How We Met: Isaiah and I met during my sophomore year in high school. He was mostly a person I’d see in the hall often, we’d exchange friendly hugs but that’s was it. During his senior year and my junior year, he went to a different school. I saw him at a party and we pretty much started hanging out after that, as friends, but later turned into something else, which I really didn’t expect. I was a senior by the time you’d say we were dating.
We had our first child when I was 17 and he was 18. We were young and of course the families weren’t expecting that type of news at a young age. We decided we wouldn’t get married at that time or even when I turned 18 because we didn’t want a child to be the reason for a marriage. Jump 4 years later (I’ve known him for about 7 years) we had a 2nd child and we were one happy family. Our surrounding family is proud of us for sticking together and raising our beautiful children at such a young age.
how they asked: I’ve been wanting to get married and he said he’d propose, he just didn’t know when. There was one time, I was looking in his jacket pocket for the car keys and I came across a ring box, he saw me and frantically took it away and didn’t say anything about it. I just brushed it off, but I mean I was pretty darn excited because he finally got the ring. I didn’t open it because I didn’t want to ruin my surprise of the seeing the ring once the time came.
I set up to get family photos done, because I wanted to have some up in my home and to share with family. I just went to the session only expecting to get our family pictures done.
The whole thing is kind of a blur, but I remember going through this aisle of flowers in the Point Defiance Rose Garden with Isaiah to do a couple photos of he & I away from the kids.
I glanced over at my daughter running the opposite direction while Isaiah was in front of me, and when I turned back to face Isaiah he was down on one knee.
Stephanie our photographer was just as surprised as I was. He told me how much I meant to him and he wouldn’t have anyone else be the mother of his children, water started to fill my eyes and my heart was racing. I was like “oh duh…he’s proposing” I was in shock, but so excited that he couldn’t have timed it any better.
Later after the session he told me that he thought it was a good time to ask because I love photography and there was nothing that tipped me off about him asking, so when he did, Stephanie captured all my surprise!
Photos by Stephanie Jarstad