All tomorrow's parties

It seems to be getting harder and harder to be sociable with a child. Going out with the wife and without the child is expensive and requires lots of advance planning. I can go out by myself, which is okay, but I married L because I enjoy doing stuff with her. It's not as fun going to clubs or gigs without her. We could have people over, but that seems to be less and less an option.

If I try having a party or some other event, I'm more and more finding people won't come. Of all the various events I've organised over the years, the number of people who say they're going to come has dropped dramatically. However that's not dropped nearly as dramatically as the number of people who say they'll come and actually do show.

I've organised a lot of social events over the years. I've gotten used to people saying I might be able to make it, but x… and that meaning there's around 20-40% chance of them coming – depending on what x is. But if someone says I'll be there then they're almost certainly going to be there. I got the the point that I could guess quite accurately the number of people who'd actually show.

I've noticed a trend of of increasing flakiness with friends over the past few years – where people who said they'd come just don't show up, and saying I might come is actually shorthand for Thanks for inviting me. That was before the girl was born. Since she's been here, the flakiness of my non-childed friends as gone up drastically. Pretty much everything I've tried to arrange lately has fallen apart to some degree.

For my birthday last week, I'd tried to organise a nice little outing plus lunch. Despite a number of people saying they'd come, not a single one of my friends did. So I spent the birthday with the girl and her cousins from out of town. While a nice afternoon was had by all, that's not the point. This is just the extreme case of a trend I've seen amplified since the girl was born. yes, I'll come has more and more meant … unless something else comes up, or I decide to sleep in, or the weather is bad… I've stopped having parties at the house, since I got annoyed of buying and making food and drinks for the people who said they'd come, only to have less than a quarter of them actually show.

It used to be as much one in ten would or so would drop out last minute to due illness or some other emergency. And usually they'd mention being on call or getting sick days in advance. I'm getting far more last minute no-warning excuses now. They may be true – perhaps we're all getting older and more fragile. Or maybe they just like the credible sound of these excuses. Or maybe in this age of social media and mobile phones people don't really plan things and just decide last minute based on their mood when they go online and see they have something to do.

While I call out specifically non-childed friends above, it's not that childed friends are immune to dropping out. In fact it's the opposite – it's fairly common for people with kids to drop out last minute, and I expect that. The problem is amplified at children's parties. The number of people who say they're going to show up for a party is several times the number of people who do show. To the point where it's pretty common for no one at all to show, or sometimes only one or two guests come.

I know I've been guilty of this – children get sick, and you don't want to bring a nasty disease and turn a party into a den of germs. The girl was at risk of chicken pox last year (turns out she did have the pox) and we skipped a first birthday party I'd committed to going to. I felt horrible about it, but I did have a good reason. Just the fact that everyone else also pulled out for various reasons makes me feel guilty.

It's pretty disappointing to be in this dilemma. When the girl was very young it was trivial to take her to pubs and restaurants – she'd sleep or quietly sit through. Now she spends the time eating. She's well behaved, but needs enough attention that I find at the end of the night all I can remember is saying a few words to the person sitting next to me and maybe vaguely what I ate. That's not quite true – I can remember what she ate, what she threw on the floor, what she didn't like, which cutlery she used, how much she drank and the number of times I took her too the loo. I can do all that at home.

So, is it even possible to have a family and still have any sort of social life? Am I stuck with Facebook and the like being my only lifeline to my childless friends? Do I only get to hang out with other people with kids of the same age? I don't mind that last bit since we've plenty of friends with kids under 4. But I wouldn't be friends with everyone else if I didn't want to see them.