Octavio and I met at Pi Phi's philanthropy in the Spring of 2007. I was randomly assigned as his fraternity's "coach" for the charity flag football game. As everyone knows, when you meet Octavio for the first time, it is memorable. His personality, spirit and great hair catch your attention immediately. After the philanthropy, we saw each other on campus a couple of times and then spent approximately 32 hours standing in the O'Dome getting to know each other better during Dance Marathon. During those long 32 hours, I had mentioned that I had given up bagels for lent (at the time I was eating a bagel at Einstein's almost every day) and was going to Starbucks at the HUB in the mornings instead. Sure enough, that Monday after DM at 6am Octavio walked into Starbucks and joined me for breakfast. He got my phone number and continued to meet me for breakfast almost every single morning for the rest of the semester. For those that know Octavio, you know that he does not willingly wake up early, so for him to come eat breakfast that early was truly impressive. The semester ended and I went back to Texas and Octavio went back to Miami for the summer. We talked on the phone almost every single night for hours at a time. When we came back to school that Fall to begin our Sophomore year, we hung out a little bit as friends and then pretty quickly we went on our first date to Ballyhoo followed by cold stone ice cream (no surprise there). We then took our ice cream to campus to walk around and stopped to sit by the Gator statue near Century Tower and that is where Octavio asked me to be his girlfriend.

We have spent a good portion of the last year traveling out of town almost every weekend, so when we decided to go up to Gainesville for Kristina's graduation in December it was with me dragging my feet just a little bit because we were going on 13 consecutive weekends of traveling out of town. We found out on the Thursday before the graduation that she was actually graduating on Friday afternoon and not Saturday like we had previously thought (we had been so busy traveling that we forgot to even ask what day it was going to be). We scrambled to try and get off work to leave early, but we couldn't get off work in time to make it to the graduation. I started to put up a little bit of resistance on spending 5 hours driving up to Gainesville since I was going to be missing the graduation and I was tired from being out of town so much. Little did I know, that the graduation was only one of the reasons we were going to Gainesville. Octavio being the amazing encourager of fun type of person he is, revived me and off we went to Gainesville.

We were able to make it to Kristina's graduation dinner and we spent the rest of the weekend hanging out with our friends. Sunday morning we left pretty early to go to mass, we said our goodbyes to Chris and Kellie, they helped put our luggage in the car, we hugged, everything was really normal. I had always just assumed that I would be able to guess when I was going to be proposed to based on how everyone acted around me, but that was not the case at all. We had planned a couple months previously, to take a walk around campus the next time we were in Gainesville. So we went to mass at the church next to campus and then walked across the street after to take a stroll through campus as planned. Since we were going to church we had dressed up a little bit, which was definitely well planned on Octavio's part.

We walked by some of our favorite spots on campus and reminisced on all of our previous memories of when we were at UF and eventually found ourselves walking up to the Gator statue where he had asked me to be his girlfriend 9ish years earlier. The setting could not have been more perfect. The morning sunlight was hitting the red brick buildings just right, the Spanish Moss was swaying in the wind and the bell tower was chiming it's beautiful notes, the only thing that was a little off was that there was someone taking pictures close to the statue. I was really hoping to have the campus, that was otherwise empty since it was Winter Break, to ourselves. When I turned back around to look at Octavio and tell him how I was annoyed at this guy taking pictures at our special spot, he looked at me with these really serious eyes and said "Are you ready for this?" and then got down on one knee before I had a chance to even say "Ready for what". He said a whole bunch of wonderful things, that all seems like a blur now and then asked me to marry him. Meanwhile the photographer who Octavio had hired to be there was able to capture the whole thing. We even were able to get some great pictures on campus afterwards. After the pictures we went back to Chris and Kellie's house to go tell them the good news. Much to my surprise, we were greeted at the door with streamer rockets by my family and a couple of our close friends. I don't think it really hit me until that point that it was all real and I wasn't dreaming and at that point when I was hugging my mom I just broke down in tears. I couldn't have asked for a more perfect proposal from a more perfect guy.

I think my favorite part of the story, which I did not know until after, was the story about how Octavio got the ring from my dad. I guess when he asked my dad for permission to marry me, they had coordinated the exchange of my great grandmother's beautiful engagement ring. Half way up to Gainesville we had to stop for gas at the Turkey Lake Service Plaza and Octavio needed to change out of his scrubs to clothes for dinner. Little did I know that my dad was waiting in the service plaza bathroom to meet him and give him the ring. So Octavio went in and there my dad was playing with the Dyson Air Blade hand dryer in the men's bathroom at the service plaza. We had hit a good amount of traffic on the way up to Gainesville, so apparently my dad was hanging out in the men's bathroom for almost an hour waiting. He didn't want to leave the bathroom in case we showed up and I saw him and ruined the surprise. I am sure he got pretty funny looks for waiting around in the men's bathroom that long. They were able to exchange the ring, which Octavio was able to conveniently put in the bag with his clothes and off we went to Gainesville with me none the wiser.