Party Time

Like many busy families, we don’t get to see a lot of each other during the week. Well… I see plenty of the kids but there’s little to no time spent as a family unit of 4. Our weekends are  extremely precious to us, when the children don’t get to spend enough time with their dad they act out, my son will give him the cold shoulder and not let him anywhere near him and my daughter will find other ways to test him such as being more than usually demanding. I miss his companionship and start to feel depressed if we don’t get to hang out together.

Although my daughter enjoys the Saturday parties she is regularly invited to, when they are clustered together one weekend after another it gets frustrating for the rest of us. Today was the fourth weekend in a row we had an “outside the family” Saturday commitment and I came very close to bailing on the party altogether. In the end I felt too guilty to the family whose invitation we had accepted and to my daughter. So we came up with the plan of driving up together and my husband taking my son out for lunch for quality boy time while us girls partied. It worked pretty well, my daughter’s friends were very pleased to see her and it was a cool party. She got to drive a motorized go-cart, float around in a paddleboat and play in this sort of human version of a hamster run.

In the future I think I need to schedule weekends on the calendar where we are spending time as a family so I am ready when my daughter asks me instead of being blindsided and saying yes to every single party. It’s getting expensive too with all those presents.