We're Engaged!

After 4 years, 3 months, and 15 days of dating the most amazing guy on this Earth, I now have a fiancé y'all! We're engaged!!! This past weekend has literally felt like a dream come true and I am beyond excited to start on this new journey of planning a wonderful wedding and an even more amazing marriage with Joshua. 
I won't list all the details right now as I am working on a long post explaining it all because let me tell you, Josh planned the most perfect engagement day. Here are a few clues: the engagement process lasted 10 hours, expanded over 184 miles, involved our family and closest friends, and ended right in the location where Josh and I went on our first "date" before either one of us knew we liked the other! Not to mention, Josh had our sweetest friend Shelby, videoing and photographing the entire thing. Once we get the pictures and movie back from her, I'll do a more extensive post...for now a few cell phone pictures will have to do!

Josh and I cannot thank our family and friends enough for everything they did to make our engagement truly one of a kind! Thank you to everyone who has guided us and prayed for us over the past 4 and a half years, there is no doubt we would not be where we are today without each of you! 

Since I am on spring break till Sunday, Josh and I will be traveling almost everyday to get around the state (and Georgia!) so we can see some special people...I'm looking forward to every minute of it!

"Ways to Show Him Love" (Guest Post)

Happy Thursday Sweet Friends!
Today I am guest posting over at A Worker At Home :-) Ekk... my first guest post, so exciting! Katie has grown to be one of my sweetest bloggy friends over the past two months and I am so excited for her and her husband to be preparing for baby girls's arrival! So hop on over to her blog today to show her some love and read my first guest post!

A Worker at Home Guest Post

Five on Friday: Valentine's Edition

Happy Friday and Happy Valentine's Day! I'm excited to be celebrating one of the first major holidays of 2014 and even though I'm not at home, I'm sending lots of extra love back to my favorite people in North Carolina today. Today's a little bittersweet for me as this is the 5th Valentine's Josh and I have celebrated together but also the first that we don't get to be together. 502 miles separate us today but I can promise you that won't stop us from have a wonderfully long Skype date tonight! (Oh modern technology, I am so thankful for you!) So today I'm linking up with my favorite ladies for Five on Friday and I'm doing this post a little differently than normal. Today is all about looking back on the past five Valentine's I've spent with Joshua. Enjoy :-)
one// 2010

Our first Valentine's Day came a little over 3 months into us dating. We spent the weekend in Chapel Hill and got to experience our first snow fall together. We ate dinner at a Japanese restaurant and then had a snowball fight outside his Carolina dorm room. 
two// 2011

Valentine's Day number two was spent having Josh as my date to my sororities date function. The theme was "Famous Couples" so we went as the red and green M&M. Pretty clever right?
three// 2012

By 2012, Josh was interning as a youth pastor so we spent our Valentine's weekend skiing with 30 youth group members in West Virginia. Luckily no broken bones happened! 
four// 2013

Valentine's our senior year of college was celebrated with hearing the acceptance of Josh getting into grad school at Wake Forest! 
five// 2014 And since we aren't together today for me to snap a picture, I made Josh a little surprise montage of many of our pictures together. This is what I sent him earlier today, so if you have 4.5 minutes to spare you can take a little laugh at how much our looks have changed in the past five years!

Valentine's Day 2014 from Alyssa on Vimeo.

Happy Valentine's day to all of you, my sweet sweet friends! 

Flashback: The Start of Us

So if you read my post last Friday, you learned that Josh, my wonderful boyfriend, and I will be celebrating 4 happy years together later this month. I posted a few pictures of us together and posed the question for you to e-mail me with where you thought we met. Several of you responded and guessed college, a bar, and a basketball game. Well, none of those are even close so I thought today I would do a little flashback and tell you all the story of how we started dating...apologizes ahead of time for the possibly long and cheesy post! 


Flashback to the 60s/70s
Our parents grew up in the same community and went to the same high school. My aunt became high school best friend's with Josh's mom and still to this day do almost everything together.

Flashback to Easter 1994
When my parents got married in the 80s, they were the only siblings in both of their families to move away from their hometown. I grew up 2 hours northwest of my entire family and well Josh as well. Growing up, my parents and I would always drive down to my Grandparents church for any holidays and I would go into my Grandma's Sunday school class. Josh and his family attended the same church as my Grandparents and Josh was in my Grandma's Sunday school class. Well on Easter 1994 she captured a picture that she later gave to Josh and I; it is of us in her same Sunday school classroom. I guess you can say this is the first time we officially met!

Flashback to the late 90s-2000s 
Josh attended elementary through high school with all of my cousins and they all grew up together. He continued to attend my grandparents churn and my aunt always loved Josh and his younger brother. In high school, my aunt would always mention how she wanted me to meet this really great young man named Josh because he was perfect for me but of course growing up two hours apart from one another I thought it would be weird to have a long distance boyfriend in high school...so we never met.

October 2009
It was our freshman year of college. I attend UNC Charlotte and Josh attended UNC Chapel Hill. Our two schools were 3.5 hours apart and our paths had still not crossed. It was October 8, 2009 when I got the phone call that shook my world. I was getting ready to go to my first midterm as a college student when my aunt called to tell me she couldn't get ahold of my mom but Grandpa was being rushed to the hospital for having a heart attack. Little did I know at this point that my Grandpa had already passed away but my family didn't want me to be upset while making the four hour drive to where my family was. I quickly emailed my professors and rushed to Fayetteville, NC. When I met my family at the house I was told the news that I would never get to say goodbye to the one person who meant the world to me. 

Two days later the family was at the funeral home for my grandpa's visitation and that ladies and gentlemen is where I met Josh. Yep, you read that right. I met Josh at my grandpa's funeral visitation...I bet y'all never would have guessed that one! Shortly after the passing of my grandpa, Josh and I became friends on the big world of Facebook and started to message each other every few days. We finally exchanged numbers towards the beginning of November and on November 6th I went to UNC Chapel Hill to see my best friend in a play. I somehow remembered I had Josh's number and thought to text him. He agreed to meet me and my mom for dinner at [B]Ski's on Franklin Street and the rest is history. 

It took a few days for us both to get up the courage to tell one another we liked the other but I then began making weekly trips to good ole Chapel Hill since Josh didn't have his car freshman year. Right before Thanksgiving break we were on a little date night walking around campus. When we got to the intramural fields we stopped to look at the starts and then Josh asked if he could call me his girlfriend...the rest has been nothing but memories! 

So come November 21st we will have been together 4 years! And yes, if you've put two and two together we have dated long distance the entire four years...including SUPER long distance as I've been traveling the country this year! Josh graduated this past May and is now in his first year of grad school at Wake Forest University! Now that you've learned a little about "us" I'll share some pictures with you that way you don't have to keep reading words! Enjoy :-)