Life After the Wedding

After we got home from the wedding and finished recovering from illness and exhaustion, we found that there was still more wedding work to do. Pictures and video were pulled off of our cameras and those pictures were soon joined by hundreds of others as people sent in the photo cds that I had included in their welcome packets. The photo cds ended up being a really good idea and I had a couple of people tell me that they wouldn’t have even taken pictures, but the cds reminded them that I was hoping to get a lot of photos. In just a week, we even got our professional previews from Root Photography and those were quickly followed by more than a thousand beautiful professional pictures.

Pictures and video weren’t the only things piling up. We got a handful of wedding cards while we were in Florida, but when we got back from the wedding, the gifts really started to pick up. We weren’t expecting any of the Florida guests to get us anything, but a bunch of people did and a bunch of the people who couldn’t make it ended up sending us stuff as well, so before you knew it we had a whole bunch of awesomeness in our living room.



This brings me to the next big task: thank you cards! Long time readers know that I am fanatical about thank you cards…as soon as I get something from someone I want to get a thank you card in the mail. It positively drives me crazy when I have to wait a week or two, so I couldn’t wait to get started on the wedding thank you cards.

Thanks to my thank you card obsession, Kyle and I each have shoe boxes full of blank thank you cards just waiting to be sent out and it was tempting to use all of those up. However, in the end we decided to do photo thank you cards using the professional wedding pictures. I checked around, but I couldn’t find a place that was doing photo cards for reasonable rates…the cheapest I could find was a dollar per card and when you’ve got more than a hundred cards to do, that really adds up!

So, we went with a DIY option. I hit Staples and got some cheap blank white thank you cards in boxes of 20 for four dollars. Then, I cropped some of the wedding photos so that they would fit nicely on the front of the blank cards. This was actually really nice because I was able to tailor the photos to the recipient if I could, instead of using the same picture for everyone. For example, for the thank you card I sent to Jed, I was able to send him a photo of the two of us. Everyone who didn’t get a tailored photo got one of my four favorite images from the wedding, which was again nice because I could pick and choose to see who would want an artistic one, who’d want a funny one, who’d want a really standard one, and who’d want a romantic one.

I used double sided tape to stick the photos on and (voila!) photo thank you cards. It took a while, but we actually got all of the thank you cards out before the first home reception…and then we were able to get all of those thank you cards out before the second reception. I think that’s really the big secret if you’re having more than one celebration. If we had needed to do all of the thank you cards at once (around 250?!), Kyle and I would have been trapped at the kitchen table for a week. Getting them out the door and then doing others as soon as the gifts came in made the process a whole lot more fun and it kept the thank you notes from sounding really canned and repetitive.

My other tips for the thank you notes:

• When doing invitations, make a master list with everyone’s names and addresses and then keep that list on hand for thank you notes. This makes sure that you have everyone’s addresses and also serves as a good checklist to make sure you don’t thank someone twice!
• Don’t just write, “Thanks, we love it!” and sign your name. Talk about why you love it, why you wanted one, what you look forward to doing with it, and how nice it was to see that person (if applicable) at the celebration.
• Don’t forget to write in the plural. I kept catching myself saying “I love this, I’ve wanted one forever” and then realizing that the gift was for me AND my new husband and the thank you note was supposed to be from both of us.
• Do your best to track down wedding gift givers! The one thing that still bothers me about the whole thank you note process is that we actually got a gift that didn’t have the gift-givers name with it and we could never figure out who it was from. It was a $50 Williams-Sonoma gift card that came with a really cute Disney card, but the card wasn’t signed…I even wrote out a thank you note just in case, detailing what we used the gift card for (the most gorgeous glasses you’ve ever seen in your life), but the note is still sitting on my counter…le sigh…
• If the gift is from a family with kids and you have leftover wedding stickers, etc., go ahead and toss some in. What are the chances you’re going to use all those bridal stickers, even if you are a scrapbooker?
• Make sure you do them. Don’t think that just because you waited a while, you don’t have to bother sending thank you notes. If you got a gift, you send a note. It doesn’t matter if you were hit by a car, spent two years in a coma, and are just learning how to write for the second time. Do them.