Wedding Invites and Giggly Girls

Less than three weeks to go to my brothers wedding and the invites finally turned up yesterday at the same moment my mum was on the phone to me having a meltdown. I headed over to mum’s after work, kids in tow to write up the cards so that she could start handing them out as soon as possible.

I did think, that ordering them from Pakistan (about £10 for 100 as opposed to the £180 it was costing here) we would be lucky if the printers managed to get the bride and groom’s names right, let alone anything else. In fact they did manage to get most of the contents right because we had typed it up and e-mailed it to them, they still managed to forget to leave somewhere on the cards to put the guest’s name and where we had headed the text up with “Wedding Invitation Wording” and “Henna Invitation Wording” to tell them where the text needed to go, they left the bit that said “Wording” on the card!!

So a lesson that sometimes taking a short cut to save money is not the way, also cousins and Uncles who say that they have a “friend” who can do something for you, are not to be relied on without a barrage of questions pinning them down on timescales, costs, and a step-by-step explanation on how exactly something is going to be done. Just watch the relative with the “friend” recoil when asked for specifics.

Anyway, it was too late to do anything and we ignored my Dad’s suggestion to Tip-ex the “wording” bit out (although he did start on a few) and just got on with filling them out, which was a whole further ridiculous evening in itself. We picked the moment that Mum was glued to her favourite Indian drama serial to barrage her with questions of:

“What’s Aunty Baby’s real name?” (Not even making that up and there is more than one with this problem)
“What are the people at No.18/16/14/13/11/6 called?” (That’s what comes from years of calling them next-door-people, No.18-people, Adil’s-Mum etc.)
"What's the Aunty's husband's name - or are we putting Mr and Mrs X?"

We even sent Kooky Little Sister down the road to look at what was written at the front of one of the neighbours houses to try and deduce the dad’s surname.

Then we had the whole discussion about people my parents felt obliged to invite, who us siblings can’t actually stand at all.

We did laugh though, as we always do when the four of us sisters are anywhere near each other. We pointed out the evil mother-in-law in the drama Mum was watching and told her to take lessons. She very seriously and indignantly told us “I only have one son, why would I do that to his wife”. We were in hysterics.

We made fun of all the songs we are planning to sing at my brothers henna (we are throwing the men out after dinner so we can get silly). Very silly I know, but we were laughing till we could barely breathe.