Hello Everyone!
We're getting married in Tulum, Mexico in May, 2020 and instead of a reception after the ceremony, we're going to charter a yacht and only invite our immediate families and best friends on the charter with us. My two sisters and my fiance's older sister all have kids under 5 years old, as well as our best friends who have a toddler and a newborn. I mentioned to my fiance that it made me anxious to think of toddlers on a yacht, and joked that nothing will kill a celebratory vibe more than a kid falling off the boat and drowning.
Furthermore, my fiance will be graduating medical school earlier that month and 90% off the friends we're inviting on the boat are his friends from school, so we both really wanted a fun graduation vibe- which for a bunch of mid/late-20s and early 30-year-olds, means alcohol and loud music. Personally, I'm not a fan of children and I think it will not be a kid-friendly environment and would prefer to not have children on the boat -for both safety and party environment reasons- and my fiance agreed. When I brought up the idea of not having children on the boat, one of my sisters said she would probably just leave her daughter with her in-laws if that were the case, and my other sister was very combative and accusatory, wanting to know what to do with her toddler then if she were not allowed to the boat party. I suggested that she could use the babysitter service through our villa management company, a reputable company that rents out luxury homes and offers a bunch of amenities including babysitting, and was told she would not leave her kid with a stranger. I then suggested she leave her daughter at home and was told she "wasn't ready to do that yet", even though her daughter is three and my other sister's daughter is one and she was willing to leave her with family, so that seems kind of unreasonable.
I haven't even gotten around to asking my fiance's sister for fear of even more push back (she's super emotionally sensitive and has also three kids under 5, so she always feels "left out" of things), but I've compromised on essentially everything in my wedding to accommodate our families and gave alternatives to the "no kids of the boat" scenario. I don't have kids nor do I plan to, and I'm kind-of notorious in my family for being anti-children, so am I just being irrational? Ideally, I would choose no children on the yacht; I think it would be weird to try and get drunk and dance with a two-year-old watching you and having to keep an eye on children nearby. My mom suggested having all the children wear life jackets as a solution which is a great idea for the safety aspect of things, but not so much for the toddlers milling around a bunch of drunk adults portion.
Yeah it's a bit selfish to ask that they do something else with their kids for 4 hours, but if you can't be selfish on your wedding day, when can you be? Lol! I have been super accommodating throughout this whole process (I wanted to elope and didn't even want a wedding), changing our location 3 times because immediate family couldn't or wouldn't travel to where we picked and constantly trying to work out how to invite 150 family members to a wedding without paying $30,000+, since I'm paying for our wedding alone without help from my fiance or our parents. Yet since I constantly get advice on how I "should do things", this had probably made me a little more sensitive than most, but I feel like I have sacrificed a lot and that it's not too much to ask to request our siblings sacrifice something in return. Obviously though, I don't have kids so maybe I don't get the full picture?
What do you guys think?
