Wedding Invite Snafu's

Now for reason #5 that you need to have a professional wedding planner.

You mother should not be in charge of addressing invites (or for that matter save-the-dates).

I don't know how many of you are addressing your own invites, but I had dreams of being able to lovingly address each individual invite. They would be artistically calligraphied and treasured by those who received them. My mother had other ideas, namely that she would be the one addressing the invitations, as it was tradition (whose I don't know - or why that is a "tradition").

A month or two after we got engaged, my mother offered to send out save-the-dates, and one of my sisters offered to design them, as I had done the same for her when she got married. Luckily, my fiance and I paid a visit to my parents house after the save-the-dates had been addressed, but not sent. We found several mistakes, doctors addressed as Mr., weird family configurations (a father and son addressed as a couple), and names that were just wrong (John instead of Josh). I admit that some, as my mother pointed out, may have been from the "confusing" guest list I made on Google Docs, but others (the John/Josh debacle) were not. My fiance and I convinced her (it was surprisingly difficult) to re-address some of the mis-labeled save-the-dates.

Fast forward to addressing the wedding invitations, a duty I gave up to my mother, since I decided that I did not really have time to address 350 invitations, much less in calligraphy. After the invites were mailed out, a few came back, one for one of my fiance's friends. I emailed my
fiance to have him obtain the guest's address information. He emailed, and the guest had moved and forgotten to tell anyone. I emailed my mom the new address and she sent the invite.

Last week, I hear that the invite has come back again. Weird - until I ask which address she sent it to, and she replied that she sent it to the one I had updated in Google Docs. Unfortunately, to avoid confusion, I had emailed her the new address, so a month later, the guest will get his invite. Luckily, we sent them out almost 10 weeks ahead of the wedding, so he should have plenty of time, and I had my fiance send him the address for the website so he could begin to make travel plans.