Having my 9mo at my wedding

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Hello. Just looking for some advice. I am getting married next month and will have my 9mo baby with us. We have hired a childminder to take him away at 4pm when we are seated for speeches and dinner and for the rest of the evening/night. She is staying over at the wedding venue for the night and looking after him until morning so we can all let our hair down and relax a bit. I don’t want family being on duty at night. With that half of the day/overnight covered I would know how best to navigate the earlier half of the day. We have plenty family (grandparents/aunties etc) available to help us and my husband to be plans on having him for most of the morning and to go out a walk for his first nap (grooms don’t have much to do in the morning anyway haha) but my main concern is our ceremony time is 1.30 and he normally goes down for his 2nd and last nap of the day around then. I know loads of people will want to hold him etc during canapés/drinks after the ceremony but I feel he will need his nap and I don’t want him to get grumpy - but I’ll be away getting photos so need to assign someone ti be in charge of feeds etc and also don’t want to tell someone to go for a walk with the pram and they miss out too!

anyone else had their young baby at their wedding and how they navigated this? The night before we are also having a family meal - again won’t be having his usual 7pm bedtime. Any tips for that too are hugely welcome.

Thanks in advance

We recently had our 10 mo at our wedding. Don’t worry too much really, for your baby it’ll just be another day, he’ll adjust! Take all the help you can from friends/family, if they want to take him off your hands, let them, much better than a grumpy baby & a stressed bride.

I’d say the trickiest bit was the reception (and we had a small wedding so it was a quiet relaxed one, no dancing, speeches etc) but you got the CM for that so I wouldn’t worry too much.

As for the ceremony, you say you don’t want to ask anyone to take him for a walk, but there might well be people who volunteer for just that? If you have +1s then they might be more than happy to “escape” for a little bit. That’s what happened in our case, my friend’s boyfriend was the one to look after my baby during the ceremony (and he was very eager to do so!)

Hope you enjoy your big day!

This is excellent advice, we have photographed many weddings where the bride & Groom have very young children in attendance and we feel they add to the experience of the day.