Thursday, August 23, 2007

Can You Believe This?

My son's school has 2 classes per grade, and our school's policy is that you try to invite your whole class, or all of one gender. (I jokingly considered having my son invite all the girls only!) If you are only inviting a few kids, that's ok but you have to be discreet.

We have a slight advantage with a summer birthday, in that it is not likely that the kids will discuss among themselves who got invited. Even so, I decided to invite my son's new class as a chance to meet each other. (This includes kids he already knows, some he does not because they were in the other class last year, and a few new students.) We were thrilled to see that most of the mean boys from last year are now in the other class, so we happily did not invite them. There was one who Dovid liked, but I decided that if we invited him we'd have to invite another kid "Joey," who is a big behavior problem and has been quite rude to my son. We only chose 2 special friends from the other class, both girls and neither of them in any contact during the summer with the boys we didn't invite. (So, to summarize, we didn't single anyone out from the other class, but certainly were glad to be able to avoid certain people, including Joey.)

So the kids started arriving, and one mom came with three of the guests. Wait, I am looking closer at the three incoming kids....There were many kids who my son and I didn't know, so I thought maybe this one kid just LOOKS familiar.....no, I'm right - it's Joey! Yes, everyone, we had a 5-year-old party crasher! Someone actually sent their child to a party to which he was not invited, and without an RSVP.

To Joey's credit, he behaved most of the time, said hello to my son (which he often does not do in school), and brought a present. And my son was amazing - he QUIETLY said to me "Why is Joey here?" then acted perfectly nicely to him just like any other guest.

I have been over the situation and can only think of two good explanations. One is that the mom honestly believed that we would have invited her son and that we made a mistake. Fair enough, I guess, especially since apparently an invitation addressed to my son got lost in the mail a few weeks ago. But in that case, wouldn't she have called to RSVP?

Other explanation - the other mom was watching the kids for the morning and had to bring him. But again, no phone call or explanation at the door. And he brought a present, which means some thought went into this.

I'm just still waliking around like "Wow, we had a party crasher. Unbelievable..." I am not mad and certainly will not say anything to the mom, but you just have to wonder...

3 comments:

Orthonomics said...

LOL. I thought crashing parties was a teen activity. Are the kids hitting puberty at 5 years old now? Or perhaps the parents are still think party crashing is cool. No RSVP. Akkkkkkk.

Miss you. We will talk soon. I'm headed to bed after a long day. Can't anyone nap around here?

Esther said...

DH is making fun of me because I'm still talking about this, but it's just one of those stories that I will be laughing about for quite a while. There's only one part that's not funny, which is the possibility that this person actually believes that they are invited to every party. I will certainly keep that in mind when we paln next year's guest list - if he's going to show up anyway, we might as well make sure to send him an invitation! =-)

Orthonomics said...

Might as well. :) LOL.