Flashback faves: So THIS is why we don’t host dinner parties

In celebration of 2015’s anniversary-palooza and 10 years of blogging, I’m revisiting some of my favourite blog posts ever. This is from the spring of 2005.

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We had some friends over on the weekend for dinner. No no, we didn’t have them à la Hannibal Lecter, we had the grilled chicken fajitas you told me I couldn’t have on Friday when I had to have takeout. Did I thank you for that yet?

So we had these terrific friends of ours over, and they brought their baby daughter. Okay, I can see it’s going to take me forever to tell this story, because I already have to correct myself again. What really happened is, we really really wanted to see, hold, cuddle, play with and otherwise fawn over their beautiful two-month-old baby daughter, and since she isn’t getting out much without a chaperone these days, we had to invite them along for the ride.

So anyway, they all three come over for cuddles and fawning and some dinner on the side. They are there exactly long enough for me to serve them each a drink when J (aka the guest who might not want to be named on the Internet) caught Simon with his hand submersed up to his wrist in J’s drink. This is the first of many times I will think throughout the evening that I am incredibly glad these are very good and patient friends of ours who genuinely love our boys and who are on the cusp of some major parenting foibles themselves. So J is pretty good about the whole thing, gets a towel and wipes off Simon’s hand and the drink spilled all over the end table and doesn’t even mention the fact that I totally didn’t offer to get him a new drink. Can you believe I only just NOW thought of that?

Now, you’d think that with the ratio of parents to children rising from 2:2 to 4:3, the odds would be improving in our favour over your average level of household mischief. Not so much. Beloved is so completely enthralled with beautiful baby girl that he forgets he even has boys, let alone that said boys are running rampant through the house. Not even 10 minutes after the Simon-as-stir-stick event, somehow Simon gets into the bathroom, closes the door behind him, and makes his way – in the pitch black, mind you – to the toilet, lifts the lid, and begins washing his pop-soaked hands in the toilet water. Beloved intercedes and washes Simon’s hands, I go back to making dinner, and within five – I’m guessing it wasn’t even three – minutes, Simon was back with his hand up to his wrist in J’s drink. God bless J, who only asked Beloved, “Are you sure you did a good job washing his hands?” And you know what? I honestly can’t remember if I got him a fresh drink even then.

So we have dinner, and it’s the usual chaos of dinner with Tristan not wanting to eat (a blog for another day) and it’s too late for Simon who passed through hungry the previous hour and had arrived at too-famished-to-do-anything-but-holler-and-throw-food, and JJ (as opposed to J) has to leave the table mid-meal to be a meal to her baby girl, and I remember the days we used to have dinner when it was just the four of us and we’d linger over dinner and dessert and conversation for hours. Or was that somebody else’s life?

You’d think having his very own baby in the house for the past 14 1/2 months would have left Tristan jaded on the concept of babies in general, but just the opposite is true. He really had no use for Simon as a baby, but he is fascinated by the new babies in our life, particularly his almost six-month old cousin Noah and beautiful baby girl. Beautiful baby girl is particularly special, however, because she is the only baby girl in any of our lives. My brother has a son, my closest friends have sons, my cousin has a son – even the day care provider has nothing but sons. So you can see why beautiful baby girl is a princess in all of our lives. On the way home in the car from our first visit to introduce beautiful baby girl to the boys, Tristan pronouced (with no prompting from us) that beautiful baby girl is his girlfriend. (pauses to let you “awwwwww” properly)

So anyway, JJ finishes feeding beautiful baby girl while we clean up the kitchen, and of course the next thing on the agenda is a diaper change. Tristan, who hasn’t really moved more than a foot away from beautiful baby girl all afternoon, is ‘helping’ and JJ is extremely patient with him. As she removes beautiful baby girl’s diaper, Tristan begins to howl with laughter, and I am mortified when he exclaims “Look at how small her penis is!”

Needless to say, we won’t be hosting too many more dinner parties this decade. We might even have to hold off until the engagement party of Tristan and beautiful baby girl…

Author: DaniGirl

Canadian. storyteller, photographer, mom to 3. Professional dilettante.

3 thoughts on “Flashback faves: So THIS is why we don’t host dinner parties”

  1. Omg….I nearly died laughing at this story. Here’s why?

    1- you are an incredible story teller/writer! (You should publish these stories in a book.)
    2- that’s exactly why we never ever had friends over for dinner.
    3- in my version of a similar story, replace that sentence with “Look at his tail!” E was 3 at the time!

  2. P.S. In case you are wondering why I hadn’t read this story during it’s first publication….my crew were 3, 1 and I was very pregnant was #3. Lucy I got to read the side of the cereal box those days! Lol

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