Home group disaster

Last Friday we decided to try a new homegroup, as our current one is midweek and alternates guys/girls, so it's really fortnightly and often enough the week that girls are on I can't go because I'm late back from Canberra etc. which has meant that our hit rate in terms of going has been rather low this year so far. So we thought we'd give a new Friday night 'family' one that we'd been invited to a couple of times a try. Turns out our girls were the youngest there. Now our girls normally go to bed for the night at about 6pm, and this wasn't kicking off until then, so things were looking shaky from the start, and they didn't really pick up from there.

I've heard and witnessed lots of kids who when they are overtired, get quieter and are happy to sit in someone's lap or a pram etc., but not our girls! We took the port-a-cot for Olivia, but the room that they asked us to put her in was right next door to the outdoor area full of 20-odd people and had bright light shining in - which Olivia assumed meant a party was happening that she was missing out on, so that was a lost cause. I persevered for over an hour to no avail, eventually pulling her out so that the other guests could at least enjoy themselves without the background wailing! Of course she's not happy to sit quietly in someone's lap though (that's a thing of the past), so someone had to wrestle with her just to hold her for the next little while (and she's a real workout I can tell you - and people ask you how you lose weight after being pregnant!!).

In the meantime Ellen just wound further and further up with excitement to the point where she looked and sounded like she would burst out of her skin - zooming around, playing with every toy in sight and talking to anyone who would listen. Finally at 8pm we called it off as a really bad idea that we may revisit in a couple of years when the girls are older....maybe! So back to Wednesday nights and a more concerted effort to both get there on our respective weeks. An evening being child free to focus on God seems a great idea in retrospect afterall!