The perfectionist resigns

Every few years, my dad goes back to the motherland to visit his brothers and sisters and their children. In the months leading up to his visit, he always talks about moving back there after he retires—thankfully he always changes his mind by the time his trip ends, because it's a 24-hour flight away from us!

His last visit commenced in October, and with it began the three weeks of worrying sick that I always do while he's away in a part of the world that most sane people don't want to visit right now. So to keep it light, I'm focusing instead on the craziness leading up to it: prepping the invitations. I know it was early—I didn't actually plan to send our invites to most of our guests until late January—but my dad wanted to hand out invitations to my Pakistani family while he was there through late November. And it makes sense, I suppose, except for one thing: all those extras I was going to add to the invites, like envelope liners and belly bands? Yeah, I hadn't done that yet. I hadn't even ordered the paper yet. OOPS! In fact, the only special fixin' that the early invitations got is a special RSVP insert with our website URL and instructions to RSVP online (all of our international guests will get this insert instead of a postcard, which I'm afraid will get lost otherwise). Here's what I had with five days to go.


The plan was to have it printed on ecru card stock (four to a page) and cut in quarters, then unceremoniously placed in the envelope sans liner and belly band. Oh well. It's functional.

Of course, I had a whole five evenings and only ten invitations to do... so I thought it might be time for a trip to the craft store for some fun paper! I might not find a perfect match, but a little something extra would be better than nothing. As pretty as I think my invites are, they kind of bore me right now... and I just can't bear to send them out half done.

Did anything in your planning process turn out not quite up to your original standards? Do you think anyone else noticed?