When did you order your invitations? Who had choice of dinner items and how did you put on invitation?

You should send out invitations 6-8 weeks before the wedding, so you sound about right. Go ahead and order them soon! We did meal choices on our RSVP cards-- I attached a pic so you could see how I set it up. Look at your contract for your caterer/venue to see when they need final numbers and make the RSVP date a week back from that so you have time to follow up with people who didn't RSVP.

I plan on mailing them out 2 months before and RSVP date 3 weeks before. When doe your venue need final head count?

Almost all of my venues here take dinner orders at the table.

We ordered ours pretty early (in the fall) because we also got save the dates and the lady who made them didn't ship to Canada so we had to make alternative arrangements. We just sent out our invites a bit ago, also sent them out a bit earlier than normal as we hVe a lot of out of town guests. Our RSVP cards included a meal selection choice. Make sure you have enough time to get everyone's rsvp back (and to call missing ones) before you have to give final numbers. Our venue requires 3 weeks notice before the event of all food choices an numbers, so we put our rsvp date a week before that.

We ordered ours when there was a sale through the website which was 3 months before we sent them out. We knew what we wanted so we didn't need to wait any longer.

We did a plated meal, below is how we worded our RSVP card. If I had to do it again, I'd either put the word "Initial" in bold or italics or something. Most people haven't followed the instructions and just put a check. If there are two people and they just put a check next to each option then we just assigned one person to each and they can switch the day of if they want.

I didn't do the format @J has because we invited some families with more than 2 guests and some with only one person invited. Also I highly recommend if you have a website to put more info on your food, it helps people to know a little more than just "beef" and also it forces them to go to the website (if they care) and hopefully they'll look around at other things on there. But also put your website somewhere else on your invite so when they send the RSVP back they still have your website. Since we sent out our invites in mid April, we have gotten 275 views of our website (with only 135 guests invited) so I am sure it helped having that info.

@Celia, none of the places in California that we met with will allow people to order at the table. All the plated meals require a selection in advance and we have to mark something on each place card so they know what meal to set down for people.

I ordered my invitations on vistaprint on January during their 50% off sale. I sent them out during the second week of april. I found an invite template on there that had the three sections to select an entree.

We didn't have our food chosen when we ordered the invitations so afterward we printed little business cards ourselves to add into the invitation and it worked out perfectly!

I had ordered ours off of vista print during the black Friday sale and got 50% off and free shipping.

We are having a DW so our invites went out earlier than most. We sent them 6 months ahead of time.

Menu choices should be listed on the RSVP card. I am doing a buffet, so no choices for my guests

We finally decided on our invitations last week. It's been a very long and tedious task. However, we also decided on buffet so there are no menu choices.

Not getting married until November 2016, So we decided to order them when we receive our tax refund.

Oooh such good information here. Thank you, thank you. Celia that is very interesting. I wish I called the catering company before this weekend came to ask them if they will be taking orders! Darn darn!! Because now I am going to miss out on the weekend deals. I think?

Happy In Hawaii - I am following yours to a T if I ended doing a choice on the RSVP cards.

Oh great! Glad I could help, I searched all over the internet for ways that people could write down what meals they wanted, I actually didn't see any that were like mine, I just kind of combined elements of a few different ones. So far it has worked out great other than the fact that the reading ability of my guests is awful. Very few have noticed the word "Initial" but for the ones that do notice, it works out perfectly!! It's cool though that people can order the day of, I've never been to a wedding with that, though most weddings I go to have buffets.

I will warn you, we had "please initial the entrée choice for each guest" on our RSVP cards and had the same problem as Happy in Hawaii in that three-quarters of the RSVPs that have been returned to us have a number next to each entrée instead of an initial. So in addition to hunting down missing RSVPs in a couple of weeks, I'm also getting in contact with our guests to find out who wants what. It's been a pain.

I wish I would've done a setup similar to @J's, because I feel like it would've been a lot easier for both the guests and for us.

I ordered invitations probably around 4 months out and sent them out 7 or 8 weeks before the event. We had a buffet, though, so there was no need to write in meal choices on our RSVP cards.