Weddingbee Blog

I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the first things I wanted to do after Mr. Guinea Pig and I got engaged was to make a guest list. I’m not even sure why, exactly, but I was SO excited about making this list of everyone we loved and wanted to share in our celebration.

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So we made a list, sent it to our parents for any additions, and then sat on it. Of course, at this time we also decided that we would be getting married 18 months later. This list remained essentially untouched until we decided to send out our save the dates: so about 9 months later, we emailed out a Google Form to everyone on the list asking them to fill in their addresses. {This very handy feature has already been blogged about here by Ms. Fondue, and now Google has actually teamed up with Style Me Pretty to make lovely templates for this, too!}

Why - WHY - did we not give the list a once over and reevaluate who was on it after leaving it to sit for so many months? I will never know. What ended up happening was that we never took anyone off the list in that year and a half… we only added people. That led to this:

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Of course, it’s not that we don’t love everyone we’re inviting - obviously they mean enough to us that we thought of them immediately when we wanted our closest friends and family to join us - but sometimes budget means you can’t invite every person you ever wanted to be there! Unfortunately I’m only coming to this (very obvious, I know) realization now, as I struggle to play the “who do you think will come?” game in an effort to guess at numbers and decide what to cut, so we can squeeze everyone into our budget.

I’ve heard many people give their cutoffs for who is or is not invited to their wedding, as well as who gets +1s. I wish I had taken a little bit of a closer look at those guidelines now! So friends: make a list, and check it twice (at least)!

What was your method of deciding who made it onto ’the list’? Is your guest list burgeoning or have you cut it back to bare bones?