From all the advice I've heard about weddings, I think it's safe to say that pretty much everyone has a misstep somewhere in the planning process. Well I certainly had mine last weekend and it taught me something new about myself.

My new insight came during the mailing of the invitations.

Seems like something that's fairly simple and yet, for us, it has been the most complicated part so far. Why so tricky?

Well it turns out I not only stink at math, my manners are pretty bad too. And that combo did not go over well with my mother.

See my mom has amazing handwriting. So good in fact that I insisted she write out all the invitation envelopes for me. (She was cool with it, it was not forced upon her I swear!)Her issue came with my lack of proper names on my invite list.

I guess I'm not good with calling people by their given names. My guest list had a lot of Mikes, Jenns or Als. Not Michaels, Jennifers or Alberts. Not good enough for my mom.

Admittedly she does have manners that are light years ahead of mine, but I didn't realize how bad mine were until we had these envelopes to fill out.

See not only do you need proper names to make my mom happy, but proper titles for them too. She was very particular about who was a Ms vs Miss, if a couple wasn't married it was important to know who's name should go first. All sorts of things I had never thought of before.

Luckily there is an app called Emily Post mobile. And much like its emilypost.com counterpart, it offers etiquette tips for all occasions right when you need them. It was a bit of a life saver.

Sadly nothing could save me from my lack of math skills. Or really my lack of common sense.

When I ordered these invites my mother so kindly addressed for me, I used my invite list as a gauge for how many to get. So with 100 names on the list, I ordered 100 invitations. So stupid!

I did not at all think of that fact that these names are mostly pairs of people coming together and therefore getting one invite. So needless to say there are a LOT of extras. Nearly 40 of them in fact.

So what do you do with 40 extra invitations? I have no idea. I guess I have plenty for framing and scrapbooking, but then what? What can I do with these invites I so stupidly spent my money on? Presumably I am throwing them away (recycling them really) which kind of bums me out. But what else can I do?

But at least this means I now have some advice to pass along to other brides in the future. Though when I offer up my advice I'll probably just get some sort of duh! response.

 

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