Sticky wicket*

We are approaching a watershed in playdates, and it's a bit of a tricky one.

Until now, playdates for Monkey have been mostly an opportunity for me to hang out with moms who are my friends and happen to have a kid the right age to play with (or "play" with, or play "with") Monkey while we drink tea/sip mimosas (it could happen) and natter. But this weekend, Monkey is having a friend over to play.

Thing is, this is a friend with whom up to now we've had no outside-school contact. He's not quite as local as most of the other kids, and both his parents work, so he's not around in the afternoons to bump into or hang out with at a playground. (Hence the weekend playdate, even though I was wary of trampling on other people's sacrosanct family time.)

But I thought that as our children have reached the ripe old ages of five and almost-five, I could now venture to invite a kid to play without having to ask his mum along too. I e-mailed her our address and named times when, if it suited, he could be dropped off and picked up. Fine, fine, GPS yada yada - and then she said, in the nicest way possible, that she hoped I wouldn't mind if she stayed too - that I didn't need to entertain her, she'd just sit in the corner and read or work or something.

Argggghh! On the one hand, I can totally understand her concern. I wouldn't want to send Monkey off to the house of people I barely know for an afternoon, and Monkey perhaps wouldn't want to go without me. I was planning to invite her in for a cup of tea / [your beverage here] when she dropped him off, just so she could see that the house wasn't a basement full of chainsaws or a gallery of piercing art, and that we were fairly normal people. (I think we're fairly normal. I hope we are, or we'll never get a damn playdate.) But I hadn't mentioned that in the e-mail, because I thought it would amount to overthinking things. Probably I should have.

On the other hand, gaaahhhh. Awkward, you know? I'm sure she's a nice lady, and maybe we'll be best buds, but - well, right there is my problem: I called her a nice lady. Possibly because she's always dressed professionally when I see her doing drop-off at school, and possibly because I think she's a little older than me, she seems scary and grown-up and not really someone I see myself having a couple of hours' worth of chatting-over-coffee to do with. But I can't really leave the woman sitting in the corner with a book while I do... whatever it is I would be doing... probably surfing the Internet and ignoring the children as best as I can, free-range-kids style, until someone is in imminent and documented danger of losing an eye. Or sending B outside to play soccer with them all - if this rain ever lets up - while I bake muffins, or surf the Internet, or write blog posts to you, dear reader(s).

Now it's like I have to clean the house or something, lest she ding me for having grotty bathroom floors.

I know. I'm a grown-up too, and no doubt we will all resolve the situation with grace and good humour. So long as the boys have a reasonably good time and nobody gets a concussion, it will be fine. She doesn't even have to like me, so long as she likes my home and my attitude to children. But she'll be judging me - oh yes she will, from my housekeeping to my decor to my parenting skills - just as I would be in her situation, because you can't expect your five-year-old to choose his friends wisely and consider their parents' views on weekend tv watching or how often the kitchen floor should be mopped when electing which kid they're going to most often play superheroes with in the playground at school.

Have you been in this situation? In her shoes or mine? What did you do?


*All these (I mean, both these, so far, but I might manage another before the year's out) cricket references are because Ireland beat England in the Cricket World Cup last week. Post-colonial schadenfreude, don't you know.