Joe Graceffa proposed to his girlfriend Elsa with help from a personalized book, a lobster suit and a classroom full of kids.
A man who wrote a book to propose to his girlfriend got a fairytale ending when she said yes.
Not only that, he pulled off the whole thing while dressed as a lobster.
Elsa Cremer was at work at Piper Preschool in Santa Monica, California when her boss asked her to read a story to the kids while she was recorded for marketing purposes.
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"They told me the book I'd be reading was written by a friend of theirs," she explained on YouTube. "What they didn't tell me was that their "friend" was my boyfriend Joe Graceffa and that he had written and illustrated the book with a surprise ending just for me."
As 21 kids listened in, she read the book, which Joe made through Mixbook.com with a coupon from his own website, and described the adventures of a lobster named Bobster.
Thankfully, she missed some of the big hints, Joe told INSIDE EDITION.
"The names of the author and illustrator were "Ivan Yutusayez" (I want you to say yes) and "Hope Tizworks" (self-explanatory)," he told IE via email. "I was really nervous that she was going to read those names to the kids and catch on before she opened the first page. But she had no clue. She says she was nervous because she knew she was on film, so she wasn't even processing what she was reading."
As Elsa neared the end of the book, she read: "Bobster got down on his lobster knee, he moved in close, he gave her a smile and asked..."
But as she turned the page, it looked blank. At that point, a large lobster appeared behind her - and it took Elsa a minute to realize it was Joe in disguise.
He dropped to his knee and finished off the last sentence by asking her to marry him. Elsa screamed as she accepted.
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Joe told INSIDE EDITION that he wanted to propose to Elsa at her school because "I couldn't think of any place that would be more meaningful."
As she teaches three and four year olds, he thought the children's book would be the perfect plan - but, as he worked on putting it together over the course of a month, he found it hard to keep quiet.
"I'm no amazing artist but I felt confident that I could draw some pictures that could meet the standard of believable children's book illustrations," he explained. "I did all the illustrations in pencil, scanned them on my phone, then colored them in using photoshop.
"The hard part was that I had to sneak around and work on it after she went to bed... and I had a few close calls when she came out of the bedroom in the middle of the night."
But it all paid off. Elsa shared the video of the proposal to YouTube, signing off: "The Happiest Crab in the World."
The kids weren't quite as excited, though.
"Elsa said they were pretty unaffected," Joe said. "She said, 'Friends, Miss Elsa is getting married! What do you think about that?' And their responses were like...'When is snack time?' 'Billy hit me in the neck!'"
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