Advice request: How to do with stupid relatives?

[~MS~]

In my world it's called picking your battles. Is today MIL's actual birthday? If it is then your wife was aware of that when you guys made plans, for her brothers to inform her 3 hours out that there is going to be an event is unacceptable by anyone's standards IMHO. No one can be anymore controlling than you let them be, is your wife the 'baby sis' to the brothers? That might be a bit harder on her to deal with in addition to her 'can't we all just get along' personality.

It's a bit too late to "fix" this event but after having lived with a Monster in law for over 25 years here's a bit of hard learned techniques. For any major 'family events' birthdays/holidays that you do together ...those kinds of things...you have to learn to be extremely proactive and contact the brothers and say, we need to make some plans so we need to know what your plans are for this event....then hold them to those plans. If they try to do an quick change oops sorry told you we made plans based on the plan you gave us, we're not available. It's a lot harder to get going than it sounds I am well aware, but believe me, a couple of years of being consistent and you'll train the control freaks that they can be as insane over crap as they want but they don't get to infect you and your wife with their crap.