Guests Must Have Seats

I have to confess that I have become a bit of a wedding blog junkie since I really got into planning mode. Daily, you can find me cruising The Knot, WeddingBee, and most recently Our Labor of Love blog and Snippet & Ink. One thing that I have read repeatedly is that as the Big Day comes closer, things just seem to pile up and it's best to get whatever you can out of the way as soon as you can. Of course, this might just be in the mind of the overloaded, emotional, excited bride, but it is a pretty well known phenomenon within every project.

We had previously planned a trip to France for the tasting with our potential caterer and a meeting with our potential photographer. Unfortunately, we've had to postpone the trip until the first week of April due to unforeseen circumstances. So of course this means we've also had to push back the vendor appointments to the first week of April as well. So now I feel as if the lovely forward progress I had been experiencing has been brought to an end. (Insert Sad Face here.) In the meantime I am occupying myself with knitting and pointless internet games.

The 4-foot long scarf I am knitting with really cool yarn.

Pointless internet game. Don't judge.

But another thing that I am occupying myself (and Mr. Fox) with is the seating chart for the reception. We decided that guests at our wedding will have not only assigned tables but also assigned seats. Due to the bi-continental nature of the wedding, those in attendance
will be a mixture of people who speak English or French, and in some instances both languages, so it is important to make sure that the people next to you can at least talk to you. Yes, I know that it is super early to be doing such a thing, we have only just sent out the Save-the-Dates and did not request any form of RSVP. But I have decided it is better to be doing something rather than nothing at all while I wait.

To be honest, for some odd reason, I thought that this would be a simple task. You know, that simple task that you tend to start a huge undertaking with so that you knock it out and can feel good about yourself. That easy thing that you use to claim progress. Uh, no. This was not simple at all.

The first thing we had to do was to establish who on Mr. Fox's side spoke English. Didn't start too well. Mr. Fox does not really know who speaks English and who does not because, yeah, of course, he rarely speaks English with his friends. So this took some heavy detective (read: guess) work.

Second, was to ask a bunch of questions: Do these guests know each other? Would they get along? Do they have things in common? Would they be able to have interesting conversation? Will they actually have fun together? This last question was super important to me. Assumptions had to be made. However, I learned a long time ago that when you assume you make an ass out of both you and me. So answering these questions was really difficult because I want all of my our guests to have a super good time. Not just good. Super good. My standards are high.

But we ran into a wall here. There were just a few names that did not fit. Anywhere. They were the odd (wo)men out. What do you in this case? We're planning to have round tables with 8 guests each. What happens when you have that one guest who will come alone and doesn't exactly fit anywhere? Mr. Fox and I obsessed about this question over two weekend breakfasts. Nothing like a little seating chart controversy with your spiegeleier.