Weddingbee Blog

My family loves a good episode of Everybody Loves Raymond; I mean, what’s not to love about awkward family dynamics and situations that everyone can relate to? Anyhow, my absolute most favorite episode is the one in which Robert is tasked with composing the wording for his own wedding invitations. Here’s the synopsis: Robert’s brother, Raymond, convinces Robert to botch the wording so badly that he’ll never be asked to do a wedding task again. Of course, as you would expect in sitcom world, the purposefully pitiful proof never gets examined and accidentally gets distributed to the entire guest list. If you’re stressed about your invitations (or any part of your wedding planning, for that matter), do yourself a favor and indulge in a 4-minute chuckle by watching the video below.

Video via YouTube / Credit: CBS

For years, the simple phrase of “Hank ’n’ Pat” was enough to put a smile on my face. Now that I’m on the other side of my invitation world, I can say that that episode has a heightened significance to me, courtesy of my own first-hand invitation boo-boo.

As I explained in my last post, I picked our invitation design MONTHS before I needed to; I felt on top of the bridal world for my impressive advanced planning. However, I was so relaxed with all the invitation stuff that I forgot to actually determine how long production would take. I assumed 2-3 weeks, so you can imagine my shock when I was told 6-8 weeks. Angry at myself for not getting the order placed sooner, I quickly pulled together our wording, proofread it a couple dozen times, and sent it off to our invitation vendor, relieved to be done with that chapter.

Fast-forward a few weeks, when Mr. Snow Cone and I returned from our retreat, eager to tear into our awaiting invitation packages and get these babies into USPS’s trustworthy hands. We opened the first set of inserts and I was dismayed to see that “regretfully” had been spelled as “regretfulley.”

The perfectionist in me reared her ugly head, but Mr. Snow Cone pointed out that one minor, inconsequential typo wouldn’t be THAT big of a problem. So we moved onto the second set of inserts, and found that our wedding website URL was directing guests to a website that was not ours. The entire point of including the URL is so that our guests will actually access our website, so that second strike was kind of a doozy. I was doubly frustrated and Mr. Snow Cone was a little off-put as well, but we decided to roll with the punches. We opened up the invitations themselves, hoping and praying to find no more surprises. No such luck. Pennsylvania, which is admittedly a tricky state to spell even for a lifelong resident, got a little twisted around into “Pennslyvania.”

Unfortunately, we had batted a solid 3 for 3 with invitation pieces and typos.

We were at a crossroads; we could send them out as they were and deal with the consequences, we could try to have them re-printed (although we had no idea how long that could take and we weren’t exactly swimming in time), or we could come up with an entirely new plan at warp speed.

What did we choose? Tune in for part two of this saga, coming to a computer near you very soon!

What was your biggest planning bump in the road?