When I die, if when I don't get lucky and go to heaven, I think I'll be forced to spend eternity making wedding guest lists. Trust me, I've had a good time, and that is NOT it. I have encountered very few things that are more difficult than creating a guest list for a wedding.

First of all, family. You have the obvious immediate family which get automatic invites: siblings, parents, grandparents. You think, "this guestlist is a piece of cake". Then it starts getting fugly.

Aunts and uncles are first. Who do you invite and who do you leave off The List? H2B and I ended up inviting all our uncles and aunts, but not without some hemming and hawing. The faraway relatives that you're pretty sure won't come anyway. The ones you haven't seen in years. The ones you suspect hate your guts. Where do you draw the line?

Then come the cousins. Which ones get invites? I have some first cousins I wouldn't recognize if I tripped over them, and others that are very close. And who gets to bring a guest? Some of them are married or have obvious significant others. Some have kids. Some have rotating dates that change on a weekly basis. Who gets to bring a date? On my side of the family, we invited all first cousins, and the ones that live on their own get to bring dates. The ones that still live at home and may or may not have significant others got included on their parents' invites. We didn't veer at all into third cousin territory, because in my family's case that includes two thirds of the New Brunswick population, and I'm not interested in paying for steak and chicken and a smorgasboard of delightful side dishes and sumptuous desserts for two thirds of New Brunswick. Noooo thanks.

Great-aunts and great-uncles: also weird and potentially awkward, but not a big source of time or energy for me. I invited the ones I like. Simple as that. There are some that are like grandparents to me, and they got invited. There are some that have probably never met me. They did not get invited.

Friends are tricky, too. I'm sure there are people who are going to be upset when they don't get an invitation. I'm sure there are people who will be surprised when they do. Again, it's super hard (for me, anyway) to determine who gets an invitation and who doesn't. I'd love to invite all of my friends. My circle of friends is a little odd. I have a ton of acquaintances and very few superclose friends. I don't have, say, a group of six girlfriends that I go shopping and get manicures with. I have two bridesmaids, not eight, and that choice was easy.

The final beast is coworkers. The epitome of uncomfortable situations. There are some people I work with closely on a regular basis, and there are people in my office that I might have spoken to twice in the past year because our paths simply don't cross at work, and everything in between. Obviously, I can't invite everybody, as much as I'd like to! But there are some people at work who I consider good friends, and I hope they're able to make it.

The coworker list has probably been the hardest one to pare down. So hard, in fact, that I haven't given any invitations out at the office yet. They're in a pile on our desk at home, and I keep looking at the name labels and second guessing, adding people, and taking names away, fretting over who I may be offending...brutal.

So, there you have it. My life over the past two weeks: working, eating, sleeping, running, worrying, and trying to avoid a paper misfeed on our DeskJet. The guest list has proven to be the worst part of the wedding planning process thus far. I'm pretty confident it'll be eclipsed in shittiness only by the seating chart for dinner.

In happier news we booked our flights to Paris over the weekend as well! We fly out on Sunday, October 18 and return the following Sunday. I couldn't be more excited. I'm already planning my Parisian wardrobe. I'm thinking lots of scarves and black.