ducksandbooks

Videographer

Starts at $1990 for this videographer and goes up from there, though I’ve found videographers I don’t like as much that will record just the ceremony starting at $550. I REALLY want someone to film the ceremony, and well, not just with a decent camera on a tripod. Oh well, its SO not in the budget. That’s basically canapes (yes, since we’re not serving cocktails I’m not calling it the cocktail hour anymore). Do I feed our guests, or film them?

Babysitter

Starts at $150 for 2 hours. I’ve held of on addressing invitations to friends with young children because we haven’t decided yet if it’s worth it. There are going to be 5-8 children, ages 2-8, that might utilize babysitting. My mom is worried that without a sitter, many of them will be missing their nap times and might have meltdowns. Otherwise, I was going to give them each a coloring/activity book, non-toxic washable crayons, and a small toy.

After Party

We need to go in and talk to the manager and price this out. Its something that I’ve been hoping that we can do, since we’re having a luncheon wedding and want to have time to hang out with our friends. I figure we can cover the first round of beer and some ballpark pretzels or spinach and artichoke dip. The budget for this is $400, or roughly the cost of the hot cider we plan to serve with the canapes…..

Sadly, Ben doesn’t like the image I spent a lot of time on yesterday :(

The plan was to print it on iron-on paper and use it on the welcome tote bags. Time to figure out plan B.

Can I please have the 5 hours I spent tracing and coloring this back? Please?

This is the battle I fight with myself every day.

I’ve started to address our wedding invitations. I’m about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way through, as of tonight. Boy am I glad that we got extra envelopes though, I think I mess up about 1 in 7. I’ve also discovered that I have trouble with double Ns, like in Vienna, or Minnesota. They just turn into never ending, undulating doodles or get mooshed together into a 4 humped M. Oh, and I somehow forgot how to write most of the capitol letters and am having to re teach myself.

Yes, I know I don’t HAVE to address them in cursive, but my regular handwriting looks too pedestrian and I tried printing/tracing fancy script on, to get perfectly centered addresses, but tracing addresses is really hard! Even when I found a font that looked like my handwriting, only more evenly spaced.

If my handwriting on your invitation is less than A+, please keep in mind that I’m not sure that I’ve written anything in cursive since the 8th grade (after that all my school papers were typed at home, or written in pencil for exams).

Thank you Franklin Sherman Elementary and Longfellow Middle School for teaching me how to write well and making me use it enough to remember 15-20 years later. Once I’m done, I don’t think I’ll ever have to write in cursive again, unless I really want to.

Stamps should arrive any day now, so hopefully I’ll get the invitations in the mail early next week. That gives people FIVE WEEKS to respond. Don’t make me send the invitation ninjas (our moms) after you for not RSVPing! If you want to keep your card, let me know, and I’ll send you another, OK?

I knew that our envelopes were square and that it would mean we’d need to pay an extra $0.20/envelope because of that, what I didn’t calculate was that by adding inner envelopes, the invitations are now over an ounce!!!! That means it now costs $1.05 to mail our invitations, and I somehow forgot about postage for the responses too.

At least the postage options are pretty for large denomination stamps (though they’ll all need supplemental postage):

And $2.08 to mail them internationally. Crapola.

That’s almost $200 in postage that I forgot to plan for. *&^#%$@!

Many of my best gal pals are coming out to Denver in 3 weeks just to celebrate with me! It’ll be my belated-birthday/bachelorette party! It’s going to be awesome.

The only thing that won’t be awesome is the fact the I feel guilty about going out and having fun while Ben is sitting at home, eating ice cream and reading fan fiction online -obviously by himself.

I know it’s his idea of a relaxing evening at home, but I don’t want him to relax at home, I want him to go out and have pizza and beer with his guy friends! The problem is that most of his guy friends are from work and he doesn’t really want to see them on the weekend unless they’re eating sushi and singing death metal karaoke….. Maybe I’ll email them behind his back and strongly encourage them to go out for sushi/karaoke night while I’m out with the girls. No, I’m not his social secretary. I’ll just keep pestering him to plan something for my sake, so that when my girlfriends ask what he’s doing that night, I don’t have to tell them that I left him home alone, with ice cream and wifi.

I’m starting to work out a system for addressing our wedding invitations. So far, I’ve only messed up 2 of the 5 I’ve addressed. I only ordered 20 extra envelopes, so this is not looking good…. I did change my system, a lot of the addresses in my list/printout had abbreviations on them (St. Dr. Cir, state names, etc.), I’ve now fixed all those and re printed the list.

My other problem has been with the embosser for stamping return addresses. It’s cast slightly crooked and if I try and stamp while sitting it doesn’t always have a clear print of the top line. No bueno.

And, just to obsesses a little more about the invitations, they came with tissue paper that I could place over the invites, but I’m only placing them over the response cards, to prevent the glue from the envelop getting stuck to the card when I mail them to ickystickyhot places on the East Coast, where they have problems like humidity (I am -so- glad to be back in Colorado).

Before I forget, I’m going to remind myself, here for you all to witness, that I need to use a pencil and lightly number the RSVP cards, just incase someone gets so excited to tell us that they’re coming, that they forget to tell us who they are.

Invitation to-do list:

• decide if we’re inciting our friend’s kids or not, and if we are, hire a babysitter
• get stamps for response envelopes
• have an assembled invitation weighed to find out what postage is needed
  • look at postage options and buy the least ugly one
• stamp/emboss more return addresses (friends, you get the uglies, sorry)
• decide if I’m going to stamp inner envelopes w/ cute little motif
• number the backs of response cards with a pencil (number must coordinate to number on invite list)
• add the Obamas, the Ritters, the Udalls, Dr. Steven Chu and guest, and anyone else cool I can think of to help use up all those extra invitations (Ben’s secretly hoping Dr. Chu will come, since he’s friends with his PI)

Our invitations came in the other day, but I’m still down in Peru (ostensibly to help my mom pack out her apartment down here) and Ben opened them without waiting for me. I’m not terribly upset about that, but I am annoyed with the fact that we got extras for free. If I’d know we were going to get free extras, I would have ordered fewer! They’re printed in batches of 25, and I ordered 150, knowing that we’d need 120 and that 125 was too close a call for my comfort. Bugger. That would have saved us something along the lines of $40!  Grumble….. We could have used those $40 elsewhere in the budget!

Oh well, I’m excited to see the invitations when I get home! Look for yours in the mail some time in mid August. Now, I just have to decide if we’re inviting out friends kiddos or not. I’d really like to, but my mom is against it because then they’ll miss their nap times and might not be the little angles I know them to be when their schedules are not disrupted.

Really, I want photos like this one, from my friend Jennifer’s wedding a few years ago:

cello player friend, her baby, Jennifer & Jonathan

But I’ve seen two very interesting things while surfing the internets from South America

1. If anyone else likes my dress as much as I do and wears a size 4 in dresses at Ann Taylor, you can now buy one for yourself, and name your best offer on the weddingbee boards
2. Our photographer has put up some of our favorite engagement photos, but for some reason Ben’s been renamed Brian…. I’m not sure if there’s a reason for that or not, and I haven’t asked. I’m chicken. click here to see us