Some Blog

desperately seeking sanity

11/29/2008

My sister is pregnant. This is good. The family is getting their grand/great-grand child. My sister is getting her child. I am getting some peace.

Except I am throwing her a baby shower. Cross-country. And my family, they’re kind of being special about things. Specifically my stepmother and father. I don’t know about you, but when I get a request for mailing addresses for four specific people I don’t return a list of 14. I’ve already order the engraved invitations so ordering more is not happening. I’ve already sent out invites to all the other families and groups of friends and the RSVP date is in four weeks, so even if I lost my dang mind and ordered another printing of 20 invites, which would cost half as much as ordering 80 so kind of a lot of money there,  I wouldn’t have time to get them back to me and then addressed and mailed out. I did the next best thing.

I spent the day at stationery store buying card sets that match the paper of the invites. Bruce then scanned one of the original invites and I tweaked a little until the coloring was right. I then messed around in word and created reasonable facsimiles of the RSVP card and direction inserts. I then printed onto the card stock. You see, even though I had set aside four for the original list I didn’t think I could send engraved invitations to my four aunts and then something clearly different to their daughters. So I had to make invites for the whole list. My head is killing me and all I want to do is go to sleep, but the pile of laundry calls as does Bruce’s very untidy apartment.

This whole matter is only complicated by the fact that my step-mother has not sent me a list for her side. I’ve already sent her invite and invites to some of her niece’s. I specifically mentioned that I needed five addresses from her side of the family. So it’s kind of strange that the list I got only included my father’s side. I’ve managed to whitepage.com two of the people I needed and I sent one of the niece’s to her mom with an apology note (I hated getting invites at my mom’s house long after I moved out). That leave two more people from my step-mother’s family. Everyone else is going to get invites and being talking about the baby shower at Christmas, which is historically held at my father’s place so that is going to be really awkward for the two females from that side that didn’t get an invite. I’ve already resorted to calling 411 to get their phone number to call them directly to get their address, no luck.

I am dealing with all this in a strategic manner. I left a message on my father’s voicemail saying: “I found a few addresses, but I still needed two more. I’ve already mailed out the other ones and I know my sister really wanted to see her aunt and cousin and I wouldn’t want them to feel like they were not invited.” I hope this motivates my family to do the right things. Unfortunately do to all the personality disorders that are running rampant right now, I don’t know if that is even a possibility. 

I’m not sure what the interaction is going to be, but if there is a reason for what’s going on, I am going to make my father and step-mother tell my sister directly. I am not taking the heat for this.