Coming?

That moment your daughter says, "Can we just pray, so I can go to bed?" when her friend (the only one of eight invited) leaves after arriving 1.5 hours late for a 2.5 party that includes pizza, the entire junk aisle from Walmart, sodas, and hot tub/movie.  Sometimes I wonder if cancer care is the only reason that my kids are invited to things.  Keilie had a hard time making friends before Caden's diagnosis, and now is rarely invited to anything and rarely has people show up to her parties.  Granted, she couldn't invite the entire school, since the hot tub only holds 8, but she had friends that said they could come that didn't show up, didn't answer her texts of "Hey, are you still coming tonight?"  Crickets.

Clincher: When Keilie asked her "best friend" if she was coming, that "friend" told her that she "had plans with her friends already."  To her face.

After prayer, Brennon said something about wishing they could have gone trick-or-treating longer.  I had followed Randy's urging, begrudgingly, to allow the kids to show some independence by letting them go alone, but gave them my phone and told them to "check in" with me at 7:00pm.  They interpreted that as "you're done at 7:00."  I thought they came home then because it was so windy and cold.  Tyson, upon finding out they could have gone longer, said he was "disappointed with the night."  Keilie: "Well at least you got to go trick-or-treating."  She could have would have if she wasn't waiting around for friends to show up, who as it turns out, were trick-or-treating themselves.

Halloween didn't turn out how any of us wished that it would have.

UPDATE:
Tyson: "Mom, isn't it weird that more kids came trick-or-treating to our door when we had our lights off than friends came to Keilie's party?  It makes me wonder, why didn't her friends want to come to her party?"

Because Randy was out-of-town, and because I didn't want to have to watch Mira have high anxiety all night from all of the doorbells and knocking, I chose not to hand out candy for the first time in our entire marriage.  Even with all of the lights off out front, and again with all lights off inside, we still had trick-or-treaters come to our door.

Crazy thing: we even had more last night when we didn't want them than we ever had while living on Jason Loop, a circle of 90 homes with minimal walking between front porches.  Still cannot believe how few kids actually went through that neighborhood.  In my opinion, that is a neighborhood of trick-or-treating dreams!  Especially since the neighborhood across the main street is one where bus loads of kids are driven in from poverty-stricken Pasco.