Friday night disaster!

The four of us are still very busy making sure we show our faces at various social occasions so we can get to know people, build a circle of friends and make a good impression.  So to say that this Friday night just gone didn’t exactly go according to plan would be something of an understatement….

We were invited to a lovely family for dinner, the same family who were kind enough to include us in their second night Seder.
All day the weather had been horrendous, torrential rain and generally a dark, thundery day.
I was well organised and got Eden into her pyjamas and gave her her milk before we left as this family are quite frum so I didn’t want to risk offending and get a cup of milk out in the middle of their meaty meal!

I dashed the kids out of the building and into a cab without getting too wet.  The journey was slow, stop/start the whole way which I guess was probably due to it being Friday evening and also the horrible weather.  We got there exactly on time and again had to dash through the rain from the cab into the building whilst carrying Eden, handbag, nappy bag and flowers.  Having been heavily focused on flat-hunting the last few weeks, once in the lobby I certainly appreciated that this family lived in a really lovely building.  It was spick and span, very posh.

So we got to the lifts and just before the lift arrived Eden promptly vomited all over the floor.  In hindsight, I should have stayed where I was and alerted one of the lobby staff to the problem and got their help.  Sounds obvious now but what I in fact did was bundle us all into the lift thinking I just needed to get her upstairs.  Before the lift doors even closed the vomit came again!  All over the walls of the lift and poor old Josh didn’t go without a direct hit!  I couldn’t exactly subtly retreat from the situation now, nor could I make a calm smiley entrance into our host’s apartment with my 2 lovely children!!

I was just starting to clean up a screaming Eden outside their door when my lovely host opened up and looked more than a little shocked at the sight that greeted her!  I had to explain what happened at which point she made sure I knew that she had a total fear of vomit and was a real clean freak (not unlike me so I did have to sympathise!)  I was trying to laugh it all off whilst quietly dying inside but I could tell she would have been happier if I’d left Eden outside the door all night!!  Plus her poor helper had to go down in the lift and alert the lobby staff to what had happened.  I don’t know exactly what happened down there but she just said they’d already discovered it and that another resident had almost slipped on the puddles, oops.  It’s not like the residents are well-off respectable people who probably pay a fortune in building management fees.  Oh, they are.

Poor Eden was actually completely fine after all that.  Once I’d got her changed out of her organised pyjamas and into the random too-small clothes I tend to keep lurking at the bottom of her nappy bag, she was more than happy to run in and play and was totally fine the whole evening – in fact she was ravenous!

Dan was more than a little shocked with the sick story Joshua excitedly told him when he pitched up about 10 minutes later, drenched from the rain too of course!

As for my poor hostess with the vomit & germ-phobia, she deserves an Oscar for pretending to be ok about everything when I’m sure all she really wanted was to do was send us straight home and not let us cross the threshold!  I’m sure she either threw away or thoroughly sterilised everything Eden touched during the evening but I hope not!  We’re a lovely family really, normally very well-behaved and well-presented.  Well, Eden can be a bit of a loose canon sometimes but not to this extent!  I hope we’re given a second chance one day!

The moral of the story?  Um, never give your child milk before a long, bumpy taxi ride?  Never be confident you’ll make a good first impression?  Never abandon a pile of vomit in a posh place without taking responsibility?  I don’t know, probably all of these – and more!