Party trick

On the weekend, we were invited to a BBQ by a work colleague. It was meant to be an adults-only affair, and despite having a few weeks’ notice of the event, we still had no babysitter lined up by Friday. We’ve been lucky to have had Grampa and Gramma pretty much at our disposal for the past three years, and we know it’s time to find other babysitters so we can still get out and do things without constantly roping them into watching our kids. In fact, we have two new babysitters lined up – both teenage girls in our new neighbourhood. However… we won’t be using them til we are actually living there, and our first time using them won’t be when we are traveling out of town, as we did to get to the BBQ.As I was picking the kids up from Cindy’s on Friday night, she asked whether we were planning to attend the BBQ (since she had been invited as well) and I told her that we were not, since we didn’t have a babysitter. To which she replied that another friend had already told her she was bringing their kids to the event, so why didn’t we just bring Liam and Mallory along?I thought about it for a bit, not wanting to invite my kids to an event they had not been invited to in the first place; but I also felt bad about the prospect of missing my first social function in my new work group. So I called the host and left a message for him saying I’d heard another family was bringing the kids and I hoped it would be OK if I brought my kids too.Fast forward to the BBQ… two others showed up with their kids in tow also, which made me feel better, but the friend Cindy told me had decided to bring her kids first? I spoke to her and she said, “I’m so glad Cindy said you were bringing your kids… that’s when I decided to bring mine, too!” I still haven’t gotten to the bottom of this and I still don’t know who the first to invite their kids along was; I still hope it wasn’t us – I would hate to have been presumptuous. To make matters worse, Mallory has a newfound fascination with her belly button, and because she was wearing a dress, she spent the first hour or so that we were there flashing everyone as she went around the room lifting up her dress to make sure that they all saw her belly button. It was kind of cute and kind of mortifying all at the same time. Here she is doing it again on Sunday:I'm not sure that we will be invited back.