years of dating and a year of living together, they decided to make "the future" official. In March of 2007, they went ring-shopping together, hoping to find something pretty and sparkly. Nate was happy they went together, because he found out that Joanna wanted a sapphire, not a diamond, as the main stone. (Her sister, mother, and maternal grandmother all have engagement rings with a sapphire.) The two of them spent several weekends looking for just the right sapphire and finally found it near the end of April.

On Saturday, May 12, they picked up the brand-new, made-for-them, most-beautiful-ring-ever (!) ring, and headed down to Providence, R.I., for a day of getting engaged.

Now, there are some who are disappointed to hear that the day was not a total surprise to Joanna (she was even once asked, "Oh, so were you really disappointed that it wasn't a surprise?"). However, Nate and Jo thought that since they were going to spend their life together, they might as well start out by planning their engagement together.

They started off by going to the park where they'd had their second date. They played catch for a while (with a baseball this time, instead of a football) and then went over to the fountain where they had spent hours talking to do the Actual Ring Exchange (they decided to wait until after they'd finished playing catch, because somehow a baseball mitt doesn't show off an engagement ring to its fullest extent). Joanna put on the ring, and it fit perfectly and looked beautiful. Nate and Jo then roped some random guy into taking a couple of pictures of them and after that set off on a nice, long walk.

The next stop was (clearly) to get some ice cream at Ben and Jerry's. While they were there, they ran into a friend of Joanna's old roommate, Hannah, so she was the very first person they told about their engagement. After ice cream, they did some more wandering about, generally enjoying each other's company, before they headed to Paragon (where they had their first date) for an early dinner.

On the way back to Boston, there was much calling of friends and relatives to share the news . . . but for some reason no one was very surprised to hear the news (which Nate and Jo took to be a good sign!).