Save The Date!

The guest list wasn’t too hard to make. One thing I strongly believed was that everyone should have the option to bring a plus one since they’d be travelling out to PA and I would want them to feel as comfortable as possible—boyfriend or not. I stuck to that in the beginning. 

If I’m being honest, I don’t have that many friends, so my end of the list was easy to make. I knew who I wanted there. My fiancé has good friends and also made his list pretty quickly. I was actually shocked when I read his over because he had people listed I had never even met before. I mean, in the five years we’ve been dating he hadn’t seen these people, so why would we invite them to our wedding of all things? Then I realized maybe I wanted to invite some people I hadn’t seen in ages who had been really close friends growing up in hopes we could reconnect. If someone had been a big part of his or my life growing up, we could gladly make room for them at our wedding. 

My soon to be mother-in-law had to give us the list for his side of the family, as my fiancé wasn’t even sure who all to include since his family is more spread out than mine. Once we had our final list together, including all of my family members and some of my mother’s closest friends I knew from growing up, we sent it over to my parents to be “reviewed”. I think we had about 150 invited with the expectation that not everyone would be able to make it. 

When they got the list, my mom ended up calling me one night with my father and I can specifically remember her asking me “who’s this” to pretty much every person we had on the guest list- including all of his family members! Some of the names she asked about were people she knew which was even more annoying. We definitely reduced some of the “plus-ones” for our friends to make my mother stop complaining.At one point I remember telling my parents to just cross off all of our friends because it wasn’t our wedding so who cared if the people we wanted to be there were invited. Everything was always a nightmarewith my mother. 

My dad advocated for us after that. He was stuck in a hard place with choosing sides, having to deal with my mom 24/7. To be honest, he was a mediator and savior in many of our pop-up wedding battles. We got our guest list finalized and started tracking down all the addresses we needed. 

It was now August/ early September 2017 and we wanted to make the “Save the Date” process as simple as possible. My fiancé and I were paying for these and wanted to exclude everyone (aka my parents) and make it our own thing. 

We invited our good friend and groomsmen, who is big on photography and graphics, out to PA for a visit and went for a hike along a local path. He snapped various pictures of us throughout our journey and then sent us the good ones once he got home and had the chance to edit them. 

We picked our favorites and started messing around with them having little edits made here and there. My fiancé and I discussed our options and prices and he ended up heading to NJ to work with our groomsmen to get something printed. The two of them went to Staples and when my fiancé met me at home with the final product, he knew I wasn’t going to be happy. The cardstock had the right picture, but each copy had a glare that distorted the appearance of the whole card. I was pretty upset that something this simple could go wrong, and I was even more hot and bothered that my fiancé spent the money without speaking up at pick-up and saying they didn’t look right. 

After a mini frenzy, we called our local Staples and told them about the situation. They said we could come in and replace the old copies, so off he went to get things right. My fiancé worked with the Staples employee to get a various copies of different prints of the card we could select from. He ended up not really loving any of the options and brought them home to me to make a final decision. 

Realizing we might didn’t like any option and might be out the money, we decided to try an alternative route. He did some more research and found a reasonably priced magnet version we could order online. This time, we went with a plain black and white version to try and avoid any issues. When the magnets arrived, we were happy! I wouldn’t say I was obsessed or anything like that, but they would do the trick. 

Once we finally tracked down all of the addresses we needed, we sent out our “Save the Dates”! 

One step closer to the wedding.