Small wedding advice

Your idea is great and will absolutely result in a nice wedding. Your plan is for a nice, celebratory dinner party with good food and conversation, which sounds lovely. Nothing boring about that.

The sticky part is that your mom is paying for your wedding, so her opinion does carry some weight. You can try to convince her of the validity of your plan or you can choose to pay for your party yourself, which will give you the leeway to make all the decisions.

I am having a intimate wedding with about 50 guest with majority family and a few friends. In the beginning of the year we were planning to have a big wedding for end of 2020 with about 150 guest. From the moment I got engaged in December 2018 to maybe March 2019 I was fed up with how crazy my parents were driving me. They had offered to help pay a good portion but were stalling the planning process and I'm very organized and plan everything out well in advance. I talked it out with Fh and we decided we didn't want to wait till end of 2020 for a wedding and we wanted to get married this December 14! It was the best decision we could have ever made! I was not happy planning this huge wedding. We literally found the perfect venue within a week to host the ceremony plus reception with a food & drink package and put the deposit! Within another week I had a deposit for the cake,florist, violinist, and photographer! We told our family after Easter we moved the wedding up and got mixed emotions but everyone came around. We call it a intimate dinner wedding with formal attire. We still have a ceremony and only a three hour reception. There will be not dj, we just made a play list to play on the sound system In the reception room. We got a good deal for 3 hours of photos and a 3 hour videographer package. We will only be doing our first dance, cake cutting and the wedding shoe game. Now I wont say there wasn't any drama with guest list, dress code, plenty of opinions but we got through them! 10 more days till I say i do and I cant wait! I'm beyond happy we decided to do a little wedding a lot sooner than planned. Do what you guys feel is right, at the end of the day it is your wedding.(side note my parents did help with this smaller wedding and we paid a good portion as well)

I've never been to a wedding like that, but it sounds fun!

I'm doing this exact thing. My fiance doesn't like dancing in front of people and would be miserable. I also am not a fan of loud music when I'm trying to talk. You can still plan to set-up something fun like a photo booth area (or use Polaroid-style cameras). Maybe go form the angle that you want people to be able to relax and have conversations.