Reception Entertainment for Kids

Last summer, I wrote about my take on having kids at your wedding.  Basically, my opinion is the more the joyfuller, but having now attended several weddings as a parent, I know how tough it can be to enjoy the day and relax as a guest with little ones (and their varying potential for destruction and scenes!) in tow.  I will be forever grateful to my cousin for having had the idea of providing a bucket of trucks at her garden reception.  Two-year-old boy heaven for Aaron.  Heeaaaavvvven.

As wedding season gets rolling, I want to expand on my past suggestions of considering reception venues with outdoor space for kids to play and offering activities and a special favor, handed out early, to keep them entertained.  I looked around online for you, and want to specifically share these  ideas and products that I know I, as a mom, would find insanely thoughtful (links in the caption):

1. Coloring pages and puzzles (these adorable ones found here, plus another sweet and prettily designed activity book here)  2. Disposable or Polaroid cameras and a photo scavenger hunt project (this one is a good inspiration) 3. Wedding Mad Libs (make up your own or borrow these from Martha Stewart Weddings)  4.Card & Board Games  5. Bubble machine (never underestimate)  6. Corn Hole (Etsy has amazing wedding decals you can add to blank boards, like these and these)  7. Lawn Dice  8. Outdoor Bowling

I asked around and a few other brides suggested having an area of your reception sectioned off with comfy blankets, pillows, and movies (I foresee this being pretty clutch for parents at an evening reception), asking your DJ to have one or two kids-only songs on the dance floor, and having a Q+A-style guest book where you can ask your guests to weigh in on things like what love means, what the best dinner for two is, their intentions for you as newlyweds, and their best advice for a happy marriage--even the guests who can't write themselves will probably have something to say! 

We don't have any weddings on the calendar for a while, but I know my days as a kid-toting guest aren't over.  So tell me, what sorts of kid-friendly offerings have you encountered as a guest, and are you planning anything special for your own day?

The Rosary for Engagement and Marriage: a Free eBook and a Thank You

If you'll oblige me with some clickin' today, I have a gift for you!  Pauline Books puts together a lead page for each of its new releases, and usually offers a preview of the upcoming book or some other little extra as a thank you to readers who visit the page or are generally interested.  As we were putting together mine, I was asked what sort of extra I wanted to offer.  I suggested a customizable download of the sample wedding program included in INVITED since my wedding program was such a source of stress, but, oops, they couldn't give away too much of the best book content.  I debated writing a little something about how I chose my wedding dress or my first dance, or specific ways we saved money.  But that all sounded so...me.  I don't want this project to be about me; I want it to be about you, your relationship, and your wedding.  Your path to holiness.

So instead, I eventually came up with the idea of writing a short prayer book for couples to use during their engagement and later in their marriage. I told Andrew about it, and he suggested writing prayers to accompany the Rosary.  The Rosary has been one of our favorite ways to pray together since the first months we were dating, and over time we've become fairly consistent in the intentions we pray for each of the different mysteries.  This book is our sharing some of those intentions, a little piece of our spirituality, with you, and we hope they take root and bear much fruit in your relationship.  You can get yours from INVITED's lead page here, and directions for loading it onto your Kindle here.

As a thank you for downloading the eBook and supporting INVITED,  you'll also get a 20% discount coupon to use when the book is released on Friday!  And by the way, I also just want to thank you for supporting my book in general.  I mean it.  Check back next week for two sweet release day giveaways, and meantime, in the spirit of Full of Grace, here's a roundup of past posts on praying together:

A collection of prayers for engagement and marriage, for the two of you or as a spiritual gift to friends getting married

7 women share how they pray with their husbands, including a cool new-to-me devotion called the Dailies

Why praying as a couple is usually a learned skill and habit, not something that always comes naturally, and why it's worth pushing through the initial awkwardness

Join me in praying for all of the brides who'll find these books in their hands, and as the release gets closer, I'd love to offer it for you.  Email me with your intentions or leave them in the comments, and let know how I can specifically pray for you! 

Rite Resources: Guest RSVP, Contact, and Reception Info Trackers

Picking out my wedding shoes took up a good few hours of my life.  Deciding, with my family and Andrew's, who was invited to come see them (assuming my shoes even peeked out from under my dress) took longer.  Guest-related matters make up a significant amount of wedding planning--and for good reason; in my opinion, celebrating the sacrament is an invitation to communion, in every sense of the word, for everyone present--so I want to offer you today a way to keep track of all those matters.

If 1 meant showing up on my wedding day and hoping for the best, and 10 meant apps and checklists and timelines planned down to the second, I'd rank my organization as a bride at…six.  Plus maybe a half.  I  don't consider myself too hopelessly disorganized, but complicated or overly involved systems stress me out and I like to have as few separate planning tools as possible.  I find I think more clearly when related information is mostly in one spot, rather than spread out across several.

So, when the time came for Andrew and I to get things rolling with the guest list we'd spent all that time on, I craved order and peace.  I wanted to consolidate all the addresses and phone numbers we'd written  and scattered on Post-Its from our moms' address books and, to keep track of who'd received all our wedding correspondence, and later on, to keep all of the info relevant to the reception, like who was eating what.

I'm sharing the spreadsheet I made in the hope that it'll give you some guidance as you get started communicating with your guests.  Like I said, too many planning documents tend to make me feel less organized, so I wanted to have just one sheet that could take us from the initial gathering of contacts all the way to sending out Thank You Notes.  Feel free, obviously, to take my categories and split them up across different sheets in a way that works for you.  Here's what you'll find:

Name: Obvious.  I counted families as one name, like "Calis Family," for any family members living at the same address.

Address and Phone: Also obvious?  Clearly I'm showing my expertise…

Save the Date: Along with the next column, Invitation, I just put in a check mark to indicate that these correspondences had been sent out to each guest, marking after addressing and before mailing each batch.

RSVP: I filled in Yes or No, and as the response dates crept up, my system was to highlight the rows for guests I needed to follow up with.  If a guest replies with a No, I'd recommend keeping them on your chart until after the wedding, since some guests still like to send gifts or attend showers even if they can't make it on the actual day, and that way you'll still have their info.

Numbers: How many peeps would be attending from each invitee group or row on the spreadsheet; i.e. a single friend would read as 1, while a family might read 4 or 5, depending on who planned on coming.  I broke it down into Adults and Kids.  Sounds laughably simple, yet being able to easily add up this column saved us a lot of effort when giving head counts to our priest for communion and to our reception site coordinator for seating and meals.

Reception Meals: If you're serving a buffet, ignore this (head counts alone should be sufficient), but if you're serving a choice between several plated meals, there are three columns here for you--two for the choices of adult meals and one for kids' meals; you can change the labels from "Meal 1" and "Meal 2" to chicken or pasta or whatever you're serving.  I just filled in the number of guests per party eating each one, which, again, simplified a lot of communication with the reception staff.

Notes: Anything related to gluten and high chairs.  I kid.  But really, any special needs or requests your guests might have.

Gifts and Thank You: When we got home from our honeymoon, adding a list of our wedding presents and checking off whom we'd written thank you notes to seemed like a natural extension of our pre-wedding planning.

You can download the spreadsheet here.  And please do share your feedback and tell me what organizing methods have worked best for you and for other brides you know!  I get that everyone has different tendencies and planning personalities and would love to hear your best advice for keeping your guest info clear and at your fingertips!  Thoughts?

Rite Resources: My Favorite Free Design Resources for Wedding Invitations

Natalie Franke Photography

Ever given any thought to designing your own wedding invites? Andrew's and my wedding plans were blessed with considerable financial help from our parents.  I felt so thankful, yet vaguely guilty, so I tried to express our thanks by finding ways to cut costs wherever we could.  I love design and can fake my way through Microsoft Publisher pretty well, so I wanted to try my hand at creating our own invitations, programs, and stationary, but I knew I wanted something with a little more flair than your standard ivory paper and black script.

Side note: this was about 6 months before Pinterest was around--much to my benefit, I think, if only for the reason that I probably would've gone full-on wedding cray cray if I'd had access to that much inspiration and that amount of bridal stuff at that time in my life.  Good for other peeps, and I love looking at wedding things online still, but I know myself too well…it would've complicated, rather than simplified things for me; I'm sure of it!

Anyway, with just archaic Google to help me, it took a little time to scour the internet for pretty design resources I could use for our stationary, and after finding some I truly love, I want to share them with you.  Here are some of the sites I used before my wedding, as well as a few others I've stumbled onto since then:

For fonts:
DaFont.com: This site is great as a collection of varied, free, simple to download fonts that are divided by categories, like handwritten styles, brush scripts, and calligraphy.  Definitely check out the Dingbats and Holiday sections for "fonts" that read as images, like decorative flourishes, hearts, and flowers--truthfully, there are some pretty cheesy ones to wade through, but you can find some sophisticated designs, too, if you're willing to click around.  Even four years after my initial invitation project, I use this site all the time to help me create blog graphics.  A few faves:

Lost Type Co-Op: Seriously gorgeous type, created by independent designers, that has a wonderfully professional look.  Free downloads are permitted, or you can make a donation when you download a font, and 100% of your donation goes to the designer.  If you're nerdy about this stuff like me, Lost Type sends out a fascinating e-newsletter you can subscribe to when you download.  Everything really does look beautiful, but I'm particularly partial to these:

For images, borders, and other design elements:
We Lived Happily Ever After: Elegant wreaths, Parisian flowers, rustic antlers…whatever theme you're going for, I feel like there's a good chance you'll find something to fit from Hannah's amazing collection of images, most of them hand-drawn.  It's simple to download her collections, and she even offers this handy tutorial on how to change the graphics' colors.  Some inspiration:

For backgrounds:
Design Love Fest: While I'm betting you don't want your wedding invitations to say something like "Get It Girl," this site does have a huge collection of backgrounds you can download for your phone or desktop, ones I'm betting would also look mighty fine as a backdrop for your invitations.  There are plenty of florals, geometric shapes, and watercolors like these to browse through (images are linked to the download pages):

Pattern Cooler: I'm ready to admit that some of the designs here are straight-up gaudy.  But the concept of customizing practically any design you can imagine (stripes, circles, Greek keys…) with any colors you like is unbeatable.  A sampling:

If you like the idea of free, print-your-own invites but would rather leave the design up to someone else:
Wedding Chicks: Type in a search for "free printable wedding invitations" and a lot of clunky designs with few customization options pop up.  These are different; I think they're truly pretty, and what's more, the site offers a great collection of design-your-own monograms you can use as a starting point for your own designs, as well as signs and other printables to use at your ceremony and reception.

I just recently learned about this beautiful couple who did ministry together with St. Paul!

One thing!  Be sure, when you're getting ready to print your invites and other materials, that you've saved them as a PDF.  If you try and print straight from a Microsoft program like Word or Publisher, it will usually try to convert downloaded fonts into a Windows-friendly version, and any pretty calligraphy or block type will show up on the screen but not on the final, printed version.  PDFs also just simplify things if you're taking your documents to a print shop or a place like Staples, because the formatting can't change depending on what operating system you're using.

What do you think?  Have you thought about going DIY for your wedding paper?  Is there a free design resource you've used and loved that I left off of the list?  Share away.

More design, DIY, and template stuff from this here blog:

Mass Program Templates  |  Design-Your-Own Puzzles for guests  |  A post from the early days on the more technical aspects of invitation design  |  Erika's pretty DIY invitations  |  Printable Calling Cards to share your new married address  |  Printable Prayer Cards

Inspired: Minimalist Style

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Make no mistake; I love bold colors and a nice, healthy dose of sparkle as much as the next girl (see here, here and here).  Lately, though I don't know--something about the heat and humidity of summer has me drawn to cleaner, simpler styles.  I think these minimalist finds are so modern and elegant looking and would be perfect for a late summer wedding!  Straight silhouettes, delicate jewelry, and a black and white palette add up to something so fresh, don't you think?  Links are in the captions.

1. Dress, Ruche.  2 & 4. Love Knot Necklace and Studs, Ariel Gordon.  3. Anenome Bouquet.  5. Gown, Wedding Dress Bee.  6. Sandals, Shoemint.  7. Holding Hands Invitation, Printable Press.

What do you think?  Would you go minimal for your wedding day?  Have a wonderful weekend!