Guests, guests and more guests!

One thing I'm learning about living away from home is that you have to deal with friends and relatives in an entirely different way. In the whole four years we lived in our last home I don't think we had overnight guests more than a few times. After we had Leah and Ian, and all the bedrooms were used up, we only ever had one of their cousins stay overnight once, and Hal's parents stayed overnight on Christmas Eve once, on a mattress in the living room!

I love people and I love my friends and family, but I never really wanted company overnight all that much. I was glad to see them come, and glad to see them leave.

Now it's a completely different story. People can't just come and visit for the day. I have two friends in the entire state and see them pretty rarely. Everyone else who comes to visit us has to stay at least two nights. So far MIL (mother-in-law, for those not up on netlingo) has been here twice, FIL (father-in-law) once, my mom once and just last weekend I had two friends, and the baby daughter of one of them. The friend and her baby were here for five days. I loved having them here, but it gets exhausting.

I just got a message on Crackbook (AKA Facebook) a while ago that a friend and her "new" husband (they've lived together for years but just got married the weekend after we moved down here) are coming to visit next week. Agh! I love her dearly, and we always have fun together, but we haven't spent any REAL time together in years. And she doesn't have kids, and really doesn't know much about kids. I don't know if they know what they're in for, and I'm not in the mood to try and keep my kids from being kids just to keep them happy. I also suspect that they're just using my house as a place to crash more than anything. They're already talking about a day trip into NYC and I seriously doubt that the schedule I use when I do a day trip in is what they're thinking of, so I doubt if I'll be going along. I guess I get to do another major cleaning, though. Should be interesting since Millie, our two-year-old, has to have a tooth extracted the day before they arrive (*rolls eyes).

I used to listen to BIL (brother-in-law... do I really have to keep explaining this? You're an intelligent person...) bitch about having to come home every time he had a vacation and say to Hal, "He's the one who moved across the country!" Now I get it. I'm desperate to go home and see my friends, but our ENTIRE vacation for this year is going to be used up doing that. I think we'll come back here a few days before Christmas vacation is over, just to have some time as a family in our OWN home.

What on earth is going to happen if this company moves us to Europe like they keep saying? We'll become a crash pad for every refusing to grow up friend that I have. Fun. (And I love my friends, but I'm in a VERY different place from most of them these days.)

I wonder if people will believe that our guest room burned down???