Weddingbee Blog

Hey there, hive! It’s been awhile. I thought I’d drop in to tell you guys a story that I was previously too embarrassed to share. It’s the story of how I forgot to invite someone to my wedding.

You see, I have this friend. We’ll just call her Elle. Although if she’s reading this post, I’m sure she knows who she is.  Elle and her husband were on our guest list from the beginning. I met her in law school, and we hung out occasionally and took a couple classes together. She and her husband invited the Dude and me to their wedding, which was about a year before ours—we went and had a blast. Even though we weren’t exactly attached at the hip, I knew that I wanted Elle and her husband at our wedding, so we added them to our guest list, a spreadsheet I had created on my computer in Excel.

Cut to April of 2009, about five months before our wedding (and right before I started blogging for Weddingbee!). The Dude and I were at work one day, when some burglars broke into our house. They took everything: the Dude’s expensive music equipment, my grandmother’s jewelry, our recently purchased wedding bands, and YES, my laptop.

My laptop at the time had a lot of crucial wedding information on it: vendor contracts, inspiration photos, to do lists, and (you guessed it) our guest list spreadsheet. Now was I a good little Mouse who backed up all of her stuff using Google Docs or some equivalent? I think we all know the answer to that: NO.  I lost it all, including the disc of engagement photos that was sitting in my CD drive.

Eventually we moved on from our losses, bought new stuff, and got refunded for most of it through our homeowner’s policy. Our lovely photographers sent us another CD full of our e-pics.  We started over with our spreadsheet, pulling bits and pieces together from e-mail archives of the two of us sending the document back and forth. Somehow in the confusions, Elle and her husband never made it back onto the guest list.

These facts might not sound too bad so far. It was an honest mistake, right? Yes, but there are some other factors working against my innocence in this scenario.  1) Elle and her husband had already received a save the date from us when we mailed them back in March. 2) Elle received an invitation to my shower and, though she didn’t attend, she contributed to my awesome gift of Beatles Rock Band. 3) I assumed that Elle and her husband didn’t come to our wedding because they were busy getting ready to move to Dallas, and I honestly had no idea they hadn’t received an invite until…

I sent a thank you card to Elle for her contribution to the shower gift a month or two after the wedding, and in the card I expressed my regret that she and her husband had been unable to attend our wedding. A few days later I got a really sweet e-mail from Elle explaining that she had never received an invite, and that she hadn’t meant to ignore our invitation (since she never got one). As soon as I read the e-mail, the pieces started to fall into place, and I had a sick feeling that I knew exactly what had happened.

Why am I sharing this story with you guys now, almost a year after our wedding?  Well, like I said before, I was too ashamed to talk about it until now. I guess enough time has passed that I don’t feel quite as bad about what happened. Also, I thought maybe some of you could learn from my mistakes.

Planning a wedding involves an intricate balance of details, many of which are just too important to try to keep in your head or plan on the fly. My advice? Save every single document that you get in Google Docs, or at the very least e-mail it to yourself. Save inspiration photos (and your e-pics!) onto an external hard drive or upload them to a photo storage site like Flickr or Photobucket.  And (why the hell not?) keep a handwritten list of everyone you send a save the date to! If I would have followed these simple tips it would have saved me so much stress, and Elle and her husband probably would have made it to our wedding.