Sometimes, you get super lucky and you get to marry your best friend. I was this lucky. I think it's appropriate that the first post on our blog is about our beginning - from both of our perspectives. We will try to keep it short and sweet :)


Brett and I were in the same singles ward in 2010, but he was dating someone else so I just admired him from a distance. Luckily, in 2012 we were both working in the same office on campus at Utah State University. We were both dating people on and off during this time, so we were just good work friends. However, about two weeks before I graduated and moved away, Brett finally asked me out on a date! He took me to Panda Express because he knew it was my favorite restaurant. He knew how to woo me!

Our second date was fly fishing up Logan canyon and this is the date that Brett claims he fell in love with me. For me, it was our third date - hiking up Bell Canyon. It's safe to say that since then the two of us were pretty inseparable, even though we were living 100 miles apart.

We had been dating for about 2+ months when the idea of marriage came up. It was just a no-brainer for me. Of course I wanted to marry him! He was my best friend and I couldn't imagine not having him in my life. Brett felt the same way. So we started *secretly* planning our wedding. We didn't want to announce it until we officially had the ring which didn't come for another 2 really loooong months.


I was planning on going up to Logan on Wednesday night to go canoeing with Brett, but he called me Wednseday afternoon to cancel because he had to go into work late that night for a conference call with some Japanese partners. Or did he...? Nope. He was being sneaky and picking up the ring. So we planned the canoe trip for Thursday.

Thursday night I get up to Logan and we take the canoe out to Benson. It was sunset and we were totally alone - super romantic, right? We paddled around a little bit and Brett pulled out his fly rod to do some fishing. He tied his fly and threw a few casts, and then handed the pole back to me to reel it in. I said no initially because I was a little nervous. The canoe was really wobbly and I had finally found a comfortable place in the canoe and I was afraid that if I reached forward to grab the rod that I would tip it over. But he asked me again to please reel it in and he was so sweet about it, I just had to do it! As soon as I started reeling it in I realized "Oh my gosh... this is it!" and sure enough - there was a ring tied to the end of the line! (For the record...it was a fake ring. He pulled the real ring out of his pocket). He knelt down in the canoe, and proposed. It was perfect and I will never forget that night for as long as I live.



She was hot, so I married her.  Just kidding.

Years ago when I first returned home from my mission in Spain, I happened to move into Abby's ward.  A friend of mine pointed out that "there are some girls out there that are just genuinely kind and sweet... like that Abby girl." I thought to myself "you know, you're right.  That's what I want, something like Abby." At the time, I didn't realize that it WAS Abby that I wanted.

A year or so later, I walked into the Intellectual Property Services Office at USU for my first day of work. I walked in to see Abby at the receptionist desk. I recognized her and I thought "Hey, she's a cutie." As the months passed and we moved to a new office, we eventually got to work in the same room and had part time work schedules that overlapped. The more time I spent in that office, the more drawn to her I felt. I really just had to be around her and talk to her. The problem was, we were both dating other people at the time and I couldn't work up the moxie to make any kind of advance.

By the time she got a job offer and decided to move an hour and a half to the south, I thought it would be a good time to ask her on a date. What can I say, I've always been a bit of a procrastinator.  On our second date, we went fly fishing up logan canyon.  That's right, I'm talking about Abby, in waders, with the canyon breeze blowing through her hair.  I was finished.

After many more dates and a trip to disneyland, things had progressed to the point that we decided to get married.  It was the easiest and best decision I will ever make.  I had never met someone so kind, warm and thoughtful than Abigail Soderberg.
The Proposal:

Once the ring came in, I put together a plan for the proposal.  While my plan seemed a bit more magical in my head, it certainly could have gone much worse.  We took a canoe to Benson Marina in Cache Valley along with some fishing gear.  Abby was a little uncomfortable with the weird crawfish floating in the water, the rocking of the canoe and the fact that I put my hand in vomit (not ours) to get the canoe off the dock into the water.  Nevertheless, she agreed to get into the canoe to humor me.  We paddled out, ate a quick lunch and stopped to fish for a minute.  I reeled in my line and said I had to put something on the line that "would sink a little bit".  Discretely, I attached a dummy ring (not the real one, I'm not that dumb) to the end of the line and threw it out.  I turned around and asked Abby to reel it in ;)  I was surprised at how reluctant she was to do anything that would require movement of any kind in the canoe, so I had to be a little... insistent.  She finally took the rod and reeled it in to discover a ring on the end of the line.

I carefully turned around in the canoe and knelt down on one knee (harder than it looks).  We each had to lean forward as much as we could to get a little kiss in before we paddled back to the dock.  It was hard to feel the romance of the moment when we were 20 feet apart in the canoe, facing the same direction, but even so, it was one of the happiest, most memorable moments of my life.

Before the wedding we faced our fair share of challenges, but I can't think of anyone better to go through it with than Abby.  I couldn't be any more in love, and we are just over-the-moon happy to be married and sealed forever.