Old friends, hundreds of kids ......

It was my birthday at the weekend and as I'd not done anything for years, I decided to have a party.  I gave my old uni friends an early heads up and 6 out of the 7 of them could make it, so I thought that it'd be nice for it just to be us.  A small group, lots of chatting and catching up.  Couple of glasses of wine to relax, nice chats, sitting in the garden - very civilised.

But I'd forgotten one key point - they now all come with so many other people.  Other halves and kids - hundreds of them.  Ok, so hundreds is a bit of an exaggeration but there were 4 husbands and ten children, of which six were 4 and under!  None of the girls have ever been the best at making plans and sticking to them, so I was in a marvellous position with people arriving at 10am (which became 1115), 1130, "lunchtime", and "early afternoon" - but all were coming for food.  I went for a straightforward jacket potatoes and bolognaise sauce (with a small pot of veggie curry for the vegetarian) - but there were a good number of fussy eaters so some didn't like potatoes, some didn't like bolognaise ...... oh and some had to eat much earlier than we were going to eat (despite people arriving later than they'd said and indeed not really telling me when they were coming). 

None of the above really annoyed me.  Lots of it have been characteristics of my friends for years - crap at communication, always late - and I've learned to ignore it.  The one I found really hard was that is was almost impossible to actually speak to my friends.  Now, it's always going to be difficult when there are a lot of people around.  But there was no hope.  Distractions by children, other halves - mainly children it has to be said.  I ended up sitting and people watching - at my own party!!  This didn't upset me, but I did step away from it all and look at the different ways my friends interact with their children.

There was the 9 year old, who, bless her, ended up picking up the younger ones and taking them in and out of one of my two hammocks.  (My hammocks, souvenirs from a holiday over 4 years ago, have just had their first outings as I've put posts into the back garden tfrom which o hang them.)  The kids loved the hammocks and it was pretty inspired.  Her sisters (two of the next three in age) were pretty good and played with balls and stuff quietly.  When the others had left (their parents were staying), they all wanted to sit up and listen to grown-up talk.  Which was actually fine - they sat quietly, we put a little bit of thought into what we were saying (no swearing, no gossip they shouldn't repeat) but it was lovely.

And the rest ..... at the other end of the age scale, the youngest but one needed lots of parental attention because he was a bit too young and delicate for the others to play with.  The parents took it in turns to walk him around and kick a ball to him but he ate everything, didn't sleep when he was supposed to because it was all too exciting, and didn't cry or moan at all. 

In the middle, it appears that my friends struggle to parent.  They failed to give their kids the right sort of attention but also failed to communicate with the adults either.  When they started a conversation, the kids interrupted or the parents got distracted by something that the kids were doing.  And had to run after them.  But the when kids wanted someone to do something with them, like kick a football about or similar, they weren't doing that either.  My very nice man went in goal for a short time and one of the boys suddenly became his best friend, following him about for doing something that none of the dads would do.

I did have a lovely birthday.  And I had some lovely time with my friends at some points in the day.  But I've yet to work out how exactly how we should now interact because we're not the same - and indeed now they're parents, some of them are very very different.  Hmm.