Our Thank-You Cards

We got our thank you cards through our photography studio, and received them about 3 months after our wedding, mostly because I put off deciding which picture(s) to use. I got started on writing out our 185 Thank you cards Labor Day weekend and had them all out in the mail by the first week of October. I worked on them constantly...I felt like I didn't see Chris for weeks because I was always working away after work. The front of our thank you card had my favorite black and white picture from the church, and the back had a close up of our faces:

Front/Back

Though I suppose "etiquette" dictates I should have them out within three months, I am quite proud and happy with the fact that I got them out just under the 5 month mark. I had hoped to do them in 3...but such is life.

Many people asked me if I was going to have Chris write some of the thank you's or if I was doing them all myself. Truthfully? I wrote them all myself. Honestly, I preferred to write them myself. I have much better handwriting and for as time-consuming as it was, I had a method to my madness and a master plan to accomplishing the task at hand. I didn't mind doing them all myself and this was in no way anything that Chris demanded or expected of me. Many people told me I was crazy...but that's the way that it worked out for us.

So Chris' job was adding all of our return address labels, which I had made at vistaprint:

vistaprint.com

And also adding all the stamps to the envelopes

Source

Easy and mindless - but he still had a small part in helping me out. Getting the last of these thank you's out was a HUGE relief, and that is a project I am more than happy to be done with.


What about you? Did/Will you have your husband write some of your thank-you's? Or, will/did you do them all yourself?

STAMPS

Source

When it came to getting stamps for all of our invitations, we went to a post office one Saturday with our sample to see how much the envelope would cost to mail. I could immediately tell the woman behind the counter had no clue what she was doing. First of all, it took her about 5 minutes to answer us, she was pressing a ton of buttons on the screen, and at one point...looked up at the ceiling and starting counting off numbers as if she was adding up in her head. Then she pressed down on the scale with her hand, looked at us and said:

"ummmmm .81 cents"
I said...
-"really? you're sure it's .81 cents? For this one envelope?"
-"yes".
- "It says .81 cents right there on your screen? Can you show me that?"
-"ohhh...umm ok, hold on"

She then proceeds to go through the whole process again to get .81 cents on the screen for me to see. Chris looked at me and his eyes were saying "Do NOT buy .81 cents worth of stamps here, this woman is clearly an idiot." At that point...all the post offices were closed so we couldn't get a second opinion. But we drove over to Chris's office where they have a mailing machine. We put it on the scale and it said .61 cents. That made sooo much more sense to me. From everything I had been reading online and from what I've seen in other invitations that have been mailed to us, that's what I was expecting. What on earth was that woman doing? Did she think I had asked her for the total cost of the invitation + the weight of her hand??

Oy...So Chris's mom very generously took our invitation to a different post office that Monday to confirm that .61 cents was all we needed, and this different post office did in fact confirm this price.

Source

We got the pretty .61 cent cake stamp and got to work stamping our envelopes! The lesson? Make sure you don't get jipped by your local post office!

Another thing I learned: Nicole-Lynn at Seaside Smitten gave me the great advice to "hand cancel" the invitations when they are dropped off. This way, they are not electronically run through the machines which might damage them.

Again, because we got our invitations on a Monday night and were mailing them on a Tuesday, Chris's mom offered to take them to the post office for us. I wasn't about to commute into the city with over 100 invitations just so I could personally mail them. But, I did feel a little sad that I wasn't there for their release. I felt like it was my children's first day of kindergarten and I wasn't there to see them off. (Dramatic, I know). I asked her to have them "hand-cancel" the invitations...thinking they would take care of it when she dropped them off. Well...the clerk handed her a stamp and showed her a workstation where she could do them. Chris's mom proceeded to stand in the post office and individually stamp each invitation!!! I feel so bad she had to do that herself! She was definitely a trooper when it came to our stamps AND mailing our invites, and we can't thank her enough for helping us out with that!

Tomorrow, I'll show you our invites! And don't forget to vote in Wednesday's Wedding Poll: "Are You Changing Your Name?"