Text TACKY to rsvp to this wedding.

OK, I get it.  A lot of people use online invitations and evites these days.  Personally, I don't... There's nothing wrong with evites or other invitations like them, it's just my personal preference.  However, there's a time and a place for them, but I would never in a million years do one for a wedding.

And never in a billion years would I stuff a paper wedding invitation into a regular business envelope and scrawl a name and address onto it...

 ... and I certainly wouldn't have people RSVP via a text message or email.

Come on! It's your wedding, people! The fact that this invitation has "six o'clock in the evening" spelled out tells me they were trying to be a little bit formal about it, but with the text message thing it sends a mixed message.

And then can we go back to the envelope for a minute?  The guests' last name was just scrawled on it.  Not Mr. & Mrs. Jones, but Jones.  Not The Jones Family, but Jones.  Is it a shotgun wedding? Is it an arranged marriage? Where's the joy and celebration...?   I don't know about you, but I've gotten mail addressed to Occupant that seemed a little more cheerful than that. oy.

Do it all on paper or do it all online... just do it consistently. And try to show just s smidge of enthusiasm, mKay?

I'm going to propose. Should I make it sweet... or traumatic...?

I might have been so mad at him for making me pee my pants that I would have told him No.

AW.... this is the way a proposal SHOULD be done.

OK.  There's a ton of what NOT to do regarding weddings...
Click HERE for a great example of a thoughtful and creative proposal for a girl who loves books, from a guy who loves her.

Don't dress like a bridesmaid unless you actually ARE one...

The lovely Stephanie from Binkies and Briefcases posted this on her blog.  I immediately asked her if she would share it here.  Enjoy!

June is a big month for weddings, so I thought I would share a funny and very embarrassing story that resulted in an important lesson about going to them.

Twice in my life I have attended weddings wearing a dress that is way too similar to the dress that the bridesmaids were wearing. It's extremely embarrassing and I'm quite sure the bride isn't too thrilled about it either.

Once it actually was the exact same dress. The lesson that I'm taking from the experience is that in the future I will always wear prints or separate skirt/shirt combos to weddings! But, at least now we can look back and laugh...

In the summer of 2006, our friends Jeff and Renee got married, two months before Eddie and I did, and we were all invited to eachother's weddings. It was a big wedding year for us. Just 3 weeks before Jeff & Renee's wedding, I had been a bridesmaid in another friend's wedding as well. I decided to recycle the bridesmaid's dress from that wedding and wear it to Jeff & Renee's. That is a big mistake. NEVER do that!

I had even asked Eddie to call Jeff (because they were really his friends, they all went to college together. I went to a different school and I hadn't spent very much time with them.) and ask him what color the bridesmaids were wearing. He did not call (that was also a BIG mistake) but told me he thought he had heard that Renee's bridesmaids were wearing black. The dress I wanted to wear was a light pink, so I figured it would be fine.

It was so not fine.

When we arrived at the church I went to the restroom and was greeted by about half a dozen women wearing the exact same dress I was, in the exact same color. They obviously knew I was not part of their group and they looked very confused.

I darted back to Eddie and the group of fraternity brothers he was sitting with and I was livid. I really don't think I have ever been more angry with him. (Although I realize now I should have just called Renee myself) I made him take off his suit jacket and give it to me and I sat through the entire ceremony wearing a men's jacket.

In between the ceremony and the reception we drove off and found a mall nearby so that I could buy a new dress in a hurry. Pickings were slim since I was a size 3 at the time (what I wouldn't give to fit into either of those dresses again!) and the Junior's section was barren because prom season was over.

I finally found one and put it on in the dressing room, ripped off the tags, and was on the way to pay for it and wear it out of the store when I realized you could see my flower printed underwear straight through it. Eddie was on the other side of the dressing room door so I told him he was going to have to go find me a beige thong quickly. Oh, and some different shoes too. I didn't have time to change out of the dress, into the other one, and back again and I was not about to walk around Boscov's with this underwear situation I had going on. We were already very conspicuous walking around the mall dressed for a black tie affair, plus we were late for the reception. I waited in the dressing room, getting more and more irritated.

So then there was a man in a suit literally running through the department store, carrying high heels, in pursuit of women's thong underwear. He said he panicked when there was a group of little old ladies in the underwear section and he told them all his wife was having an underwear emergency.

So by that point, in addition to me being the crazy screaming lady in the dressing room (because I was now even more angry) and being with the strange perverted man running through the store carrying a thong and high heels, there was a group of old ladies who thought I'd had a bathroom accident and wanted to help.

I could not pay for those clothes and get out of there fast enough!

On the plus side, Eddie did a great job picking out the shoes and I still have that pair.

We managed to get back to the reception before dinner was served and Renee never knew! I'm sure she had too much on her mind that day anyway, but she thought it was kind of funny when I told her about it earlier this year when we had them over for dinner.

Remember, ladies, as you are dressing for weddings this season: skirts and prints are your friends. Recycling bridesmaid's dresses is a terrible idea.

The second time this happened to me it was because I re-wore the dress I had worn as a bridesmaid's dress in my dad's second wedding to the wedding of a friend. I figured that since it was just a regular ol' off the rack dress this time would be fine. Um...nope. Although it was not the exact same dress, the bridesmaids that time were wearing the same color and their dresses were the same tea length as the one I had on. Ugh.

Yeah, recycling bridesmaid's dresses? Just don't do it.

Pre-Marital Hypocrisy

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Erin at Peony Wire Works does amazing things with chicken wire.  She has also been unfortunate enough to witness several wacky wedding situations, but she is nice enough to share some of them with us.

My husband and I lived together before we got married, so we had a pretty good handle on the things we didn't like about each other.  When my Sister-In-Law got engaged, we told her that we were glad we had lived together, because we felt that it worked out a lot of issues before we got married. 

When my husband and I got engaged, she got engaged at the same time.  We are still married, she is not.  

When she was seriously dating her current husband, she was living with a girlfriend, but her husband-to-be was basically spending every single night there too. (Unbeknownst to her parents of course.)  When we once again told her we thought it had been valuable for us to live together before marriage, she informed us that she was raised better than that and that she had better morals than we did.  She wasn't going to live with her man until they got married (apparently him spending the night with her was okay though).  She lectured us on morals and upbringing for a good 15 minutes.  My husband and I were like, "well okay then..." and dropped it.  

Imagine our surprise when a couple of months later, she ends up pregnant (not married mind you), and she and her guy move in together.  At this point, he has not even proposed, so she can't even say she's living with her husband-to-be.  He proposed to her at the baby shower.  

They got married when their daughter was 7 months old, to which his father hollered AMEN, when they were pronounced man and wife.  Now, I am not judgmental, and don't think there is a thing wrong with the way things worked out for them, but what I find rich is the series of events that played out for such and upstanding moral person.  The AMEN was a tad anticlimactic for me.

Seriously?  That's the perfect example of why you should get the log out of your own eye before trying to get the splinter out of someone else's!

Over-exposed... twice.

The wonderful and hilarious Connie at The Young and the Relentless sent in this over-exposed photo and the story to go with it.

I was the cake cutter in my friend's wedding in July 1999.  It scored me a corsage and all the cake I could eat.  This apparently posed a huge problem later when we all went to our favorite bar for drinks.....and my undergarment began to get very tight. 

No problem.  

I'd also had enough Coors Light, that deciding to removing my elastic girdle-like slip thing in the bar in front of everyone was a great idea.  And then I asked someone to take my picture. 

Yep. We should keep our undergarments, um, under our garments...

Pigs In a Blanket

What you wear to a wedding is important.  There are so many rules of etiquette, and they seem to change all the time, don’t they!?

Here’s a basic rule of thumb though: If it is a casual, outdoor wedding, I am guessing the attire is NOT formal.

Erin from Peony Wire Works has several wedding tales to tell us.  Here is another one.

My best friend and I were invited to a mutual friend’s outdoor wedding.  To this day, it is still my favorite wedding.  She had a string quartet playing, there were beautiful blooms everywhere, they served ice cold lemonade and little sugar cookies prior to the ceremony.  Her husband made the arbor they got married under, there were rose petals scattered all around...okay, you get the picture. 

The dress code was a summer casual.  Sundresses… slacks… linen trousers… think Southern.   Everyone was beautiful, cool and serene.  Then we all wore similarly shocked faces when a guest walked in wearing her Prom dress.  (And no, it wasn't prom night.)

Now, have you ever seen Steel Magnolias?  (If not, you should be beaten, but that is neither here nor there.)  Shirley McClain's character Weezer is hilarious!  She is just rude and in your face honest.  My friend and I loved that movie, and when we saw the girl in the prom dress, we looked at each other  and did our best Weezer/SM imitations..."It looks like two pigs fightin' under a blanket!"  We about died laughing.  If you haven't seen that movie, this story will make more sense after you do  The bottom line here?  Miss Prom Dress was wearing too much taffeta and not enough Spanx.

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So the deal is that if you are invited to a lovely outdoor wedding, do not come over-dressed, do not come without some support undergarments, and if you do, do not sit by Erin.  Or me, for that matter, because we will “people watch” you until the cows come home. 

Or the pigs stop fighting. 

Whichever comes first.