Keep the Groom Away from the Future In-Laws

Our guest list currently stands at 330 people. Which is a lot. It's quite a bit bigger than I had initially anticipated. The majority of the list comes from my side of the family, which includes immediate family (of course); aunts, uncles, and cousins (we're close on my side, so of course), and my dad's cousins and their children, which includes many people that I haven't seen in years (or ever, if I think about it).

The conflict arises here:

When I pictured my wedding, I imagined that it would be a large affair, but not 330 people (or even 275 with the "only ~80% of the invited guests will show" rule). Without having sent any invitations out, I'm already hearing (second party) that people are coming to the wedding. The wedding is turning into a family reunion, which is, on one side great - who doesn't like a family reunion?, but on the other, I'm not able to invite some of my friends, a difficulty everyone faces when planning a wedding, but really just not a fun situation.

Now to the title of the post. On the recent family vacation, my fiance, my dad, and I were relaxing in the hot tub, when the topic of wedding showers came up. "Oh, well, I'm sure your mother will have a shower with her tennis friends."

"I don't know, I think traditional etiquette says that a shower should only include people who have been invited to the wedding." (I am not stating this as fact, I'm actually not sure, but I think I read it somewhere.

"Well, I'm sure some of your mother's friends are going to be invited to the wedding."

At this point, I told him that I wasn't sure, because the guest list was already at 330, when my fiance joins in:

"I'm pretty sure that a lot of my family won't be able to make the trip to the wedding, so we might have that many people."

"OK, so we can invite more people, since they probably won't come."

Fantastic.

The Bridesmaids Strike Again

The day after Christmas, my entire family (and my fiance) jumped on a plane for a 5 day family vacation. As I have mentioned in a couple previous posts, my sisters are two of my bridesmaids. Which means that I am trapped in a house with them. Which means that, even though another bridesmaid flew in to look at bridesmaid dresses last week, these two have been surfing the internet.

They found that that one of the dresses that they liked but didn't even come in green, apparently does come in green. Some sort of green called "Apple," which could either be perfect or completely hideous. So now I'm on a hunt to see if there are any stores at all that have a sample dress in that color. I even checked a couple that are where we are on vacations - no dice.

The Bridesmaids Luncheon

After we finished delaying lunch hour at Belle Saison, we headed to
the Olive Garden for lunch. We did manage to narrow down the number of
finalist bridesmaids dresses from nine to three, which meant that I
could erase a lot of the pictures ok my camera that we had taken
earlier.

Then my sister asked me why i was getting so stressed out about "the
planning." I told her how I felt like my mom was undermining me at
every decision.

"Well, you're really being difficult when Mom and Dad talk to you about the wedding. They're concerned that you're not doing the research."

"That's the problem. Mom doesn't think I'm competent enough to research things, narrow down vendors to a list of options and choose one. I'm 26 years old and in business school, I think I'm capable of doing due diligence."

And so it went, back and forth, until I finally said I didn't want to talk about it anymore. And then she did, so round and round it went until my friend stopped us in time for a stonily silent car ride back to the apartment.