Preparations: Invitations

Invitations need to go out by Friday.

Now, to us it seems like the wedding is still sort of forever from now.  Six weeks?  Seriously?  You're talking to two people who are very tired of living in two different places.  Six weeks might as well seem like six months.

But to everyone else, that's the bare minimum for getting an invitation to a wedding.  So they're expecting them round about next Monday.

It turns out the biggest thing about sending out invitations is not actually picking out the invitations (we're not all that picky) or putting them together or even gathering the addresses...it was getting everything completely settled for the church and the hall for the reception so when we sent invitations we weren't saying, "Hey, come to our wedding.  Time and place to be determined.  We'll be in touch!"

We've had a guest list since July.  That part was actually easy too, though we found it had a disconcerting ability to keep growing indefinitely.  We've had a couple of months to think of everyone we might've forgotten.  We've had to keep close tabs on the list too, since the family budget is including two weddings in one year.  It's a good thing the family business is in good form this year, but Dad has had a few moments where he's said, "I have FIVE daughters!!" like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.

I'm digressing.

We've gathered almost all the addresses, set up an invitation (Elizabeth does beautiful work if anyone's interested in a good invitation designer), printed lots of test copies ("Nope, we like the watermark fainter than this - but that font is great"), decided to do most RSVPs by Internet form (it's an interesting innovation...we'll see how it works!), and gotten all the stamps.  But the real effort this week - and the major items we're very relieved to check off our list - has been finally settling on what we were going to do for a church and a reception hall.

It's not really a big surprise to any of us that we decided to go to Macomb Christian church and that we're having the reception at Crank's Catering's hall.  We've been pretty much expecting to do that for weeks, but we had to sit down with the family and make the final decision and somehow that kept getting put off.  Then there was a last-minute suggestion Ben's home church River's Edge Fellowship might actually have their building open on Monday the 28th after all (they originally told us - correctly - that it was unavailable on Mondays).  We spent a week trying to find out if that was true or not and it turned out that because the building is being shared by three churches, it's pretty tough to find a free day.

We also were setting up details of the reception with the folks at Crank's.  Since we're doing a dessert reception, we had to think about things a little differently than if we did a tradition dinner.  We didn't want to just have cake and cookies and call it a day: we're doing dessert instead of dinner because of the time, not because of the budget.  I think what we came up with (thanks to Aaron, Elizabeth, Mom, and Joy for all the research!) is going to be pretty neat.  But the details were pretty much only settled on this morning right before heading over to the hall to put a down payment on it.  After that we drove the five minutes over to Macomb Christian and settled things there, which means that...invitations need to go out tomorrow and we are certain today that the information on them is accurate.

Now if we can take care of the photographer, we'll be doing good.