There was a moment of hemming and hawing. “We were going back and forth about entering. If we go through with this, it will be everybody up in our business. We were thinking, is my job going to be OK with this, should we do this, should we not?” says Schnitzer.

But Hainley really thought they had a shot. Their story was cute – when his company, Re/Max, was donating money to the school where she works, he walked into her classroom at the urging of a friend and was immediately charmed by the perky blonde.

He asked her to coffee. She did a little background check on him (she’d also graduated from the police academy, earning her the nickname “Kindergarten Cop”). He came up clean, and they were right on track to fall in love. Schnitzer came on board with the contest.

“What man doesn’t want to give his bride her dream wedding?” he says. “I was like, ‘Whatever you want to do, sweetie.’ Between you, me and the fencepost, I thought filling out that application was just going to be three hours of my life I would never get back.” And in what might not be his first lesson in his wife being right, they beat out hundred of couples to win!

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They’d get a million-dollar wedding without the debt – but that didn’t mean without any stress. Although neither of them is a stickler for details, Hainley says they “were on pins and needles” each time they waited for the results of the voting to be unveiled, wondering what their rings would be, what her dress would be – heck, even how she’d wear her hair. “It was all beautiful, so we weren’t worried there was something we couldn’t like; we just wanted to know,” she says. “More than I could have ever dreamed,” she says.

Download Moss 2010 For Windows 7. The other stress was that they only had five weeks from the time they won until the April 7 wedding day. Hainley had to prepare an extended lesson plan for her little students during her absence – “Because if the sub doesn’t do things the way I do things, forget it!”– and send out invites and narrow the guest list to the contest’s specified 98 people.

“Every person we had over that costs $350, so too many more would have put us right back in the position of being in debt,” Schnitzer says. But when the day came, it really was their dream come true. “I don’t think we noticed the cameras that much,” says the bride, whose tearful, heartfelt vows those cameras captured for all to see. “None of the intimacy was taken away from it. It felt so special and so real,” says the groom, whose awed expression as he saw Hainley come down the aisle deserved its closeup. Brides magazine and the tourism board for the Cayman Islands “rolled out the red carpet” for them – which was the only real problem. “I could get used to it!” laughs Schnitzer now that the couple is back in their normal life in Anaheim.