It’s March 17th. And yeah, it’s St. Patrick’s Day too but it’s also officially one month until my wedding. When did THAT happen? You know, it’s totally cramping my anti-bride style to have this wedding sneak up on us the way it has.

Ah, but the one thing that has propelled me to whittle away at the planning is a friend’s wedding. Or actually two friend’s weddings.

I arrived in Chile last July and my friends Emily and Sarah were both engaged and planning their March 2010 nuptials. In the beginning they were just two girls, nice girls, I had met who were planning on getting married. Cool, I could relate. Then as the months passed and we hung out more and more, their wedding and my wedding were always a focal point of discussion. “What does your dress look like?” “Did you find a hair and make up person?” “What was the name of that videographer you found?” “Oh – I got your invite! I love it!” Other friends here even planned co-bachelorette parties for the three of us, which was all kinds of a good time. As my life began to take shape here, so did my friendship with them and as such, the wedding planning paralleled and weaved in and out of our everyday encounters. So when I was there to actually WITNESS their marriage and see everything they had worked hard on planning (in terms of the actual event) it meant a lot more to me than I had previously imagined.

And both Emily and Sarah, were stunning brides.

I have to say, the good thing about being the last of the three to get married is that I have had two weddings to learn from and to get ideas from. In fact, just from attending Sarah and Pipe’s wedding, G and I completely shifted around the actual setting of where dinner was going to originally be held. All three of us are using the same photographer and hair/make up guy and based on what I’ve seen with Emily and Sarah – me likey!!! And it also confirmed for me all the beliefs I had about brides: it’s our day to shine, to be happy, to be nervous, to be pampered and to feel like the center of the universe next to our husbands.

So that’s my wedding wrap up on those I’ve attended in the last two weeks (yes, do the math… back to back wedding weekends!) Two very enthusiastic thumbs up! Fine holiday fun!

And I’m left looking around asking “Ok, who’s next? Where am I off to now?”

Oh. It’s me. :o)

All righty then let’s bullet point the list of accomplishments thus far:

– we have a theme (It’s a surprise for now but will blog about it post event.)
– we’ve sent about 95% of the invites
– we’ve registered for gifts at Falabella
– I’ve had one dress fitting, will have the second one in the coming week
– have bouquets
– have shoes and jewelry
– tasted our food choices and reserved the cake (yum and yum!)
– figured out our table names/descriptions
– have sent the “guest book” to be made (not the traditional guest book, mind you)
– have my hair accessories
– had first meeting with our fab-u day-of coordinator (the good news is that she’s organized and totally gets our style! The bad news, she’s more organized than we are! But that’s good too!)
– oh and picked out the music for the main ‘events’ of the wedding

Absolute need-to-do’s:
– confirm the tent size, price and layout
– confirm the music with Band/DJ
– confirm random shiz-nat which are far too many to write here but just know that we have exactly one month to get all our ducks in a row and right now it feels like these dumb ducks aren’t ducks but rather, wriggly little pigs that are running away from us. In other words, chaotic.

Oh but who cares?
We’re almost there!!
And let me tell you – it will ROCK!