Family

My sister is in town visiting for a few days, so my parents had us all over for dinner (all being my 6 kids and I, my out of town sister, and my other sister, her husband and 4 kids). My parents rarely have us over, once or twice a year. I brought dessert, blueberry pie. We ate outside but it began raining just before dessert so we moved in. Of course, my 4yo dropped her entire bowl on the carpet, upside down. I actually found this amusing (cruel daughter that I am) but managed to hide that inappropriate emotion. It was amusing because my parents are very uptight about wanting everything perfect and clean all of the time.

My husband was unable to attend this family function, which was really a shame, since my family rarely all get together. He has an extremely busy month ahead of him at work, and had planned to use part of today to do some work at home, in the hopes of getting a little ahead so that he will be more available to the kids and I later. I was disappointed, but could hardly argue with this logic. My family, however, was not able to understand, and think less of him for it. None of them have really demanding jobs that require anything more than 9 to 5, so it is hard for them to relate to the extremely intense nature of his job.

My sister that lives in MI was in a very bad mood, her baby is 4 months old and still very fussy, has been since birth. Still, she vented her mood at me by saying that she hopes my next baby will be grouchy since it isn't fair that I will have had 7 happy babies and she's had 2 happy and 2 grouchy. I keep reminding myself that she is coming from a difficult place right now, to wish that on me! She is also unaware of how bad the most difficult years of having small children were, since we lived out of state during that time and she and I didn't talk much then. It didn't help much that my niece was being very cute and happy, not at all fussy, and we kept teasing my sister that we didn't believe her. She has a hot temper and that really irked her.