First, I want to preface this by saying this is going to be a long post. But, there is a lot to tell! I won't blame you if you don't make it all the way through haha.
This weekend began like any other weekend. My boyfriend and I had planned to have a cookout with our friends and also go to the shooting range. I found out on Thursday that one of my cousins that I am really close to was having her baby! She had a little boy, and I told my friends and boyfriend that I might need to skip the cookout and range to drive home and see the baby. My friend tried to talk me out of going home and said she already bought all the food for the cookout. Eventually, I felt guilty for abandoning the cookout at the last minute and decided to go see the baby next weekend instead.
So, we started our day off at the shooting range in Vandalia. Here is our first target (left) and our friends' target (right).
This is me. I didn't realize my friend was taking pictures! That's my gun that I bought a few weekends back. :)
We had a lot of fun! Next up was the cookout. I made my dad's famous recipe pasta salad and it was sooo yummy!
I snapped a quick pic of "man bonding time" while they were getting ready to grill our food. Everything was SO good! :) We had hamburgers, hot dogs, pasta salad, and corn on the cob.
After we ate, my boyfriend disappeared out the front door for a minute. I said to my friends, I wonder where he's going, etc, but didn't think too much about it. He brought in a package from Texas and said he had picked it up from the post office and forgotten to give it to me. I recognized the sender's name as Raphaelle from Digital Nails. Boyfriend had asked me a while back to list a few of my favorite indie brands and he would pick me up some polish as a present for getting my new job. Digital Nails was on that list, so I immediately got so excited because I figured that's what this was. There were five bottles inside, numbered and boyfriend said that they had to be opened in order.
I opened them up in order and my first thought was, they are supposed to make a sentence, but it didn't make any sense lol. 1 was DeGrasses' Greener, 2 was Pandorica, and 3 was Dark Matter. I was not picking up on a thing. When I got to 4, boyfriend said it is a custom made polish, and it's name? Kelly! I was so excited - the polish is absolutely stunning and I was so unbelievably excited to see a one of a kind polish that Raphaelle came up with just for me!!
The last one was wrapped differently, in 2 layers instead of one. It felt a lot fatter than the others! When I finally got it unwrapped, I first saw what looked like a galaxy mani in a bottle and some ribbon. When I turned the bottle over, it dawned on me what the label said, and out of the corner of my eye, I see boyfriend getting out of his chair and dropping down on his knee!!
The next few minutes were kind of a blur, I definitely felt like it wasn't really happening and I was dreaming. Of course I said Yes! Then I spent the next few minutes piecing everything together with my friends and talking about all the little things that didn't quite add up that now made perfect sense. I couldn't believe my boyfriend - ahem - FIANCE was able to sneak onto my computer and find the ring picture that I had mentioned 3 years ago...and he found the EXACT ring! It's perfect and I could not be happier!
Here is how the package got put together...fiance took these when he received the package in the mail!
This is what the 5th bottle looked like when I unwrapped it. :)
Here's everything all unwrapped!
I love my ring!
We spent the rest of the evening relaxing and enjoying the cookout with our friends, and we had a nice bonfire going! We had giant S'mores and champagne. It was a truly wonderful night, it could not have been better.
Today, I got some swatches of the Will You Marry Me? polish that Raphaelle created for me!! It is the most amazing polish I have ever seen, and I'm not just saying that because I am biased lol. It's a million different colors in one, and the silver flakies in it makes it look like a starry sky.
It is so hard to capture the beauty of this polish on camera! It looks so much more amazing in person!! I tried to show all the different colors in it, but they still didn't all translate in the photos. :(
I took two photos at different angles in the sun to show some of the extremes of the color shift. Here is one showing the red/purple/pink shade...
And here is one showing the blue/green/tealish shade!
The color shift is stunning alone, but I really think the silver flakies made it! Don't you just picture stars at night?? I am absolutely in love with it! I used three easy coats for opacity here, but I can't wait to try it layered over black. I also want to conserve the polish, so I'll have it forever! :D
So, if you made it to the end - thanks for reading! I have to say thank you SO MUCH to Raphaelle of Digital Nails for making all this possible and for creating two beautiful custom polishes that were a major part of a wonderful proposal!! I'll be posting swatches of the other custom in a couple of days. (I don't want to take this one off!) And, thank you to our friends Ashley and Joe for helping with arranging everything and keeping the secret!! We couldn't be happier :D
<3 Kelly