Invitations and head count?

You tell your mom- we need to keep it small. Lol. Elope while you still can! Haha

You have a while. Write down every possible name, and narrow down from there. We made our initial guest list over a year ago and are sitting down with our parents tonight to make final cuts. Anyone we haven't seen/spoken to in the last year is getting cut, with the exception of cousins.

Typically your head counts are due about 2 weeks before the date, so make your RSVP deadline 1 week before that. Send your invites about 6-8 weeks before the wedding, giving them enough time to respond and enough time for you to track them down.

We cut our guest list down soo much. We have huge families. I cut anyone that I havent spoken to in over a year. FH did the same. We did aunts and uncles and the super close cousins and a couple friends. thats it.

You send invites ~6-8 weeks out. you give numbers to the caterer when they ask for them. It is usually in the contract.

Kates advice is sound.

Figuring out the same thing with my guest count.. both FH and I have large families, so we really had to ask ourselves how well we know some of our extended relatives and adopt some rules about how far out into the family tree we could reasonably go. I'm really not going past my aunts and uncles and their children, even though I do know my parents' cousins pretty well. I feel bad not being able to invite them, but once you get into extended territory, it's a slippery slope until you have an insane amount of people to invite. It's a tough process for sure!

I wrote down close aunts and uncles. on the one side there are 4 aunts+ 4 husbands. each aunt has about 3-4 kids a piece and each one of them have girlfriends or boyfriends and each one has like 2 or 3 kids a piece. thats like 30 or 40 people just in aunts and cousins from 1 side lol i didnt realize how many kids people actually had til you write it all down lol

My fiancee told me to calm down lol and lets work from the begining and to start with a guest list so we have more of an idea of what we are working with. i am not sending out anything just getting an idea of exactly how many

Thats the problem that we have. we are extremely close with his side and talk pretty much every

single day. so i feel like we do have to invite them.

Yes we have a venue and there is no way we could do no kids. i have kids and so does my sister in law. there is atleast 45-50 kids under the age of 16 lol

On facebook messenger or texting.its not every single day but id said atleast 5 times a week we are talking to someone in the family

I am going to have to find a different way to cut guests cause i definitely dont want to cut the kids from our wedding

You talk to each one of these 30 or 40 people every single day? How? Do you literally spend all day chatting with various people?

If I had not been in contact with a person in a year then they were not invited. I have about 20 cousins I did not invite because I haven't talked to them in forever. I didn't invite them just because they are family.

You said in your original post that you're writing down family that you haven't thought of in years, but now you're saying you actually talk to all these people every day. Which is it?

Make out your rough guest list for now and over the next two years you can norrow it down. Some relationships will change and others will come into your life in that time. We were planning for two years, we did out a rough guest list to get an idea of numbers for budgets and then revisited the guest list every so often. Don't do STD as they do tie you down, but do make sure to let your VIPS or anyone who lives far away and will definitely be invited your date a few months before your invites go out. As others have said 6-8 weeks for invites. Ask your venue when they need final numbers and work back from there. I gave a our guests a month to RSVP. If you give to long people will forget and put it on the long finger. Definitely though you don't need to worry too much about it all just yet.

No the aunts and uncles and kids i talk to all the time. but there are family and friends that i havent really talked to in awhile that i feel obligated to invite. one of my friends i was in her wedding but havent really talked in 3 years the other one i watched her kid for 4 years until he went to school but only have talked to a handful of times maybe in over a year.

If you haven't talked to your friend in three YEARS it literally does not matter that you were in her wedding. You haven't talked in years, do not invite her.

This is only as hard as you're making it.

We did a definite and possible guest list at first for each of our sides. The definite was people that were musts. The possible was if we had the money, we would like to invite them. We went from there. I also separated the list into family, friends and 'other' (parents friends, etc) so I could see where our numbers were.

I see you changed your avatar. Glad you decided to focus on the basics. Worry about the guest list. Invites and head count come way later.

Yeah i know but i just dont want anyone to feel bad about not inviting them. but i guess that we will look over the list every couple months and see what happens in 2 years

Yes i did change it. i thought that i changed it a couple weeks ago but must not have hit save. lol our guest list is a little over what we originally thought but at 15 a plate that " little bit" is ALOT lol