Very Special Friends

Since becoming a family of six of the four-kids-under-four-including-twins variety, I have become especially grateful for any and all offers of kindness, friendship and generosity that come my way. It’s not that we are a dud family. On the contrary, I actually think we are a pretty awesome bunch – the kids aren’t likely to run a screwdriver down the side of your car and us big people are still capable of stringing a few adult sentences together over a nice bottle of vino. I believe it is pure logistics. Given the choice, I think people would generally prefer to invite the family with 1 or 2 kids over for a civilized meal where there is at least a remote chance of completing a sentence without interruption. Not that I blame them. I find it hard enough keeping the chaos my millions create at a comfortable level in the privacy of my own home let alone inflicting them on someone else’s home. Besides, we knew jumping from a family with 2 kids to 4 would mean a decrease in invites to other people’s homes and so in the interests of forging friendships we have decided to make our home the 'fun' home and have simply adopted a policy of entertaining at our place without expectation of anyone reciprocating. No dramas. Of course there are exceptions but I have generally accepted that we are now a force that not everyone wants to reckon with and our social life is somewhat diminished as a result.

So you can imagine my delight when we got an invite to spend a whole weekend away with another family at their holiday house on the north coast. Amazing! This family has 3 boys exactly the same ages as our kids – 2, 4 and 6. So there were 4 adults and 7 kids under 7 and we had an absolute ball. There was crab –hunting, beach combing, rock climbing and frolicking in the freezing cold ocean in the middle of winter. Special Friends. And if that wasn’t enough, they invited the Whippet too. Very Special Friends.