Reply to No kids wedding...except there were kids.

Forum Index » General Parenting Discussion

Reply to "No kids wedding...except there were kids."

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Pretty sure I'm the OP of the thread from a while ago. It was a ton of very young kids. Like 4 ring bearers all under age 4 and 3 flower girls all under age 4. So it was 7 kids. All of us with kids that weren't allowed were all older, more well behaved.

All other no kids weddings had 0 kids. Except one where the nephew whose Dad was the groom's brother and murdered that year. So made total sense nephew was there in his Dad's place. [/quote]

Ok, some of you either have not planned weddings or were asleep at the wheel when you planned your wedding, because these complaints are idiotic. The expectation that as a regular guest at a wedding (so NOT in the wedding party, not immediate family of bride or groom), your kids should be invited if any other kids are invited, is unbelievably entitled. In many cases you are talking about doubling the number of people in your party. Now multiply that by the the number of parents invited to the wedding. How can you not understand this?

My wedding was a decade ago, but I still remember dealing with these logistics and having to make hard choices. Our venue had a hard limit of 120 people. After family and wedding party (which included, GASP, six kids, all of whom were our nieces and nephews and all in the wedding itself) we were playing with about 60 other guests.

We were able to narrow our list of friends, including a handful of colleagues, down to about 50 people, which included married and long-term-partnered friends where the invitation was addressed to both people. Some of these couples had kids, all pretty young (I'd say the older was 8 or 9 at the time, most under age 6). Inviting all the kids in this group, which we would need to do to be fair because none of these kids were in the wedding party and there was no way to choose some kids over others really, would have added about 20 guests to our invite list. I know not all of these people would have brought their kids, but it was hard to know who would have and who wouldn't, so if we did this, that was going to be it for our guest list. Because our venue limit was very firm, we really did not want to overshoot with our invite list by much, especially because we had a good sense of a high positive RSVP likelihood.

But here's the thing. That list of 50ish friends also included around 15 people who were single at the time. We also had another 15 or so family members who were single. I have been to enough weddings as a single to feel like it's really valuable and kind to offer single friends the option to bring a plus one to a wedding, if possible. I also felt that any plus one would be much more likely to enjoy this wedding than the vast majority of our friends very young children. So we chose to offer plus ones to all single guests, but not invite anyone's kids (again, except the six nieces and nephews who were automatic invites as they are family and were in the wedding). I have ZERO regrets about this, and in fact know several friends who were grateful for the opportunity to bring a date to the wedding. Our wedding was very fun.

If any of our guests showed up to our wedding, saw our six nieces and nephews, and thought "Ugh, rude! If there were going to be kids at this wedding, why didn't MY kids get an invite?" without considering that they were in a category of guests where inviting their kids would also have meant inviting another 13-14 kids and not allowing our single guests to bring dates, I don't honestly have a ton of sympathy. Sorry? I am a parent now and get it's hard to find sitters for events like that. It's a hard time to have a wedding, when you have friends who are parents, who are married, who are single and dating. It's very hard to accommodate everyone. I can envision a different wedding where we prioritized inviting families over plus ones, an that could be a great wedding too. It's not the one we had.

If this is really something you still think about YEARS later, regarding weddings of friends who really had no obligation to invite your children to the wedding and where doing so might have been a major logistical challenge, you need to let. it. go. This is just how it is when you host large, catered events at a venue. I don't get how anyone who has ever had their own wedding wouldn't get this and just be understanding.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics