So the hardest part about getting married so far has been the Save the Dates. I can’t lie. I am super stressed. Between my freelance clients and my regular work and blogging and planning this wedding I am understanding the whole “you can’t do it all” thing.
The roadblocks seem funny when I take a step back, but when you’re living in them it’s pretty overwhelming. Just for kicks, here’s my experience so far:
1. I ordered the Save The Dates in June.. it took me long enough to decide on the design! Obviously I’m a design junkie, but I didn’t want to blow the budget on custom Save The Dates. (side note: it is difficult to abbreviate “Save the Dates” because the initials are “STD” ……….). I decided on a simple design post card, similar to our holiday cards. BUT I still haven’t sent them all out yet! Mainly because postage was hard to come by.
2. None of the stores around me have non-patriotic postcard postage. In fact, no one even had postcard postage. It was such a pain trying to find stamps I can’t even tell you. I work full time and it’s not possible for me to just take a casual 30 minute break to go get stamps. So I just ordered custom ones. So much for not doing custom things for the Save the Dates….
3. I gave up on the non-custom thing and decided to add just one more thing! I wanted the post cards to have texture so I also purchased a rubber stamp to put on the cards. But that was an added step that also feels overwhelming when you’re doing it alone. Advice I should have taken: have a girlfriend do it with you. During faux brunch I put my girls to work and between the three of us everything took all of 10 minutes. Too easy.
4. I was so rushed into ordering the custom postage that there is a typo on them. You know this if you saw my snaps on snapchat. I am an idiot. Again, during faux brunch we were able to cross this out with a paint pen, but that was also an unnecessary extra step that could have been avoided if I knew how to read. Oh, the struggle!
5. When finalizing our guest list, my fiance listed everyone out by first names (“Aunt Jane and Uncle John”). My in-laws provided last names only (“Mr. and Mrs. Doe”), so everything is just a giant puzzle. Normally I love an organizational challenge, but my fiance has a HUGE family. There are over 90 people on his side of the guest list, and most of his cousins have family names so there are multiple similar names, addresses, etc. Doing this for all those households is a lot. In hindsight I should have waited until we had every single address before starting. But I wanted to get a head start… which was wrong. Anyway, I’m considering hiring a virtual assistant for the day to help put all the addresses in a spreadsheet because I literally have no time or patience.
I really do love the design we ended up going with. I think the biggest thing I’ve learned so far is to get everything you need whenever you can get it. Don’t wait. We’ve been wedding planning for over a year, so everything felt like I was making moves too soon. Vendors looked at me like I was crazy for planning so far in advance. But now I realize first thought best thought: It’s ok to collect everything we need way ahead of time instead of rushing to get things done. Our checklist is dwindling – the main things left are for me to LOSE WEIGHT and set up hair and makeup trials. If you have anyone in NYC you can refer me to, pretty please do!
View our Married Morning Photos
View our Wedding Album