RSVPs and Us

One of the biggest sources of stress for any bride are the RSVPs. I know it seems like such a simple concept, simply let the bride know whether you can or cannot attend by a certain date using the pre-addressed and stamped card, but the bridal boards are filled with stories about people who just don’t get this.

Thankfully, I wasn’t one of those brides. Our RSVP date was Friday, July 16. By the start of that week, we’d heard back from almost everyone except for a few of my friends and some family on Shawn’s father’s side.

Shawn, being the impatient boy that he is, didn’t want to give people until the actual deadline to get back to us so I found myself emailing or Facebooking my friends prior to July 16, asking them what’s up.

I suspected that I hadn’t heard back from some of them because they knew they couldn’t make it and were maybe embarrassed to tell me. I don’t know if I was right about the embarrassed part but I was right about the them-not-coming-part.

I also heard back from one friend who said she was pretty sure she could make it but wouldn’t know until a few days before the wedding because of her work. I told her I would love it if she could come but then proceeded on the assumption that she wasn’t coming (the venue told us it would be easier to add people in them take them out). Turns out my assumption was right as she didn’t end up coming.

All of Shawn’s slow-to-respond family did attend. I’m not sure what was up with them not getting back to us sooner, after Shawn confirmed their attendance over the phone they did send in the RSVP cards so it’s not like they lost those.

One family did have a very good reason for the delay though; they had just had a new baby and were taking her to her first wedding on July 17. They were only going to come to our wedding if all went well there and thankfully it did.

Overall, I think Shawn was more stressed about the RSVPs than I was, probably because I’d spend time on the bridal boards and realized that compared to some, we were in good shape.

Many people do cut it close with sending in the cards so don’t be surprised if you’re two weeks out from your RSVP date and are still missing lots of cards. Only start making “contact” plans when you hit that one week mark and even then you may want to wait until the actual date has passed before you start getting in touch with people.

Getting the thing actually in the mail seems to be a real challenge for some so make it easier for people by giving them an opportunity to give you their RSVP cards in person. Have a family gathering or a party with friends coming up? Remind people that they can give you their cards then. Or tell co-workers that they can just drop the cards of on your desk.

Another trick is to give people the option of Facebooking or emailing you their respond though if you go this route, still include RSVP cards in your invites. This will make the old people happy and to be honest, I think it’s easier to organize physical cards than emails and Facebook messages.

Big Worry #2:Wedding Day Set Up

So my other big wedding worry has to do with getting the venue set up on the day of the wedding.

While we have a florist who will be delivering and setting up the flowers, all of our centrepieces and all other venue decorations, from escort cards to the card box, will have to be taken care of by myself and whoever else I can guilt in to lending a hand.

This isn’t the part that worries me. While I’m not really a DIY-er, I do like to organize and supervise and I’m actually glad that I have an excuse to go down to the venue before the wedding starts and help with setting everything up.

What I’m worried about is the amount of time I can spend doing that.

While our ceremony isn’t until 6:30 pm, we’re doing our photos first and I think the plan is to start doing those at about 4 pm. The photographer will be arriving at my place at 3 pm and shortly after he arrives I’ll be getting into my dress so that means my hair and make-up should be done by say, 3:15 pm.

Now I know some brides are probably a bit jealous of this timeline since they had 6am hair appointments but here’s where I run into a stress point: We can’t get into the venue until noon. So if I need to be back at my place by say, 1:30 pm for hair and make-up, I’ll only have an hour at the venue to get stuff set up (I’m allowing for 30 minutes of travel time).

And when I say “I”, I also mean my mother and sister since they’ll be following my getting-ready timeline.

While I can organize people to work pretty efficiently, there’s no way we’ll be able to get everything done in an hour and so I’m going to have to left the venue before it’s done being decorated and yeah, I’m really not comfortable with that idea.

The Berkeley does supply a day-of planner and I’m really hoping that I can in-list and then entrust her to at least look things and make sure they look right (I’ve already been told that the day-of planners don’t assist with things like actually setting up the centrepieces).

That way I, my mother and my sister can leave at noon and a handful of people (including Shawn) can stay behind and finish setting everything up under the eye of the planner.

But while that sounds like a good plan, it’s one that still worries me. What if the planner doesn’t have the greatest eye for detail? Or what if my helpers don’t? Or what if I can’t find anyone who can help with setting things up?

It’s this kind of thing that makes me wish that we’d gotten our own independent wedding planner. Too bad we don’t have the cash for that.

Big Worry #1: Money

In my last post I mentioned that I have a couple of big wedding-related worries. The first one has to do with money.

I would say that this is a fairly common worry for any bride who’s neither wealthy nor from a wealthy family. However, it hadn’t really been a concern for me until a week or so ago, when Shawn and I sat down and looked over our wedding finances.

I should mention that Shawn and I are covering most of the wedding costs ourselves. My parents are covering certain areas such as my dress and Shawn’s side is covering part of the liquor cost but we’re covering everything else.

We had started off on the right path, with a good overall budget and what I thought were reasonable area-specific budgets. While we did go over in some areas, it certainly wasn’t because we were being frivolous. Shawn still gets on my case about our photographer being $300 over budget but finding a good Toronto photographer who will shot at least six hours for $1500 is damn hard.

It turns out that I under-budgeted certain areas and so a few months ago we bumped our $20,000 budget to $25,000. At the time, this seemed like a reasonable, doable number.

Now, after our more recent financial review, I think that number's still doable but it’s going to be tight and there’s no room for anymore wedding-related spending. This is because while our budget went up, our savings didn’t and so now we have a bit of gap that I’m understandingly worried about.

As I’ve said numerous times throughout this blog, I think it’s silly to go into debt for a wedding and while I don’t mind putting stuff on a credit card, that card should always be paid off in full. My goal is that come September, our wedding is paid off in full and the only way for that to happen is to start saving hardcore.

Still, even the idea of having all the needed funds sitting in a bank account doesn’t completely end my worries. I know this will sound odd but I wish we could just pay in full as many wedding-related bills as we could right now. I know that’s also a stupid idea but not having to worry about those outstanding bills would certainly relax me.

So that’s big worry number one. Tomorrow I’ll go over big worry number two.