The Po Show

Social Butterfly

For people who don't have much of a social life, we are pretty busy these days. Next Friday is Tessa's last day of school (a half day) and she had invitations to two different parties. Curiously enough, she chose the pizza and waterslide party of her friend Rory, who was in her pre-K class but hasn't really been a close friend since then. I would have thought she'd have chosen the "tea party playdate" of her classmate Sofia, the one in which all the girls are going to wear fancy dresses. Tessa is such a mixture of girly girl and non-girly girl, who loves her world "cute" and pink, but loves Pokemon and YuGiOh too.

The following day, next Saturday, will be her own birthday party at Build-A-Bear Workshop. We have 12 kids coming (eeep), with pizza and ice cream to follow. Then at 3:00, we will be going to Matthew's classmate's pool party, which both of my kids are really looking forward to as well.

Today we were supposed to go to a party at another of Matthew's classmates. It was FAR (like 45 miles away), but Matthew was very excited about going. I asked if he knew if a lot of the other kids from class were coming, but the only one he could remember was (of course) Lydia. He thought several other kids had said they were coming, but he knew she was :). We left around 11:00 (the party was to start at 1:00), drove in the rain up to the outlet center that was just a couple of miles from the friend's house, and stopped for lunch. We found our way to the house and Ross remarked (since there were no cars parked in front), "Are we the first ones here?" We got out of the car, Matthew commented a few times that he was nervous (he still has such a hard time dealing with out of the ordinary events), and we walked up the drive.

The dad met us outside with a hesitant look on his face and asked, "Did you not get our message?" Oops, not what you want to hear! It turns out Chris has been sick on and off for awhile, and late this morning he started throwing up, so they decided to call off the party. They had called everyone at about 11:30, but we had already left. The parents felt terrible that we had driven all the way up there, but of course we understood. Ross wanted to go back to the outlet center, since we were up there anyway, so we upset the children further by making them walk in the rain and shop. It was really raining too! Things just worsened from there, as we were stuck in abysmal traffic on the way back, as there had been an accident earlier on the bridge across the Hudson (it took us 40 minutes to go about half a mile at one point). Matthew got very very upset that the traffic was so bad, and that it was "all for nothing" since the party had been cancelled. Strangely enough, this didn't happen till the traffic had actually picked up and we were moving pretty well.

I sure hope the social engagements to come all go better!