October!

I LOVE October and have been anxiously awaiting it's arrival. As I was driving to work this morning it dawned on me that this would probably be my ideal month to get married in, except for the whole getting engaged in May and wanting more than a five month engagement.. well, and the whole college football rules our lives in the fall and between my Texas games, Mark's OSU games and my family's Tech games, we would never find a weekend that would make everyone happy! But I am excited to celebrate our future anniversary this month because it's finally really fall! (We celebrate the 10th of each month as our "future anniversary" because it's super fun and it makes the counting down to the wedding seem to go a little quicker, when every month there's a day to look forward to.) This month we'll be in Austin on the 10th for some UT football and a delayed engagement celebration with Miss Sadie Caplan.

October is also my official start of Operation Get My Bridal Booty Into Shape. My handy dandy wedding checklist recommends starting your workout regime eight months out, but since I am anticipating failing at this for awhile, I am going to go ahead and bump it back to nine months out. I certainly sent September out with a bang: we ate at Texas de Brazil on Tuesday and then had McDonalds TWICE for dinner last night. Seriously, we grabbed a burger around 7:00 and then hit it up again for a full blown meal a couple hours later. I checked the scale this morning and yeah.. it turns out its pretty easy to gain weight in a week. Let's see how tough losing it is!

To prove to you all that I am serious about this whole workout plan, I took the ultimate plunge and enrolled in a Boot Camp class that starts next month. It meets three times a week for six weeks and I am slightly terrified of it. I'm going to spend October getting ready for the pain that I know is coming (is it silly to work out in preparation for a work out?). It will end just in time for Christmas, where I'm sure I will promptly reverse all the good I did, but here's to hoping not!

October is also when wedding planning will finally really get kicked off! Yesterday Mark and I met up with the WP and her fave DJ. We went into it thinking we'd talk to the guy for 30 minutes, then maybe go check him out at a wedding later before deciding if we wanted to hire him. But, we ended up talking to him for an hour and a half and leaving with the feeling that he's our new BFF and asked him to go ahead and send over a contract because we were SOLD. He's just what we're looking for - not cheesy, totally normal, promising to build up the energy throughout the night and swearing he will not play Brick House or We are Family.

The WP gave us a fantastic calendar she made up for us mapping out what we need to be working on month by month. On the agenda for October (among some others): find a DJ (check!), look for a dress (more to come on that soon) and take our engagement pictures (so excited about this one!). Mark loved the calendar/To Do Lists (he loves a good list) and I was glad to call my mom with some specific tasks for us to start working on.

After our time with the DJ last night, we raced up to McKinney to meet with our sponsor couple from St. Gabriel's to start really discussing the results to our compatibility test. We covered the first four areas of the test and we actually scored a 100% on one of them: Friends and Interests. So Mark and I are pretty much in agreement that our friends all rock and we both feel totally good about each other's interests. It was really so interesting to look and see how our answers to certain questions differed and it really got us talking about some aspects of our relationship and communication styles that differ from each other. Nothing was a big surprise and the couple we are meeting with were really great about sharing their own experiences in their 20 year marriage and how they have learned to make their conflicting traits work well. I also had one of those "wow this is really happening" moments when they were reading a passage from the Bible about marriage and I started imagining being in the church on our wedding day, actually getting married.

We've got a lot coming up and I'm thrilled to get it all started!