What You Do When You Have 10 Women Over For The Weekend

Holy. Moly.

I am so excited.  The girlfriend part of me.  That part is so excited I could pee in my pants.

But I am also freaking out a little bit.  (Or a lot.)  The entertaining perfectionist part of me.

Y’all, before kids, I LOVED to entertain.  I did all sorts of fun stuff with themes and ideas and décor.  I still love it, but the theme is notably younger and less breakable.

This weekend I am hosting nine friends and my fellow editors and authors of God-sizedDreams.com at my home for our first annual planning meeting.  My darling hubby is taking the kids to the farm while all my friends fly in from around the country Friday morning and will be here in H-town until Sunday evening.  It may never be the same.

But the grown up reality is that no one stays overnight at your house unless they are blood-related to you.  That means all those things you hide in the guest bedroom or stow away in the bathroom cabinets are uncovered if visitors hang around longer than four hours.

The perfectionist part of me is ready to stay up all night every night until they get here trying to get the space REALLY ready.  I actually considered taking down sheet rock in the non remodeled bathroom (I came to my senses, no need for an intervention).

There will be 10 women and two bathrooms.  There will be 10 women with seven sleeping spots.

Then everything Lisa Jo Baker ever wrote about her crazy little rental house came back at me.  I love how she transformed how to look at hospitality with all my house imperfections:

“After five years in this small house with all the brown paneling I’ve learned a lot about big hospitality. And no matter how much you clean or remodel or move or rebuild, hospitality will always be more a matter of the heart than the architecture.  And your guests will only feel as comfortable in your house as you feel in your own skin. And there’s no shame in paper plates if they’re heaped high with delight in each others’ company.”

My entire hallway has a bigger marker stripe down it that I can’t get out to save my life.  The playroom will not look orderly despite my attempts at organization.  We did finally get the foam tiles out of it, but the tile is cracked and the furniture is well loved.  Our kitchen table has dents and the door over our trash can is trying to come off the hinges.  But as Lisa Jo shared when her husband invited a family over anyways, it shouldn’t matter:

Turned out, [he] wasn’t limited by the size of our house. Because he had big hospitality in mind. He said we should give them our master bedroom and we’d take the inflatable mattress in the playroom, even if it was only for a night. The kids could camp out on mattresses and sofa cushions in the living room. He was determined that our homesick boys would get a full dose of family. And that meant sleepovers included.  We made dinner a taco fiesta buffet and everyone ate anywhere they were comfy. …In the four years we’ve lived here our house has never felt as big as it did that week.  I learned that big hospitality has nothing to do with the size of your house.

So you know what?  I’m just going to be excited.  I will clean more than usual.  My husband has actually commented my GSD friends should come over more often given my responsiveness about household projects.  But there will still just be two bathrooms connected by a big marker stripe down the wall.  And showing all those imperfections is a price worth paying for 48 hours of fellowship with some soul sisters.