Adorable Distractions!

Mr. Rye Bread and I have been engaged for over 8 months, now! It's hard to believe time has flown by so fast! In that time, we have finished grad school, opened a joint bank account (how lucky is it that WAMU didn't tank completely??), moved to Chile, started new jobs, got a cute puppy, got a cute kitty, started taking spanish lessons together, and absentee-voted! (DEFINITELY made sure to do that one!) Anything missing there? Yipes! Planning a wedding! :)

Before we get started, I have to include some

gratuitous furr-baby photos. Plus two makes us a family, now! Meet Beauregard! He's adorable. He's also known as Beau-bunny, Beau-tard, Mr. Beau-jangles... You get the idea. Pretty cute, eh? Yes, I have adorned his collar with floral goods! ;) Apparently, "teething" means "loves to eat hydrangea plants". I planted 6 hydrangea plants in our garden - slowly but surely, he dug all of them out! I planted more, and put up

a little barrier. When I got home, he had dug up 3, and one was in his mouth! So the little jer

k got to be a pretty little girl-pup for th

e rest of the day. Guilt is so much cuter on a puppy face. He's getting doggy training from a (probably the only) dog trainer now, though! Beau's a good obedient dog, he just has to grow out of the puppy bratty phase.

Then there's our kitty Georgina! (Very regal names, eh?) We bought Beau (who we're told is a golden retriever) from Coquimbo, and then a month later, our friend Matt found a baby kitten in a box near his house! Most cats and dogs in Chile live on the street - there are literally packs of domesticated/wild dogs roaming the streets!

Needless to say, these kiddos won the lottery when they were hand-selected by us! ;) Gina's very sweet, and loves to sit on everyone's lap!

She's definitely a lap-cat. Mr. Rye Bread thinks she should dance. And also thinks she's very, very tasty. What good are kitties if you can't squeeze them?

As you can see, we've had some pretty serious wedding planning distractions. We do have some things taken care of, though! We have a date! And a location! I'll leave the location results for a complete post - but the date is Sept 21, 2009! And... that's a Monday. We'll be getting to that in a bit, too. Having the wedding in September means we have 8 months left to plan. Moreover, I'm only going back to the states once before September - and that will be in Hawaii, in March, for work. Mr. Rye doesn't have any trips back to the states before the wedding at all. Let me clarify something from the get-go: planning a wedding is hard.. planning a DIY wedding is harder... planning a DIY wedding from South America is.. mind boggling. There's no paper store here! The only flowers they have (to practice making arrangements) are carnations, roses, sunflowers, and daisies. What's the name of my blog? Definitely not http://carnationsrosessunflowersanddaisies.blogspot.com. I tried growing hydrangea, but we both know how that turned out, now. There's more, but I haven't quite discovered it all quite yet.

Mr. Rye and I have decided to pace ourselves with the wedding planning - how much can you really tackle all at once, anyways? Thursday night is designated wedding planning night. We sit down, discuss one specific topic only, and move on! Thus far, we've had WPN (wedding planning night!) twice - I think it's working well! The first topic of discussion: write down a list of questions for the wedding coordinator/events coordinator at our location. They take care of food and lodging at the same place, so our list was quite long. It ranged from "can we have candles outside?" to "how many tables are there, and what are their dimensions?" (remember, we won't see the place again for 8 months!) to "do you guys have Parcheesi?!?!?"

The next night's agenda: How many days to take off work! Very exciting, I know, but when you need a full day each way to travel, you have 21 days in the year off (some of which you want to use to travel around South America during the year! Conference in Rio, yee-ya!), and you have to take into account time in Portland before the wedding for last-minute planning and after the wedding for the honeymoon, this conversation becomes really important.

How are you and your FI pacing yourselves in the marital-athon? Were there some things you wish you had planned sooner/later?