Wedding Update: Invitations! (and a Minted Giveaway)

When your daughter is planning her wedding, your thoughts often go back to your own big day.

Holy Matrimony!  Have weddings and wedding products changed since then!

Check out the festive invitations you can find at Minted.com

Thirty-some years ago, non-traditional invitations were just coming into fashion.

But my mom and I stuck to tradition and what we thought was proper:  engraved invitations on cream colored paper.

Years later, they seem oh so boring :

We thought the butterfly stamps made the RSVP envelope look festive. This was as cutting edge as we got:

Nowadays you send out Save the Date cards too.  (A quite practical innovation, especially for a destination wedding.) Laura had a wonderful time designing the one in the top photo  from the selections at Minted.

Although the bride won’t let me show you her actual wedding invitations yet, I can promise you they bear no resemblance to my cream colored invites.

A few days ago, I met another mother of the bride.

It’s always fun to compare notes.

“All I  asked of her,” the mom said, drawing out her wedding words, “is that she use traditional invitations.”

Not me.

I’m rolling with the times.

The more festive the better!

Giveaway:  Minted sells all sorts of colorful and creative paper products from invitations to journals to note cards to party decor. They’re offering one Friend for the Ride reader a fifty dollar credit toward your next order. No other purchases required.

To enter the giveaway, simply post a comment by April 10 saying that you’d like to win. Winner will be chosen at random.

Invitations Below: If I could pick my wedding invitations all over again, here are some I’d consider  from Minted.

Mother of the Bride Update: Wedding Arms

Nine and a half more weeks until my daughter Laura’s wedding.

Yikes!

And my MOB dress is SLEEVELESS.

Like Meg Tipper, I’m wondering how my arms will look.

Shiny pink hand weights weren’t enough to inspire me to pump those arms…

Until I decided to indulge in one of my greatest vices: situation comedies from the 60s.

I cut myself a deal.

And it’s working!  (And most of the deals I cut with myself fail within two days.)

I’m allowed to watch the Dick van Dyke Show IF I lift weights while I watch.

Shout out to the Lauras!

Laura Younger for helping me select the dress.

Laura Petrie for entertaining and inspiring me as I work on my Mother of the Bride bod.

Before you know it, I’m going to be escorted down the aisle with Laura Petrie arms.

Well maybe they won’t be Laura Petrie arms, but some of the jiggle really is gone.

What about you?

Any tips for keeping your arms in shape?

Peekaboo: The Wedding Dress Revealed!

Not.

Just a trick to lure you into reading my post.

Won’t do it again, promise!

But this puff of underskirts is all the bride would permit me to show you.

Actually, she barely agreed to that much.

The dress is sitting in its long, important bag on her childhood bed.

Duckie stands guard.

A brand new dress.

A not so new duck.

And love swirling around in all sorts of ways.

Wedding Update: What a Time to Love a Dress!

The dress shopping is finished!  At least for the wedding day. Rehearsal dinner dresses yet to be selected. I promise a Mother of the Bride dress update soon.

Until then, in honor of the wedding shopping adventures of mothers and daughters everywhere, a poem, written by me:

What a time

To be a mom.

What a time

To love a dress.

Her dress,

My dress,

We chose them both

Together.

Just like playing dress ups

Together,

What a time,

Not so many years ago.

Photos: Laura posing in my wedding dress with kitty Edmund as the groom. And Laura and I celebrating a time when small prints must have been in vogue, about twenty (yikes!) years go.