There's a small group of friends I've known for years and I meet up with them once or twice a month of a weekend evening, although they meet up together a lot more regularly than that!
Their nights out seem to consist of standing around in a bar for a few hours,(music so loud you can't hear yourself think!), then normally going on somewhere else until early hours of morning, sleeping off hangovers next day only to repeat it all the next night, then the night after if they've managed to take Monday off work!
While I enjoy seeing them all and like a few drinks myself, I tend to stop after about 3 alcoholic ones and go on to soft drinks, which I'm teased about every single time! The reason is that it's always so busy here that if I can avoid a hangover I will! Our two children are at primary school so I'm well past the stage of them waking in the night, but on a Saturday morning one of them needs ferrying to a club, on Sunday morning it's the other one, we sometimes have dh's family staying or are going out for a "family day" ourselves somewhere nice or the children have friends over, sometimes for sleepovers and although dh doesn't mind, it's not fair to leave him with four children for a whole evening when he has a very busy job and likes weekends to be "chill out time"!
My friends just don't seem to "get it", the fact that I like to be home by midnight, especially if we've all met up at 8 pm! I had a phone call last Sunday lunchtime from one of them saying they were all meeting at some pub for the afternoon, would I join them. Well, that weekend my dh had already left had to travel somewhere as a course he was on started early Monday morning, so of course I had the dc's, packed lunches + uniform to prepare, homework, you name it! Told my friend I'd have loved to but also why I couldn't. She just couldn't understand, it was, "Why don't you just leave them with your neighbour, call your mum etc?" I wouldn't at that short notice and anyway, there were things I needed to get done as I work part time in the week, too. Have now suggested meeting a few of them for lunch on my day off, which they agreed to but I know they much prefer an evening. How do the rest of you handle these things? I enjoy their company but our lifestyles seem so DIFFERENT now! We're all in our 30's by the way.