A huge thanks to Good Times Productions for the awesome video – we can’t wait to see the full DVD! :)

Here’s a cute photo of some clownfish from the aquarium tanks!  These are my favorite fishes – why?  Not because they’re Nemo fish, but because they’re so cute and cuddly and like to swim in the anemones.  Oh wait… It’s really cause they’re Nemo fish…

And here’s Alexa’s favorite aquarium attraction – the sea otters!  He was quite playful :)

BTW, if you were curious where we got the photobooth, it was brought by the amazing ladies of 321 Foto.  We absolutely loved having them at our wedding!

And we’d be remiss if we didn’t put one of our fave photo strips up from the evening.  Sorry, it’s just of us two, but we thought it was crazy fun!

And last but not least, we wanted to introduce you to our newest family member: Streamer Baby!!!  During our Grand Exit, so many streamers came out around us that we got all caught up and the streamers tangled into a ball.  One of the groomsmen (we can’t remember who – if it was you – let us know!) threw the whole bundle into our getaway car!  Obviously we kept it and we’ve been carrying it around Vancouver taking pictures with it everywhere we go.  We’ll post the pics over the next couple of days, but for now, we just have one.  Introducing… Streamer Baby!

Here’s a link to all the info on Macy’s site: http://www1.macys.com/registry/wedding/m/gift-giver-promo

The promo ends April 15th, so I guess that means you’ve only got 2 more days – sorry we found out so late.

Yes, we’ve just used a lot of exclamation marks…

Here’s some more:  Don’t wait – book your hotel room now!!!

As with our Save The Dates, we hand made the wraparound address labels.  This time we kicked it up a notch, using our theme fonts, the same as on the actual invitations, and the background matches the berry-colored envelope liner.  See… now you know a little bit of what the invitations look like :)  A while back we saw a blog post by another couple who had separate male and female theme fonts, and we loved that idea, so you’ll see that used throughout all of the paper products from now until the wedding.  Call us geeks or over-planners or whatever, but we think it adds a neat extra touch that ties everything together :)  We’re still planning a future post that will share our label templates for anyone that wants to do your own fantastic labels – look for that in the next couple of weeks!

So anyway, those are our invitations!  Don’t forget to RSVP by May 1st!

We’ll leave you with a fun photo of us out on Whidbey Island from a few weeks ago when we had Ben’s parents visit – it was a beautiful day to drive around Western Washington and take in the views of the ocean with the mountains in the distance.  This is at Fort Casey, which looked to me like a great location for filming “24” (sadly, it’s been cancelled after this season, so that’ll never happen).  Views like this are just one of the things everyone who’s never been to Seattle can look forward to in May!  BTW, we also visited Deception Pass State Park on our adventurous drive – check out all the pictures on Ben’s Flickr page.

Let’s see, where to start?  Well, we celebrated Alexa’s Birthday and the holidays here in Kirkland a few days before Christmas, since we both flew home to spend the 25th with our families for the last time as “single” people (wow, kinda scary, huh?!?!)  It was great to be home with everyone, but it was a bit odd to be apart – we’re definitely looking forward to spending the holidays together next year :)  But to celebrate this year, we chose to make stockings for each other.  Yes, we actually sewed them!  And then of course stuffed them with fun little presents :)  We hung them on our improvised stocking holders (random wine bottles) and put them on our mantle.  As always, I’ve included a cute photo for you to see!

We also got our engagement photos back from Azzura, and put them up on our new photo wall.  It looks really great!  We can’t wait to add photos from our wedding. *Bonus points to anyone who can name where we got the fancy frame shelf.*

As for wedding planning, we’ve been super busy!  We’ve picked Fiore Blossoms as our florist/decorator, chosen our DJ, Wave Link Music, and our invitations are being designed by Dolce Design!  Check out all the people working on our wedding on our Twitter list: @APandBBetz/our-wedding-vendors. We’ve also been working on a few cool surprises and fun things we won’t talk about just yet.  Gotta have some suspense, right?  We did spend a nice afternoon at the Seattle Wedding Show two weekends ago.  Ok, yeah, not exactly a guy thing – really, I went to eat all the cake tasters :)  Oh, and to have fun with Alexa, of course!

There’s still lots more to do, and only a few months left!  We know many of you are interested in our registries – we’re furiously working on finishing those up, and should have them all set to go in a week or so.  We’ll be sure to post to the blog to let you know.  And someday soon, Alexa will start posting on here too – I know you’re all waiting on the edge of your seat!

Actually, we have a pretty cool story about our save the dates – we won them off of twitter from einvite.com!  And even better, we won the twitter contest just hours after also wining a charity silent auction at Get Hitched, Give Hope for our main invites.  So our save the dates are pretty cool, because we were able to get some awesome printing done for free :)  They’re navy Crane & Co. cards with white engraved printing.  For a preview, take a look at einvite’s blog post about them: http://einvitesinsights.blogspot.com/2009/11/alexa-and-bens-simply-gorgeous.html

But we couldn’t just stop at having cool cards, we had to do something fun for the addressing, too.  Alexa had read about these Martha Stewart-inspired wraparound labels on a few wedding blogs she follows, so off we went to the craft store to figure out how to make them.  Well, really, she convinced me to stop there on the way home from work, and I spent 20 minutes attempting to figure out what kind of paper a label should be printed on.  3 hours of fighting with Word’s mail merge feature later, we had some awesome labels printed, cut, sent through a Xyron 250 Sticker Maker, and voila! We’ll post the template we made in a future blog entry so others can make them, too!  The design on the label is inspired by 1960’s-era typography and a bold modern-retro background. 

After watching Mad Men and loving the fashion and style of the 1960’s that it illustrates, we realized that would be the inspiration for the look and feel of our wedding (wow, that felt like a UI design discussion…).  We use the term “swanky elegance” to describe the atmosphere we’re going for.  It’s not really a theme per se, but more of the bit of inspiration we’re using to help us envision our wedding.  Anyway, I don’t want to go into that too much right now, so I’ll leave you with a quick shot (on the left) of some of the finished save the date envelopes, from just before we put on the stamps and dropped them at the post office.  We hope you look forward to getting yours in the mail!