My best friend’s wedding was the perfect day: great weather, great food, great venue – the works. They’d spent a lot of time and money on getting things just the way they wanted it, and right up until the moment the bride made her entrance, it was all going to plan. Just one problem, though: as the Wedding March struck up, so did a baby in the congregation. A baby who proceeded to scream so loudly, and for so long, that no one could hear a word that was said.
Of course, it wasn’t the baby’s fault – he was just doing what babies do – but I would at least have expected the parents to have had the courtesy to take him outside when it became clear that he wasn’t going to stop. Instead, the mother marched up and down one of the aisles of the church, with the howling baby on her shoulder. The acoustics in the church were marvellous: unfortunately that meant that the baby’s screams were amplified to such a degree that when the happy couple received their much-anticipated wedding video, and sat down to watch it, they were treated to thirty minutes of screaming baby and not much else.
We will be inviting family children to our wedding (Well, two of them are flower girl and page boy, so it would be pretty hard to exclude them!) but it’s episodes like this one that makes me wonder if we’re doing the right thing. Our venue isn’t particularly child-friendly: there’s no spare room to serve as a creche, and no budget for children’s entertainers. We’ll be supplying goodie bags with toys and colouring books, but I still suspect it’s going to be a long and boring day for the little people, and who could blame them if they choose to make their feelings known?
These days, of course, more and more people seem to be implementing a "no children" rule, and I can understand why (in fact, I’d probably have counted myself among them had we not met with a huge amount of family pressure to invite children). They either don’t want their day to be disrupted by noise, they don’t have enough room in their budget for children too, or they don’t want to use up guest-list space on children they don’t really know. Sometimes, they’d just rather have an all-adult day. Sounds fair enough to me, although I know from experience that it doesn’t often go down well with those who have children.
What about you? Are you inviting children to your wedding? And if not, what kind of reaction did you get?
(Picture from GirlsDresses.com)
