How We Met
Casdon and I first met in August 2018. During UVU’s Week of Welcome, there are several events that the school puts on to get students ready for the Fall Semester. One of these events is Freshman Convocation which helps prepare students for college life and get them excited about being a Wolverine! Usually, the president gives a welcome speech, they recognize UVU’s athletic teams and the cheer team performs the school song! After our performance, we rush to line the hallways with cheerleaders to escort people to the courtyard for dinner following the event. Just like the movies, we shake our poms and welcome people to UVU (;
As I finally get to the food lines to get dinner for myself, someone in the group of over average heightened humans calls out, “Hey do you think you could be all cute and get me to the front of the line?” It was a basketball player, but I didn’t exactly take much interest in which one attempted to hit on me, because I had a boyfriend.
Meanwhile, Casdon proceeds to do the “2 likes, then wait for a follow” strategy where he liked 2 of my Instagram pictures to see if I would follow him and then he would follow me back. Apparently, I followed him, so he took it as his cue to ask a mutual friend of ours on my cheer team to set us up. Our friend broke the news that I was dating someone pretty seriously and that it wasn’t going to happen.
Fast forward to January 2019, my previous relationship had recently ended and I was open to what was to come off the new year. After school had started again, I remember wrestling with whether or not to post a selfie manifesting my singleness or if I was still healing from my previous break up. I settled for a low key Instagram story that I put a poll on as an excuse to put myself out there. What a world we live in. haha But the poll was whether I should go to Universal Studios or Disney World when I traveled to Florida for Nationals with my cheer team. Little did I know that would be the spark to a conversation with the man of my dreams. Sorry for the cheese Caz (;
Apparently, Casdon has an obsession with Harry Potter… or possibly just Emma Watson, but either way, we started talking about Florida theme parks. As the conversation went on I was starting to feel like he wasn’t into me, but later found out that he still thought I had a boyfriend and was simply replying to encourage me to go to Universal Studios. hahaha “This girl is either really unhappy in her relationship or she’s single,” he thought so he went with it.
I ended up shooting my shot and he asked me on a date the next day. Turns out he was the basketball player that threw out the pick up line at the freshman event and I found out that he was interested in me months prior. We canceled all other dates and were with each other every day after that. There is no other way to describe the first 2 weeks after we officially met other than magical. We were  completely infatuated and could not get enough of each other. After dating for almost a year in January, I can say that everything truly does happen for a reason and God is totally in the details of our lives.
How They Asked
Casdon and I had found the ring we wanted all the way back in May. We were going to rush to get married in August, but decide that we were in no rush and were going to enjoy dating for another school year. As the holidays were approaching I started to wonder when he was going to propose. I told him that I was not easy to surprise and he took that as a challenge. THREE “special dinners” he planned telling me to dress nice and curl my hair that I thought it was going to happen. I joke that if he would have played me one more time, I would have broken up with him.
haha I finally insisted on him telling me when it was going to happen and he said the 26th, 27th, or 28th of December so I was content knowing I would be ready for it. However on Saturday the 14th he suddenly started showing extra interest in how my nails looked. He finally told me that we were going to another “special dinner” in Salt Lake on Monday that I would want my nails done for. Soon after this conversation, I got a text from Makenna Toolson saying that her couple for a shoot with Utah Valley Bride bailed and she needed us to fill in. I asked Casdon if he had anything to do with this and he played it off very well saying that he couldn’t have planned that.. “Her couple bailed.” So I was off his tracks.
On Sunday we had breakfast with his parents and then went to church. Afterward, we semi-coordinated our outfits over text and he was going to pick me up to go to the shoot. I noticed that he was wearing a pair of new shoes, but I just thought he was breaking them in for the next day because I was still under the impression that I had another special dinner to get ready for. In one of our first month’s dating he showed me these shoes and said that he wasn’t going to wear them until it was a really special occasion. So, be sure to check those out in the pictures (;
On our drive there I told him that I brought some options of rings that we could use for a fake engagement ring for the pictures. Â He kindly told me to bring them all and was probably dying that he was actually going to pull off the surprise. We parked and started walking along the trail to the photographer. We were chatting normally until I looked up and saw rose petals. I knew. There were pictures of us strung up along the bridge and before I knew it, he was down on one knee. He had planned the perfect proposal and completely surprised me.
