Partying in the Sandwich Generation

I recently looked at some amazing photos of my friend Christine's crawfish boil party - and I thought, I used to have parties like that. Maybe 5 couples, plus a baby. Very manageable, everyone sitting at one table, a good conversation. But that kind of party seems way in the past, or off in the future.

Now we have two daughters - a preteen and teen - and my mother. And a lot of our friends have kids, although not all of them. I'm sad that some of our friends have gone by the wayside because they happened to have boys and we happened to have girls. It's not like we're avoiding them - but after our kids got past preschool, they were less eager to hang out with younger kids, or boys. They would do it, but it just wasn't as EASY. So we started making friends, or trying to, with the parents of their friends. But often we didn't have anything in common with, or particularly like the parents of their friends. When we have gatherings now, we have to have someone for everyone to feel happy to hang out with, or someone ends up feeling left out.

Yesterday we had a BBQ party which seemed to work out well. It was a lot of people. We had a friend of mine from my adoption work, a couple of my writing friends, some parents-of-kids'-friends, some old-time friends (ie, before marriage, before kids) some relatives (ranging from 8 to 80), a huge cohort of my older girl's crew team buddies. It was a giant mishmash of people. It wasn't intimate, and I didn't get to talk to nearly as many people for nearly as much time as I would've liked. We certainly didn't all sit together; we were scattered all over the house and beyond. We had some good food. We talked.

One day our family is going to shrink down again, and I guess that will be the the time for all the small parties we can stand.