Do you address the envelope to the parents or to the baby?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nAddress it to the adults, always. The card can talk to the baby all it likes inside, and a welcome to the world line is charming there, but an envelope made out to a two-week-old is a small joke that has to be explained to whoever is sorting the mail. Both names if you know both parents; the one you actually know if you do not, since a card addressed to a couple by somebody who has only ever met one of them reads as slightly borrowed. The family surname works when a card is going to a whole household with older children in it. And address it by hand even if your handwriting is poor. Printed labels are for invoices, and this envelope may still be around in six months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is a coworker I like but do not know well. Where is the line between friendly and intrusive?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe line sits at information. Warmth is welcome from anybody, and a coworker writing that they are glad for someone is never unwelcome. What crosses over is asking for details or offering things that require a relationship you do not have: the name before it has been announced, a visit, a photograph, an opinion on how long they are taking off. Keep it to two lines and keep the subject on them rather than on the arrangements. Congratulations, no rush on anything here, we will hold the fort covers it entirely. If a group card is going around, add your own sentence rather than a signature under somebody else’s, because eleven names and one message is a card from the department, not a person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everything I write comes out solemn. Is a new baby card allowed to be funny?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYes, and the funny card is frequently the one that gets read twice. The test is not whether the joke is good, it is who the joke is aimed at. Aim it at yourself, at the furniture, at the volume, at the amount of laundry one very small person generates, or at the family’s collective loss of composure, and it lands every time. Aim it at the parents’ competence, at the baby, or at anything to do with the body or the birth, and it does not. Timing matters more than tone here: a joke that works beautifully a month in can land badly in week one, when the card may be opened somewhere with fluorescent lighting. If you send only one card, send the plain one. The funny one is a second card.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is already a meal train going around. Does the card still need to offer help?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIt helps to say what you have signed up for rather than offering again in the abstract. A meal train solves the coordination problem, and a card that repeats let me know if you need anything on top of it adds one more thing for the parents to manage. Dinner is covered Tuesday, do not answer the door if you do not feel like it, I will leave it on the step is better, because it is specific, dated and requires nothing back. If you want to offer more than the sign-up sheet covers, pick the jobs nobody puts on a list: the trash, the older child on a school morning, an hour of somebody sitting in the house while a parent goes outside. Name one and commit to it in a single sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The baby is still in the hospital. Do you send the card now or wait until they are home?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nSend it now, and send it to the parents rather than to the room. The stretch before a baby comes home is the part with the least mail in it and the most hours, and a card that arrives during it does more work than one that arrives after everything has settled. Change the wording rather than the timing: leave out the welcome home lines, leave out any guess about how long it will be, and do not attach a date to anything you cannot control. Thinking of you today and tomorrow, no reply needed, is the whole message. Then send a second card when they do get home, because that day deserves its own envelope and by then the first one will be weeks old.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A new baby card gets opened days late, in a kitchen, in the gaps of a week with no shape to it, and it is usually the only mail in the stack that is not a bill or a form. That changes what belongs inside it. What lands is short, warm and unmistakably addressed to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":583,"featured_media":5288,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3724],"tags":[],"moimportance":[],"motype":[],"moformat":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5287","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-greetings"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/583"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5287"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5291,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5287\/revisions\/5291"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5287"},{"taxonomy":"moimportance","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moimportance?post=5287"},{"taxonomy":"motype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/motype?post=5287"},{"taxonomy":"moformat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moformat?post=5287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}