Signed, sealed, delivered

Posted Thursday, August 09, 2007 5:08 PM

It's amazing what sending out invitations can do for one's sanity.

Monday evening, Adam came over to my house and we stuffed and sealed all 183 invitations. My future in-laws' neighbor generously donated her time to address all of them. Of course, between the time we gave her the list and the time we put the invites together, four people moved, but we solved the problem with some correction tape, a calligraphy pen, blank labels and a manilla envelope.

Even though we had no inner envelope or pesky tissue paper, we still had several things we had to do for each invite: put invitation in envelope, put response card in response card envelope, stamp outer envelope, stamp response envelope, seal outer envelope.

I tossed Adam the pretty 41-cent wedding stamps I picked up at the post office and he tackled stamping the response envelopes while I worked on stuffing the invites and pulling out those that needed fixing.

 The next part was a bit trickier – and took us longer. I learned a little tip regarding the responses: some people send it back and forget to include their names. So I asked Adam to put a number next to each name on our invite list. Then I grabbed an invite, checked for the number on the list and marked the back of each card with a number, after which I handed him the card and the already addressed invitation and then he put them response card in the inner envelope and put the whole thing together.

At this point it was about 12:30 a.m. So I kissed Adam good night and told him to go home – I would take it from there. I turned on the TV and in the time it took to watch the end of "The Mummy Returns," a "Golden Girls" episode and the last 30 minutes of "Whose Wedding Is It Anyway?" I had stamped and sealed every envelope (except the three international, the four in manilla envelopes and the two I was waiting for an apartment number on).

The next morning I had the missing numbers filled in and I took two boxes of invites to the post office, smiling at everyone I passed. I waited a few minutes and walked up to the clerk (I had weighed the invites in advance, so I knew I was OK with the specially priced wedding stamp). Then she gave me stamps for the Israel invites as she stamped the one going to Canada. Then she weighed the four larger envelopes and stamped those.

And that was it. She took them all. I was done. I almost felt like crying. It was like a huge weight had been lifted off Adam and I and now everything else we did would be a piece of cake. I wanted to take a picture of the momentous occasion, but I thought that might have been illegal at a post office.

So what if I didn't get to sleep until 2 a.m? It was worth it just to be able to check one more thing off from my list.