Actually letting go of control

I keep saying that I am trying to be relaxed about details that are not on our priority list. I genuinely mean it, and mainly I think I am achieving it. Or I thought I was.

We've just got back to Auckland after two weeks in the South Pacific. I wasn't planning to do anything wedding related whilst we were there, but the last few days we had wifi and not much else to do. You can guess what happened. I started by catching up on my blog reading, and ended up doing etsy and google image searches. Then I pestered Gadget with my findings.

He was surprisingly agreeable to this. In fact, he found a great idea for an invitation and decided on table names. The table names are still provisional as we don't know how many tables we're having, but they'll be easy to adapt.

The invitation is a more concrete decision. There isn't a finished design, because we've decided to go down the route of having custom artwork on our invites. Given that we're sending evites and there is very little money budgeted for stationary, this would have been a problem if I didn't have a talented brother.

My little brother (who is very tall and not little at all) is an amazing artist and has very kindly agreed to do the artwork for us. I think he'd rather have been asked months ago when he wasn't working and was still in the UK with his graphics tablet, but never mind!

This means that I no longer have control of the invites. I don't have the design to tinker with whenever I want, and I don't get to determine when they'll be ready. I've told my brother the deadline is December, and now I will have to leave him to it until he has something to show me. And that's actually quite hard.

This is the first decision I've made that has meant handing over control. Obviously I'll still approve the final design and text work, but the process is now in the control of someone else. And that feels very odd.

I'm surprised by these feelings, as I haven't had them with other things. My MOH bought shoes for my page boys last week - and I'm very happy with them. I have no need to be present for every purchase or consulted for every decision. If it's not on the priority list, then it just needs to happen.

The invites (and stationary in general) are not on the priority list. Having said that, they are one of the few parts of my wedding that I have thought about over the years. I'm happy with the plan for the invites, and I'm happy that my brother knows what we want. I guess I'll just have to come to terms with feeling a bit out of control!