Children and Babies!

I would say it depends how young the baby is. I said absolutely no children but my brother and his wife are now expecting so we'll have a 5 month old baby at the wedding. 1) It will be my niece/nephew so what them there 2) It will be too young to be away from parents all day and night and I want them to be there

Hi

I got so stressed out about a similar situation.

We originally decided that we were not going to have children at the wedding although obviously if any babies were really young then we would obviously allow them to attend due to feeding etc. I checked with some guests that have children before deciding and they ok with it. We didn't specifically invite children on invitations and we told some guests that asked with kids that we were not having children there. but then a close friend asked to bring her baby and I agreed. A friend of OH then asked and he struggled to say no cos I had said yes to someone. In the end we decided that we would allow children. So OH said yes. We then contacted the people we had specifically said no to and told them there would be children there and offered option to bring theirs. One said they wouldn't be bringing their kids anyway but appreciated being told it had changed and the other couple accepted the invite for their child. But we only did that for guests who had specifically asked if their child could come and we were saying young children only. Q

So having been in a similar situation I would say I felt bad about saying no to some and yes to others which is why we did contacted people. Else it would have seemed like we had allowed some and not others of same age.

Have you said no to lots of guests or just a few. If just a few you could give them the heads up that there will be a baby there but to be honest if the baby is that young then it should be obvious why you would allow the baby. Also unless they have children of the same age then they can't compare why they couldn't bring their children.

Hope that makes sense and helps!

We had no children except my niece (4, flower girl) and my nephew (7, Page Boy) however I did allow babies under 1, and we ended up with 4 babies there! It was more important to me to have the parents come and we knew it would be very difficult if we didn't allow them to bring their babies. I felt it was different with children, as we would have to cater for them & no one actually asked us or said anything about them kids being there or not.

It is tough, but I definitely think babies are different to children xxxx

I have five kids coming to mine at the end of August - my almost 3yr old niece, his nieces who are nearly 3 and nearly 5, and my best friend's two children who are older at 8 and nearly 11. I wasn't prepared to have any other children coming because we're only having quite a small wedding and we didn't want to take up spaces with distant family members' children who we don't really know and who probably aren't going to remember it. I can trust the older kids to behave but I imagine the three little girls will cause havoc.

We debated as to whether to have children at our wedding and my bridesmaid (who has two kids who will be 5 and 2 at the time of the wedding) was fully supportive of this as she wanted a kid free weekend! However, the best man has two kids the same age and his wife will not leave her kids with anyone else, so we had no option but to have their kids there, so I wanted my bridesmaids two there.

My bridemaid's two kids will be my flower girl and page boy. The best man's kids will be present but have no role in the wedding. Our venue insists on a nanny if there are children but they have allowed us to have the four kids there as they are young.

We will be informing our guests that children cannot be accommodated at the wedding. The guests that already know (my other bridemaid has a 8 year old who will stay with his dad for the weekend) have been fine with it. There has been a recent baby boom though amongst our friends so there will be quite a few babies around the one year/ 18 months mark that won't be invited! So, we will cross that bridge when we get to it. My OH is a lot more lenient than me but I really don't want lots of babies at my wedding!

I don't think that many people will be upset if it is just one baby and, they are part of the family. Have you said no kids to other family members? X

I think as long as you make it clear to everyone in advance that babies are allowed, there won't be a problem. Maybe give a cut-off age so there are no blurred lines.

Arrangements can usually be made for childcare, but I agree with you that small babies are a bit different! Especially if it's the mother that's your main friend - you don't want her stressing about being away from the baby for the whole wedding. Also, she's probably more likely to leg it as soon as she politely can! So for your sake as well as hers it's probably a good idea to say the baby is welcome to be there. As long as everyone knows the rule in advance and nobody is surprised on the day, no-one ought to get offended.

I definitely wouldn't want lots of kids at the wedding, but fortunately we haven't got too many. We've only got two children in the family - his cousin's kids. The other seven are children of friends, and some of them are saying they will leave the kids behind with grandparents out of choice because they want a day off! Lol.