That crazy bride moment: most brides can say they have had at least one. Mine didn’t involve a bridezilla temper tantrum or any sort of scene, but it was definitely one of those caught-up-in-it-all moments that I realized in retrospect was pretty silly and definitely a waste of time, money and energy.
Back in December, before we had our lovely save-the-dates, Z and I decided to be super economical and buy stamps before they went up in price. The savings was probably about $4, so to start with, this wasn’t the most commonsense decision. I sent him to the post office and he bought pretty Forever stamps with cherry blossoms on them. They weren’t anything fancy, but they would do the trick.
Fast forward 3 months and our save-the-dates were addressed and ready to be sent out. I had spent several hours tying them with pretty pieces of twine and hand-addressing them. We stamped the envelopes and took them to the post office to get them hand-cancelled. And that’s where things started spiraling just a tiny bit out of control.
Note to future brides: It costs extra to send something with twine, buttons, jewels, anything that will make the envelope lumpy.
In our case, the extra was $.20. But the money wasn’t the problem. The issue was that the only $.20 stamps available were of George Washington. This was not exactly the stamp I was envisioning on my beautiful rustic save-the-date. The $.66 stamps were pictures of pretty butterflies, so I bought a few books.
Home I went with all of my stamped and addressed envelopes. And I started peeling stamps. This is where the crazy comes in. I spent over six hours, until almost 2am, on a work night, carefully peeling the cherry blossom stamps off of envelopes and saving them on wax paper for future use. I didn’t quite finish that project, but Z patiently stayed up with me until I finally fell asleep on the couch, never once saying that no one looks at the stamps, or that this was entirely insane.
The next morning I woke up exhausted. I took a big box of envelopes back to the post office and spent thirty minutes hand-canceling the new, pretty butterfly stamps. For the envelopes that still had cherry blossom stamps, I purchased two $.10 stamps of clocks, which weren’t beautiful, but they also weren’t the face of our first president on my wedding paper goods.
A few days later Z’s mom called to say how much she loved our save-the-date, the river, the twine, the text. We told her the stamp story and she said, “oh, I’ll have to go look. Dad opened it and I never saw the envelope.” Z and I exchanged looks and before he could say anything, I admitted that my stamp peeling episode was entirely nuts (we still have several sheets of wax paper with cherry blossom stamps on them). I also thanked him for keeping his mouth shut and letting me have that moment.
What have been your moments of slight insanity, or taking things just one step too far? I had one other evening where I decided I didn’t like our website anymore and stayed up until single digit hours moving all the text to a new site. It’s so easy in this process to get very wrapped up in the details and forget the big picture. And the details are, in fact, one of the most fun parts about planning, but is the perfect envelope, piece of lace, centerpiece, music list, etc. worth losing sleep, money and your sanity? Jury is still out in our household, but I am definitely trying to find a better balance.