No Kids Allowed.

Mr. Ly and I decided pretty early on that our wedding would be a child-free event.

Image created by Miss Lyre

It's not that we don't love children (I work with them 10 months out of the year!), and don't have lots of lovely little ones we'd love to share our day with, it just wasn't what we envisioned for our day.

Look at this face, it was hard to say no to this one:

The lovely little Carya, our niece / Personal Photo

But we wanted our bridal party to not have to worry about their kids during our wedding, and never had that vision of lots of little ones in our bridal party either.

Originally, when our wedding was going to be on Saturday night, it didn't seem like the proper place for kids anyway.  Now that our wedding will be Sunday, and a little bit earlier, it could be more kid-friendly, but it's still a black-tie formal affair.And what it really comes down to is we don't actually want kids there.  This doesn't mean I love any of these children any less.  But kids are loud. messy. sticky. and don't have the best record of sitting still or being quiet during ceremonies.  My niece will be 13 months old when we get married, and she will never remember this day anyway. I will take loads of pictures with her when we are getting ready, and happily pass her to the babysitter when it's time to get going.

If our ONLY niece is not going to be invited then we really don't see the need to invite anyone else's children.   Mr. Ly has a cousin who somehow managed to photo bomb (surely unintentionally) many many pictures from his sister's wedding, his best man has a daughter who doesn't ever stop running and screaming and throwing things around.  I can't imagine what that would be like during our ceremony, and don't really want to experience it.  Again, another child who is close to us that we are not inviting, so those we are not close to have no place at our wedding.

There is a fine line though between child and preteen, and we have had difficulty deciding where to draw that line.  We both have cousins who will be about 12 years old around our wedding, and our Best Man's son will be 11.  If we're not inviting Best Man's daughter, I don't think it's appropriate to invite his son.  Mr. Ly would like to have him there, but not our 12 year old cousins.  For this we are applying an all or nothing policy.  We pulled an "acceptable" age (out of thin air, basically) and said anyone who is not 15 or older, will not be invited to our wedding.  This solves the problem of our cousins, not inviting Best Man's kids, and includes  Mr. Ly's slightly older cousin who is 15 years old, and all her older siblings will be there. (I have a thing about leaving one person from a whole family out - I think it comes from my Bat-Mitzvah days, my mom would never let us invite the parents and one kid from a family without the rest of the family!)

So now we are just worried that there are some people who will just bring their kids anyway. We thought about putting some sort of information card in the invitation that said something along the lines of "we love your children, but don't want them at our wedding." And also including some web addresses and phone numbers to baby-sitting services that supply babysitters for just this kind of occasion for our out of town guests who may or may not be traveling with kids.

Is there any good way to word this without having to put adults-only on the invitation?  Did anyone have any small, uninvited guests at their adult-only wedding?