Thank You, Thank You, Thank You

I want to share a pet-peeve of mine:
Bringing a gift to a shower or wedding or sending a gift to a bride and groom, and not getting a Thank You card back in the proper amount of time. Even worse than that, Tres and I have sent gifts before and NEVER received a Thank You card at all! I am just completely perplexed by this. Mostly because a) I wonder if my $50-100 gift ever even made it to the person’s house and b) its rude, rude, rude!

Let me get this straight, I am no Princess Diana when it comes to class and am certainly no Emily Post when it comes to etiquette (although I secretly long to be), but I do know sending Thank You notes should be at the top of my list as a bride! As busy as we all get – especially when planning a wedding – it’s very easy to forget to write Thank You notes. I do understand that, and I don’t want to offend any past brides out there who have neglected sending out their Thank Yous in the appropriate amount of time after receiving gifts. This post is to merely express my thoughts on this subject and to warn future brides of the importance of these friendly little cards!

If anything, this tacky non-gesture from a number of people has made me very prompt with my Thank You card sending. And when I say, very prompt, I do mean I am a border-line Thank You card Nazi! Literally, after every single shower, I sat down the very next day and wrote out every single Thank You card – regardless of how many I had to address. Not to mention, every time a wedding gift has shown up at our door, I stop everything immediately after opening the gift and write a Thank You.

I am sharing this with everyone for a good reason: because I have done this, writing Thank Yous has been the easiest part of the entire wedding planning experience! I’ve heard horror stories of people waiting until after the wedding, having names piled high to send cards to, and it taking weeks to complete! I am so happy that I can confidently come home from my honeymoon without a permanently cramped hand, and our friends and family know immediately how appreciative we are of their gifts!

With that opinion now being expressed, I would like to move on and yell at the top of my lungs that we have 13 DAYS UNTIL WE GET MARRIED!!!! And exactly EIGHT days until we leave for New Orleans!!! We will be getting to the city early to get our marriage license, pay our remaining balances, and tie up all loose ends – I can’t wait!

I am taking every day in gratefully, and I have been so surprisingly calm the past week that it’s unreal. If you didn’t already know, I am usually worried and stressed and crazy beyond belief that everything has to always be “so-so” and “flawlessly perfect!” Well… not anymore. I miracle has come over my head, and I honestly DON’T CARE ANYMORE. I JUST DON’T CARE!!!!!! Maybe it’s because I have been planning this wedding for so long, and I am so ready for it to happen that I just could care less about anything more!

The best part is I have actually been sleeping and not waking up every two hours thinking about my to-do list. It could be that we really don’t have much to do anymore. We have very few tiny planning details left – mainly because we put a big X through a few of the big ones. Yep, you heard me right…. There are two things on our list that three months ago I would have lost my mind over if we didn’t get done, and guess what? This weekend, I happily joined my fiancé in placing big, huge, gigantic X through them because I JUST DON’T CARE, and I can’t express in written words how good it feels not to care about this wedding anymore :) I honestly feel like someone has slipped me a week-long activated Valium, and if I feel half this “free” on wedding day, I will be one happy bride! Moral of this post: Send out Thank You cards immediately no matter what the circumstances, and try not to be such a perfectionist about everything else because you will be a much happier bride if you don’t stress!