Wedding Guestlist Part I: Narrowing it Down

Image via Mademan.com

The guestlist was the bane of my existence for quite some time.  FH has a pretty small family so even though we invited nearly all of his immediate and extended family, they still barely made a dent in the list.  As for our friends, they made up about 30% of the list.  My family on the other hand is enormous, so figuring out who to invite (without hurting feelings) was a monumental task to undertake.  

Initially my parents wanted to invite everyone and their mother.  Here is an example of one of many conversations I had with my mother:
Mom: Oh what about inviting so and so and her husband?
Me: Who the heck is so and so?
Mom: You know who that is!  That was my best friend growing up in Haiti and you’ve met her!
Me: ….when did I meet her?
Mom:  I think you were probably 8 or 9 at the time...but still you’ve met her!!
Me:  Yea, I think we’d like to limit the number of people we invite based on if I wasn’t 4 feet tall the last time they saw me.
Mom: Sigh....fine!

Although it took some time, my parents finally started to understand why we just couldn’t possibly invite everyone to the wedding once I gave them some insight into the budget.  While FH and I insisted on paying for the wedding ourselves, our parents have graciously offered to pay for a number of big ticket items that will ease the burden (we are paying for roughly 60% while each set of parents are contributing about 20%.  We have pretty awesome parents).

After narrowing it down we decided that in a perfect world, we'd have 100 people at the wedding.  We will end up inviting 137 people but since it’s a destination wedding, I imagine we'll have a few nos.  Though with the type of friends and family we have who have been waiting for this wedding to happen for a long time, I think at the very least we will end up with 100 people.

Since booking the venue, we also set up a room block since all of our guests will be coming from the US.  And currently, even though we’ve only sent out the Save the Dates so far, 44 people have already booked their hotel room.  So excited!!