#postagefail

YA OKAY.  So I've been MIA on the blog the last little while.  It's tax season....back off!  Wait!  Don't go.  Please keep reading.....

The wedding is less than three months away, and while it's not too bad yet, I can feel the stress creeping up and ready to strike.  We're in the "three months before" category of our wedding checklist now and all of a sudden the number of items on the to-do list triples.  And inevitably, as soon as you feel like you've checked something off the list as done, it just reappears for you to "confirm" it again in another month or creates three more things you have to do.  Wedding planning is fun, don't get me wrong, but it can feel never ending at times!

I do have wonderful news in that we sent our wedding invitations out this past weekend.  Our stationer Ashley did such a wonderful, beautiful job, and I couldn't be happier with how they turned out.  Here's a peek!

Front...

Inside...

 

 

The whole beautiful set!

When I started addressing the invitations, I was filled with an overwhelming feeling of anxiety because first, handwriting on beautiful paper is nerve wracking because you want it to look perfect and second, I was deathly afraid we would miss someone on the list.  Thankfully my wonderful fiance put together a foolproof spreadsheet with all the addresses and guests and it was easy to double and triple check the list.  (Spreadsheet whiz....reason #6548 that I adore Eric!)

What I didn't anticipate was all the bloody problems we would have with postage!  (Seriously, who mails anything anymore.  Whatever.)  First of all, if you want to put a stamp on something and you go to a post office to buy a stamp, these are your choices:

1.  Gophers.

2.  The Queen of England.

3.  Winnipeg Jets logo.

Wow, really?  So I have to slap a rodent on our beautiful wedding invitations, fine, whatever, not a big deal.

Then Eric smartly realizes that the invitations, with their heavy cardstock, probably aren't going to be the same price as a normal letter being mailed due to their weight.  So after I've lovingly placed a gopher stamp on all the wedding invitiations, I take them to the post office and the girl working looks at me as if I'm just the dumbest human being on the planet and is like, "ya, they don't have near enough postage on them".  Wonderful.  So I go to buy 100 more gopher stamps (potentially bringing the total number of gopher stamps purchased to 200 more than I ever wanted to buy) and they are out of gophers.  What?  So now I WANT the gopher stamps and I can't even get them?!  This is what I've been reduced to?  At this point I don't even care anymore so ultimately, the invitations get sent out with the Queen of England mean-mugging three gophers on the upper right hand corner of the envelope.

So they all finally get mailed, and I start receiving text messages from our guests letting me know how nice they think the invitations are, and I start breathing a sigh of relief that my postage woes are over and everything has ended up where it should have.

 

Success.

Then Canada Post decides it's not quite through with me yet, and rears its ugly head again in the form of my reply cards.  Yes, reply cards.  You'd think with my views on mail as an old, antiquated form of exchanging information in this digital age, that we would have just went with email replies.  If not for one thing - I love getting mail.  And when the time came to make the decision to do mail replies, I just imagined myself sprinting to the mailbox like:

 

WE'VE GOT MAAAAAAAIL!!!!

So we include a return envelope stamped with a gopher with every invitation, and we find out that March 31, the price of stamps is going up from 63 to 85 cents.  WTF.  I don't know what bride checks to see if the price of stamps is going up anytime soon before she mails her invitations, but I sure as hell didn't.  So according to the dragon nice lady I spoke to at Canada Post, because our reply cards don't have a return address on them, if they don't have enough postage they won't be delivered and will be destroyed.  Destroyed!  Not even just, put into a pile somewhere at some mail processing center where I have a hope of actually recovering them.  Just straight up put in the shredder.  They open the envelopes, and if they don't have money in them, into the fire they go.  Greeeeeat.

So if you have received our invitation and you don't drop your reply card in the mail before Monday, I'm sorry to have to make you spend the extra 22 cents to send it.  I hate inconveniencing people so if you want to send us the news by Facebook, email or in person that's okay too! 

Oh and Canada Post?

Happy Wedding Wednesday!!!



~M

Change of A Dress

....I have a confession to make.

I wasn't really going to blog about this at all, because really who would know?  But in the spirit of being open about my bridal perspective on this grand adventure, here it goes.

I changed my dress. 

*collective gasp*

I know, I KNOW.  After I posted on the blog about how much I loved the one I chose, and then I posted AGAIN about how I didn't have any dress regret, I go and do this?  But before you start questioning my sanity, allow me to explain.

 

"This one?  Or this one?  Or thisoneorthisoneorthisoneorthisone...."

The original dress I chose was be-ea-au-tiful.  I loved it, I really did.  It had everything I wanted in a dress (which I would love to describe to you in excrutiating detail but I really want the whole thing to be a big surprise for my future husband!) and I was absolutely ready to commit.  In my mind, I already had committed.  I was in a common-law relationship with that dress, in the eyes of the wedding gods we were already bound, and buying it was simply a formality.

So when I returned to the store in early September to officially order and buy the dress, I put it back on to indulge in one last round of swishing and swaying before my dress search experience was over for good.  At first I was giddy as a schoolgirl, and then I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and there was one brief fleeting moment where I wondered aloud if the dress was perfectly flattering in all the right places.  After I said it out loud, and the bridal consultants and my MOB started looking at me critically and trying to assure me it was a good pick, my doubt grew a little.  Before I could try to even start discerning if I really was shying away from committing or if I just had a case of cold feet, the consultant said those taboo words, the words you NEVER say to a bride once she's picked a dress.  "Well we have a dress that just came in, from the designer's new line, if you'd like to see it."

 

"UM YEAH I WANNA SEE IT"

 

 

So then I broke the cardinal rule of wedding dress shopping, and tried on a dress after I had already made my choice.  And damn.  Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn.  New Dress blew Old Dress out of the water.  New Dress made Old Dress look like a stinking pile of garbage.  New Dress hugged me in all the right places.  Old Dress felt like wearing a potato sack.  Okay I might be exaggerating.  But it certainly wasn't that I didn't love Old Dress, it's just that I love New Dress more!  If possible, it was even more perfect and more gorgeous than the old one.  And then there was the whole "you're the first bride to ever try the dress on, I just took it out of the box yesterday, you'd be the first bride in Winnipeg to order this dress as we have exclusive rights to the line" thing that got me. 

 

 

 

"It's not you...it's me...."

 

 

So after trying on the new dress, it was pretty much a no-brainer.  I had to have it.  And I am happy to say that really, truly, honestly this time I've said Yes To The Dress and I'm 100% over the moon with my choice.  The dress is ordered, bought and paid for and just came in this past weekend, and it is every bit as gorgeous as I imagined!  I tried it on with the shoes and a lovely cathedral length veil and it was the perfect look.  So happy!!!

 

 

 

For real this time.

 

 

And that's that!

 

Eric and I met with our stationer a couple weeks ago and the invitations are picked and being finalized as I blog.  I will say, my fiance has great taste.  Anytime he gives his opinion on anything wedding related I always glow a little because he chooses so well!  And that's not even bride-speak for "he consistently chooses what I want him to choose", he really does give great input which is awesome.  :)

 

So to end this post here's a little sneak peek at what's cookin' over at Sweetness Stationery ....

 

 

 

AHHHHH I'M SO EXCITED!!!

 

 

Happy Wedding Wednesday!!!

 

 

 

~M