my mom and the guest list...

Our wedding is in September 2008 (so a whole year away).. however I am having some guest list issues when it comes to my mom.

* Our venue has a minimum guest count of 75 people, so if we have less than that, we pay for the 75 people anyways. We are paying them a set amount per person for an open bar of beer, wine and champagne (its a vineyard so they don't serve hard alcohol).
* Some of the caterers we spoke to require a 100 person minimum and so we figure thats about normal and plan on cutting the list off at 100 because:
a. We can't really afford more than
b. We didn't really want a large wedding anyways. When we first started looking, we kind of thought our guest list would be around 50.. 75 maximum.

That being said, we wouldn't mind going over a little bit over 100, we don't want to be really rigid about it and tell our good friends that they cant come because we are over 100 people.

We are at 126 people right now - that doesn't include children - other than flower girls and ring bearer and no dates for single guests that are from the area and would know tons of other people. This isn't the prom and we aren't paying for dinner for your date that you only have just because you didn't want to come to a wedding alone. If you love us enough, you will come and celebrate with us without bringing a security blanket with you.

So the problem is ... My mom.

My mom is a supervisor at her work and every time I talk to her.. she just has someone else she HAS to invite. She keeps saying, oh well they might not come anyways, but .. seriously what if they do? My sister said, well no one really came to mine so just let her invite whoever and its not worth fighting over so early on.. - her wedding was 8 hours away... mine is seriously 15 minutes.. if that. I'm sure some people won't come, but I think a lot of people from her work might considering its so close, plus we have free food and drinks.

So I told my mom that I really wish that she wouldn't promise that people can go when we don't know if we can afford it

Right now we have 126 people on our guest list.

I want to at least do a A list B list thing, or at least get her to give us more money to pay for the extra people.

I figured she would understand the whole money side of it, because she's the one that told us not to spend that much on just one day.

So she gets all huffy and demands to know who is on our list and how many people his dad is inviting - for the record 0. We have of course his dad's best friend and his wife. Plus his grandparent's best friends/neighbors .. so maybe we say his family's extra people totals: 4.

Then she asked who was on the list, so I said - combined family totals 40 people, plus friends, a few of Aaron's co-workers and some of hers. So she said - Well Aaron (fiance) gets to invite his coworkers, why can't I invite all of mine. Aaron is inviting 4 of his co-workers and their spouses. My mom wants to invite 40 people so far... so when I complained about her guest list before, she crossed off their spouses... which I'm sorry you can't do!

My mom is trying to invite every person she's ever met, plus people who have invited her to their wedding. Like she just went to a wedding and now she wants that guy on our list.

Now I know that its awhile away until we really have to tone down our guest list, i just want her to stop telling people they are invited... That way the A list, B list thing won't be so apparent.

Is that so hard to understand?

I'm going to send our Save the Dates out in a about a month or so for our Sept 08 wedding. The first wave of Save the Dates, will go to close friends, family and out of state friends. We aren't sending them yet to her friends, we'll send them later on.