How did it go?

Friday night went so differently from planned, that I thought I should let you know how it went. First of all, it was successful in terms of how many came. More than 100% of those who replied came - we had 10 rather than 8! We had heaps of food and plenty of conversation. Many had actually met before, so that helped, or maybe it hindered the evening. Conversation wasn't a problem, so we let informal conversation go on a bit too long. Before we knew it, the evening was almost over (young parents almost asleep on the bean bag) and we'd done almost none of what we'd planned. Nor did we manage good conversations with everyone. Another factor were the latecomers. Understandable that that might happen, but it threw out our already rather feeble program. Hmmm. We're not sure how everyone felt about the evening. We felt like we'd under-delivered. The boys also refused to go to bed or get involved. Instead they terrorised our guests by letting balloons go without tying them and running around with self-constructed swords and daggers. Boys! Next time we'll need to be more disciplined and try to deliver what we promise. We found it easy to slip into the hospitality mode of feeding people and chatting with them. That's good, I suppose, and would probably work with a smaller group of people. Some we had long, useful conversations (full of good questions), but others missed out. So, a bit disappointed. Nevertheless we'll try again next year, after the summer holidays. Maybe we'll do a better job second time round.