ArcaMax

Dear Crowded: You should definitely express your concern to the friend who invites others along on your shared vacations without running her plans past you first. When you’ve budgeted the time and money for a specific vacation with a specific person, learning after the fact that you will be sharing your time with others is not at all fair to you.

When it comes to your visits with your children, they might believe that you would welcome having mini-reunions with other family members or local friends when you’re visiting their homes. This instinct is generous and inclusive.

If you want more alone-time with them and their immediate families during your visits, you should absolutely let them know.

Dear Amy: Given that wedding season is coming up, I thought I would offer a tip that might help wedding guests, as well as the marrying couple.

I have always said that if you are taking a gift that has even the smallest of possibilities of landing on a "group gift table,” always, ALWAYS include a card INSIDE the gift.

After a wedding in our family, I cannot tell you how many gifts were found on the table "after" the event that had no cards as they had become unattached and were just set in a pile.

For those gifts that had no cards attached, we sent a generic card thanking the person for attending our joyous event and explained that many cards had become detached.

We asked our guests to contact us so we could make sure their gift was properly acknowledged.

Obviously if they had not sent a gift, they would not be contacting us.

We ended up eventually matching all of the gifts to the guests who had given them, but it would have been so much easier if the cards had been placed inside the gift.

...continued