Yesterday my DS (4) had a friend from school around to play. It was organised last week but to be frank I felt she was very pushy about it. I wasn't very keen for a few reasons, we live a 40 minute walk from the school and a 10 minute drive not in traffic but about 25 minutes in rush hour. The parents don't own a car but they do drive and belong to a city car club. The car for this club is parked outside their house. I have a 10 month old so really did not want to drop the friend back in rush hour as I knew it would take about an hour and that my DD baby would fall to sleep at 6ish.
Last week the mother of DS's friend just assumed I would drop him back and said, 'what time will you be dropping him back?'. I was a bit taken aback and explained about DD thinking she might get the hint and say she would of course pick him up. She only has the one child and her partner comes home every day at 5.30 so either one could have come over in the car club car or a cab. Anyway, she didn't get the hint and I didn't want to be miserable about it in front of the boys so I said about 6.
Fast forward to the playdate. I spent most of my time in the kitchen with DD so the boys could get on with playing. They seemed to have a good time, then it was dinner and they had blackcurrant juice with it. We have cream carpets which were here before we moved in, I asked them to be careful with the juice but not using a scrict tone. Anyway, I went to fetch the food and came back through, DS's friend was sitting on the table moving a truck toy about and in doing so knocked over the black currant juice. I rushed to clear it up and said, 'don't worry accidents happen.' but he wasn't worried, upset, in fact he was laughing about it, spreading it around the table with his hand and said it was like purple wee dripping through the bench.
After school today DS's friend's mum asked me how I think the playdate went. I said, 'good', as I thought that it was fine. I then asked the 2 boys and TBH I thought they'd agree but her DS said that he didn't enjoy it. They ran off to play on the school field and then she brought up the blackcurrant spillage. I said what happened and that my DS said in a jokey tone that his daddy would be cross if his friend deliberately made it worse but as I said above, the friend appeared to like his messy play! He was happy, laughing. The mother seemed to think he was traumatised by the whole thing. She called him over, got me to explain that I was fine about the accident and told my DS off for scaring him with the Dad comment.
Bearing in mind she manipulated the play date at mine in that she said she would like to have my DS around to play and then said her son would like to go to mine and directly asked, 'when can you have him next week? Also, bear in mind the presumption that I would drop him back in rush hour, am I reasonable in feeling that she was rude to scrutinise the events of the playdate?
Neither did he thank me when I dropped him off. She told him to and he still wouldn't!