Dinner date

One of my friends in playgroup sent out an e-mail over the weekend inviting any husband-less person to her house for dinner tonight. Her husband is out of town and she was wanting some company. Poor thing probably thought maybe one of us would respond...but it turns out 3 of us were husband-less tonight, so she ended up with a houseful.

So all in all there were 4 adults and 6 children under the age of 4. Kimber is used to her house being full with her one daughter. Tee hee hee. Welcome, Chaos.

It was a fun evening. Andrew screamed...literally screamed...for the first 15 minutes because he wanted to leave. And I wonder why we aren't invited places. Once I explained that he could scream all night but we still weren't leaving, he tried to calm down and eventually had a great time. Thank heavens I brought a bottle of wine!

Gatherings with more than one mother all usually end up the same way. Tonight was no different. The mothers yell conversation over the happy noises of their children...and each conversation is usually interrupted about 5 times with children needing the potty, needing a fight broken up, needing to say, "stop chasing that cat", etc etc...until we forget what the conversation was supposed to be about in the first place. And we have so much ground to cover! One of the ladies is 9 months pregnant...with no name for her son, one of the ladies is in the process of finishing her home studies to adopt a 3rd child, and the hostess is waiting for her adoption from China to come through.

Anyway, the kids ate their pizza while barking like dogs, then decorated cupcakes...which amped up the energy a bit, and just generally had a noisy good time. Andrew cried when we had to leave (I could KILL that boy sometimes), and as I thanked Kimber for the lovely evening she said...

"I'm glad you had fun. But I must be a terrible hostess. This evening seemed like such chaos."

Spoken like a true novice. I assured her that the chaos had nothing to do with her hostessing skills...it just comes with the territory when you have this many children in one small space. And then Andrew came up and said, "Thank you for dinner, but this house is a mess!"

Lovely. I assure you...we WILL NEVER be invited out again. Well, maybe Lily and I will. ;)