Wedding Invitations (mis)interpretation

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

That’s just it. Why would anyone want to drag a three-year-old to an event at which he’ll be the only three-year-old and which, from his point of view, will come down to a bunch of boring adults doing boring adult stuff? I doubt he’ll be into the fancy food served at the reception or the wine. The little kids I’ve known also haven’t been real impressed by romantic love or having to stay dressed up and tidy for hours on end which can seem like an eternity to a kid.

If the woman insisted, I think I’d put on my most innocent look and ask why she’d want to subject her son to several hours of boredom? There’s plenty of time for that when he’s an adult and has to put up with it at work!

CJ

62

This thread brought to mind my cousin Eleanor’s wedding - I was about 7 at the time, and the oldest of 4 sibs. We were all invited (including my not-quite toddler sister) along with other cousins. We knew how to behave ourselves in church, and I remember at the reception we all ran around the dance floor - before the music started and while the adults were eating their boring meal.

At this reception, there was a fountain with a sweet red beverage flowing. Yummy. We helped ourselves. No one bothered to tell the children not to drink because the beverage had alcohol in it. It didn’t take long before several children left regurgitated beverage on the dance floor… :eek: I may have been among them - I blocked some of that out.

Anyway, even at child-friendly events, children can create problems, intentionally or otherwise. But it all ended happily. My cousin and her husband have been together around 45 years, and they’re grandparents. Dang, when did I get so old??

63

My mother, who is normally the most reasonable and sane of people, boggled my mind over my wedding.

Very early on in the proceedings we were talking about bridesmaids, and she was listing possible candidates in our family - very few because the little kids at that time were mostly boys except the sullen daughter of an aunt we rarely see. I said that bridesmaids weren’t a problem because the daughters of my three best friends had been asked and that was enough.

My mother then had a fit because she had been doing the mental dredging, come up with said cousin and without consulting me HAD ALREADY ASKED HER MOTHER!!!

I had absolutely no intention of having her as a bridesmaid, and as far as I know (because I refused to have as much to do with the unasking as I had had with the asking) my mother had to call and unask.

This caused my mother some worry because at another cousin’s wedding said kid had turned up in a floofy dress clutching a bouquet!!! Whatever my mother said must have got through though because there was no sign of such stuff on our day.

Speaking as a Brit, and possibly an ignorant one (I have found out so much more about weddings and ettiquette since we got married that I wonder what our shambolic fun must have looked like to the outsider!!) I had no idea that an invite to two parents wouldn’t include the kids…

In Japan in our area unless you are very immediate family you do not get invited to a wedding at all - even if hub or wife is the bride or groom’s best friend you won’t be on the invite. Neither was I invited to my SIL’s wedding which took place a few months before our own - I wasn’t family yet. This is possibly because each invitee is expected to cough up between 150 and 500 dollars depending on the area you live in and the closeness of the relationship. For our Japanese wedding I ended up not inviting any of my friends for this reason - I didn’t want to stick them with a huge bill.

64

BiblioCat and Honey can add me to the list of terrible mothers! I love an excuse to leave the kids home sometimes! I love an excuse to go out and just do grown-up stuff! I don’t know if I’d feel differently if I weren’t a SAHM (although I still wouldn’t have the nerve to insist the kids be invited, too). But hey, I’m here, all day, every day. I get plenty of quality time with my kids. Sometimes I like quality time with adults, too. And no matter where you are or what you’re doing, if the kids are with you, you are, before all else, a parent.

Ninevah, I’ll echo the people who say don’t invite the newborn, either. The baby may be no problem at all, but may be a screamer. If the baby turns out to be a screamer, and the mother can’t be trusted to remove the baby from the room if it does start screaming, that’s a big deal! Just don’t take the chance!

65

You’ve pretty much described my sister and brother-in-law here, the parents of the niece that I particularly didn’t want at my wedding. Thanks for the confirmation that we did indeed do the right thing with not having kids at our wedding. (For the record, they also think there is nothing wrong with their daughter, who nobody else in the family, including grandma, can stand to be around. But that’s a whole 'nother thread.)

66

A quick update before the big day (this Sat)

Much-discussed baby has just made its entrance into the world yesterday (Tues) at 5pm. That said, the mother (and baby girl - as yet unnamed) is still intending on coming to wedding although father now can’t make it (excuse: can’t get out of work or something like that).

Was rather hoping it’d be the other way round, but oh well.

Will report back after wedding.

67

You silly Aussie’s and your different time zone… that yesterday (Tuesday) thing really confused me for a second.

Wow, what kind of weirdo brings a newborn to a wedding. Sounds to me like she wants to be the center of attention with the “cute little baby” at your wedding.
Good luck.

68

I agree. She could be hoping to upstage the bride. Maybe commonsense will prevail and she’ll decide both she and bub are not up to a wedding four days after delivery?

69

Please spill how that turned out. :wink:
Being over a decade younger than any of my siblings (and most of my cousins) I went to alot of weddings I was usually well behaved, but my siblings/cousins/uncles always though hit funny to get me drunk and see how my teetoller mother would react. I was 16 before I got through a reception without getting drunk! Only one of my brothers had a child-free wedding, but he was stationed overseas at the time.

70

Well, I seem to be a voice in the wilderness on this one, but I would certainly assume that my children are invited to a wedding that I am invited to, unless explicitly told otherwise.

I’ve never encountered accidental ambiguity on this, either. Maybe about 5 of the many weddings I have been invited to since becoming a parent have been of the “no children” variety, were explicitly stated as such in the invitation, and in all but one case was also followed by a direct email from the friend in question on the side apologizing for the exclusion and describing it as being based on cost (but no doubt also serving as a polite reminder of their wishes in this regard).

To me, a wedding is the joining of two families, and families have children – that’s what defines a family, after all (your family wouldn’t be your family if you hadn’t grown up in it!). Excluding my own family’s children from attending my wedding would have been like, well, having a housewarming party in a hotel conference room instead of my actual house.

Now I understand that this is not everybody’s attitude, but I would go so far as to say it is the default/prevailing one in most American sub-cultures. Weddings have children the way that McDonald’s hamburgers have pickles: most people like 'em that way, but you have the right to ask to not have them and deserve to have your request honored, but even so be forewarned that unless you take extra steps (like trying to watch them make it) you might well get a couple anyway.

So my advice would be to hold firm on the no children policy, and if it’s not too late, send that secondary email/letter! Dis-inviting people’s kids is one thing; having the parents feel like they were somehow singled out, or that some kind of double standard was applied, is quite another. One time I attended a friend’s wedding after leaving my kids with my parents, and was annoyed (my wife even more so) to find quite that there were 5 or 6 kids there, that my kids had even met before and would have liked to have played with.

This was “that one case” where the friend in question had NOT sent the separate follow-up messages to those invitees he knew had children to reinforce the message, and it turned out that the parents of these kids (close family of the bride’s) hadn’t really read the invitation and just brought the whole family along. Basically their reaction had been “oh look, it’s the invitation to <X>'s wedding, let’s mark the date and venue/directions”, and the idea that a wedding might not include children never occured to them.

BTW, in response to all the replies about “bratty children” “ruining” weddings, I have not yet been to a wedding I would consider having been disrupted by a child. There may have been a few cases of crying infants/small children whisked away by a parent, and one case of a 2-year-old piping up “I don’t like this story, I want a different one” during the priest’s sermon at a Catholic wedding, which is still remembered with great amusement by the groom and bride, while nobody remembers anything about the homily.

71

[QUOTE=robardin]
Well, I seem to be a voice in the wilderness on this one, but I would certainly assume that my children are invited to a wedding that I am invited to, unless explicitly told otherwise.

[QUOTE]
I agree that it should be stated in the invite. But at the same time most people I know would ask if it’s ok to bring their little booger-eating monsters or simply wouldn’t bring them out of common courtesy. Assuming that it’s ok to bring an newborn is just insane.

Out of curiosity, what is the appropriate age cut-off for kids? I remember my cousin was upset that her daughter (almost 13 at the time) wasn’t invited to my brothers wedding. Do you just say anyone under 18 is not allowed?

72

In our case, there is no set age that is “too young”, but there are a number of factors:

  1. It is an adult party. Anybody that cannot enjoy that it is an event demanding a certain maturity may be too young.
  2. There will be alcohol. Anybody who cannot legally imbibe is probably too young (I think the only real exception here is the bride’s little sister, who obviously can’t not be invited, and at 16 will be old enough to meet factor 1. Hopefully.)
  3. Are you the child of another guest? If so, you pretty well have to be gainfully employed/living on your own/showing some sign of being an adult.

And of course,
4) We say so. We shouldn’t have to justify to any guests why their children are not invited.

Is it rude of us? Possibly. But for every parent who raises a stink about not being able to bring along a young child, I’m guessing there’d be two who would be thankful that the level of discourse for the evening is raised beyond Bob the Builder (for the young ones), Algebra, or Intramural Sports. A chance to not be somebody’s mommy for a few hours. We’re doing them a favor, really.

73

I won’t say you’re wrong, but I will say that it will be significant how you approach it. Yes, it might be your right to disinvite children, but I think you might find it to your benefit to do it as apologetically as possible.

I think most people I know do assume that their children are invited to a wedding that they are invited to, even if they are not mentioned on an invitation. It seems perfectly natural to me. Again, I’m not criticising your decision, but it might be to your advantage to understand why people might feel this way and go about it in as gentle a manner as possible, with, as robardin suggested, multiple reinforcements of the message.

74

I know it’s your wedding, and therefore you make the rules. But not including kids is a very selfish thing for you to do. Why no kids? What’s the problem with having kids at your wedding? What are they possibly going to do to spoil the day, make a bit of noise?

I love my kids and really enjoy taking them places. They’re polite, well-behaved and a joy to be around.

Wait until you have your own kids and people invite you places and tell you not to bring them. You’ll feel insulted too.

75

For one thing, it’s more mouths to feed. At our wedding, it was $30-some dollars per guest. This was almost 12 years ago, at an Embassy Suites hotel banquet room. If we’d invited the all the children of all our guests, the guest list would have been … I dunno, tripled, and we wouldn’t have been able to afford it.
Sure, we could have had a backyard picnic, but it’s not quite what we wanted.

76

Every couple you invited had an average of 4 kids each?

77

I know they’re your kids, and therefore you want them with you. But bringing kids to an event to which they’re not welcome is a very selfish thing to do. Why bring kids? It’s only an adult ceremony (and, for some people, a religiously holy one) at which the only center of attention should be bride, groom and officiant. A “bit of noise” is inappropriate, and does indeed ruin forever an expensive wedding video.

You love your kids and really enjoy taking them places. You consider them polite, well-behaved and a joy to be around. You can’t expect anyone who isn’t their parent to feel the same way.

And - not everyone getting married has the intent to have children of their own. They, especially, might be offended at the presence of them (uninvited) at their wedding.

Bottom line: Western etiquette says only the people specifically named on the invitation go to the wedding, that the couple has the right to exclude children (or anyone other than the spouse of another invited guest, for that matter), and that the only appropriate response if you can’t live with this is to decline the invitation. Politely.

78

I was just throwing that out as an estimate. But most of my friends do have 2 or 3 kids, yeah.
I still say money could be a big factor.

79

ninevah, I hope that things are going well! I wish I had some great advice to give, but, sadly, none. Just best wishes.

Just to show how different folks expect different things, a little story about my family & weddings.

Since I was 16, I have been to the weddings of three cousins and one brother. Later on this year, one more cousin and one more brother. (Single folks in this family are getting to be a rare commodity!) Every single wedding has had (or will have) children in attendance (including me, for the one 11 years ago). Every single wedding has had (or will have) ‘an adult reception’ to follow. We’ve always had a great time. Kids have ranged from newborns to, well, at whatever age they stop being kids. One such newborn at one such wedding was the son of the bride and groom. The mother specifically picked the wedding date after the due date (by about 1.5 mo), just so that she could have a drink at the wedding. At this same wedding, which was on a beach, with the vows being given on a pier, one of ‘yoot’ guests waded into the water to take pictures of the vows. He was then followed by (I think) his younger sister, who was not taking pictures. Nobody seemed to mind. (Of course, I should mention that, at this wedding, the drinking started before the ceremony; it was the only wedding I have been to where the toast to the bride and groom happened immediately after the vows!)* :smiley:

So, I guess what I am trying to say, is that, if I were invited to a wedding, and (og forbid) I had kids, I would assume you invited them, unless there was some clue. Once I figured it out, I would, of course, respect the wishes of the bride and groom. But said couple might need to be less subtle, than, say, a sledgehammer to get me to understand. :stuck_out_tongue:

*Two more things about the family.
1.) I realized how much we drink when, at the above mentioned beach wedding, family pictures were being taken, our extended family was called out, and someone from the crowd yelled, “Finally! The bar is clear!” Only funny because the bar was only half cleared…
2.) My family has never understood the concept of ‘adults-only receptions.’ So long as everyone is being responsible, everyone has a good time. In theory, the kids also learn how to drink responsibly. Heck, at the wedding where I was 16, the bride and groom were giving small bottles strawberry juice / vodka to the guests. I got one, and was told to hang on to it for a few years. I cracked it on my 21st birthday.

80

For $20000 to $100000 for a classy, decently appointed wedding, a little selfishness is allowed.

Things that they could do (off the top of my head and in no particular order):

  1. Make a bit of noise. You know, right when the vows get to “I do” and there’s suddenly a loud babyshriek forever immortalized on the wedding video. Or during the toasting. Or through an entire reception because the kid is already tired at 10pm and the loud music all night doesn’t help matters.
  2. Be the center of attention. “One and only wedding day” trumps “spinning in circles in my pretty flowergirl dress.” Or worse, “MOMMY!!! I’M BORED!!! boredboredboredboredboredboredboredboredbored…”
  3. The sight, the sound and the fury of bodily excretions. To by cynical: babies do three things. Poop, eat, and cry (if you’re lucky they sleep a bit too)*. I don’t want to smell babyshit at my wedding. For the older children: between the more exotic, adult menu, and the possibility of a mischievous adult slipping the kid a drink or two, vomit is the surest way to ruin a reception. At least most drunk adult guests will have the good sense to go into the bathroom.
  4. Drag their parents away earlier than they would like. Again, small talk and dancing are boring to many children. Combine that with a night wedding as ours is, and it’s a shame that their parents, whom we might not get to see very often, and almost never without children in tow, have to leave an hour into the reception to take their kid home.
  5. You invite one, you’re kinda stuck inviting them all. Leaffan, you said “[My kids are] polite, well-behaved and a joy to be around.” You know that doesn’t hold true for every child.
  6. Even children that are a joy to be around are still CHILDREN. I hold my tongue around children so as to not spoil their minds with comments that are perfectly appropriate among a group of (socially lubricated) adults. It’s a relief to not have to look out for any kids nearby before speaking freely.

*I know. They also soak in the world in wide-eyed wonder and give an innocent hope to the future. But at weddings, they poop, eat, and cry.