I’m not lying when I say, my first dinner party was a disaster. I’m not saying it has gotten much better since then either. Just a few months ago, we had friends over for a late night dinner after the kids went to bed and I forgot to buy napkins! What did I do? Well, I improvised… with baby wipes! Haha.

My very first dinner party was for my 30th birthday. My husband and I planned a nice dinner for a few close friends of mine. We set up the dining table in our big, open space living room. I decorated the table with white and gold pumpkins, candles, and our “good china”. Each chair had a fur blanket on it to make the dinner feel extra cozy in late September. It may have looked pretty, but man… I was (and still am) an amateur hostess.

Dinner began and it all started to unravel. We hired an amazing chef to cook us dinner. We started with Caesar salad (my favourite) and the plates were brought to our table. While we all gabbed and drank wine, we realized Nick didn’t have a plate! And there were no extras in the kitchen. I realized I had put aside 7 plates and not 8 for the chef to plate. OMG. So everyone insisted that they make a plate for Nick and everyone put a little of their salad onto his plate. How mortifying!

The dinner was so delicious and by this point we had the plate system worked out. Few! Delicious pasta in a creamy garlic parm sauce. Then came dessert and we quickly realized… we’ve run out of forks! We used the small forks for the salad and the large forks for dinner and now we don’t have any forks for dessert! Nick, the incredible husband he is, grabbed everyone’s plates and quickly washed the forks for a second use!

I looked across the table to one of my “seasoned” friends, who laughed so hard. This was amateur hour at the house of clowns! She of course has had her share of gatherings and I wondered if she ever had one go as terribly as mine.

Have I mentioned I love my husband? We got on the topic of babies and birth (we’re mostly mamas here) and Nick insisted on bringing out a book of our birth photography. I mean, maybe he was boasting the skills of our photographer who was one of the guests at the party? But here it was, the book of Oaklin’s water birth being passed around the table like a game of pass the parcel. Except that on these pages are some very… intimate…images of their host!

All I could do was laugh.

I laughed so hard that night. Nothing went as expected, but we all managed to have a good time. My friend Veronica stayed to help clean up and she gave me a bottle of champagne to pop (which I had never done before). More laughter and love exchanged between friends that feel like home.

I think that’s the key take away. Find friends that embrace the chaos and don’t mind when you forget napkins and give them baby wipes. My friend group looks so different in this season of life. I hold those dinner party friends close to my heart, because they walked life with me in my early motherhood days when the road was tough. There’s still bumps in the road these days, but my footing is stronger. My friends aren’t in large groups now, but just a sweet few- an that’s more then okay. They too, embrace my mess and imperfections and always invite me to sit at their table, too.