Certified Coordinated Bride Shakita

Journal Entry #2

Love and Basketball…Well kinda but not really…

June 11, 2015… The day I’ll never forget because it was the day my baby proposed.  Our journey started 12 years ago in a call center taking support calls to fix self-checkout registers. We worked on different teams, but we were obviously destined to meet.

It was all thanks to one of his co-workers who actually was trying to add me to his “crew of women” he had in the call center that he called his basketball team. He would always go back to Sredrick telling him he wanted me to be one of his starting 5 but I was tripping. His antics are what led us to take note of each other. To this day, Sredrick still cracks jokes about me being on the starting 5 line up (insert side eye here). Depending on which one of us you ask, the story of us actually meeting varies from there.  We created a magazine for our “Save the Date” and wanted to include a “how we met” story but we couldn’t agree on the details. So we did a “his story” vs “her story” instead.Fast forward to June 2015 and I was in for a surprise of a lifetime. While we have been together for literally forever, I still had no clue a proposal was on the horizon. We were in the mist of getting ready for our Hawaii trip for my niece’s college graduation celebration so my focus was solely on that.  Besides, I know Sredrick and he is not a planner, so I just couldn’t see him planning a proposal there…especially with the itinerary I was laying out. I mean when would he even have the time?  Needless to say, that itinerary and my appetite almost cost me the proposal!  Once we got there I had activities laid out for each day so there really wasn’t much time for him to sneak in his plans.  He would often make suggestions about doing these elaborate things but I always turned them down because they weren’t on my schedule of things to do or places to go and eat. On our last day he really pressed for us to go on a sunset cruise, just the two of us, but I was starving so we went to eat at Cheeseburger Waikiki first and then tried to catch the cruise. But we were too late, as the final booking time had just passed.  I was low-key excited that we missed the booking time because I ate too much and just wanted to go lay down in the room. If only I’d known that I was sabotaging what would be one of my happiest moments in life… I definitely would have passed on the pulled pork burger.The next day we all went out for one last meal before catching our flight back home. Sredrick was determined to execute his plan to propose before we left the island.  Little did I know, he had called the restaurant in advance and arranged for them to help him with the proposal.  When we got there, they already knew what I was going to order and had it cooked perfectly.  After the meal Sredrick asked me to come with him to the balcony to check out the view of the marina.  He escorted me to a private dining room where there was dessert laid out on a table.  I noticed a group of workers at the back of the room glaring at us, so as we sat down I began rattling off one question after another… “Is this for us?” “How did you get this back here?” “Why is no one else sitting back here?” “I thought we were going to see the view?” “Sed your going to get us kicked out, we are not supposed to be back here”. Cool, calm and collected as always, Sredrick told me to just sit down and chill. He explained that he wanted to spend some time alone before heading back to Charlotte. We sat down and began to discuss how much fun we had over the past 7 days. We reminisced back to 10 years prior when we took our first trip together to Hawaii and how much we loved being here.Sredrick slid an open ring box onto the table and I had to quickly transition my thoughts to what my eyes were seeing. All I could think to say was “Oh my goodness what is that”. He said “What do you think it is”. We actually went back and forth a few times in typical Kita and Sed fashion… It wouldn’t have been right if we didn’t take jabs at each other, even during a proposal.

He asked. I said yes. We kissed.  I cried (only for a minute though).

We finally made it outside to take pictures in front of the marina and all the workers were clapping and congratulating us. That’s when I found out about his whole plan and I was completely blown away that Sredrick was able to pull it together …at the last minute…and without me finding out. I felt bad about ruining his previous plans, but the thought and effort behind it all was more special than a helicopter ride or sunset cruise could have ever been. It was the perfect way to end the most amazing vacation ever. 

Until next time!