A Women's Party that Celebrates Friendship

Every year for about 14 years I have had a potluck party in March called the Women’s Party. It started out because we all had young children and never got a night off. The rules we had when we first started were.

1)  You have to buy the food that you’re bringing to the party already made and bring it in its original container. (In other words no work and no talking about recipes, not that I have a problem sharing recipes I do it all the time. But I just wanted to have my friends share there lives, not there recipes.) This rule had an interesting side effect. We learned where in our town we could get good deli food and take out.

2) You’re not allowed to go home before your kids are in bed.

3) You can invite your friends too. (Every year new faces show up and different combinations of friends come. Keeping the party ever changing)

These three simple rules make for a really fun party. Everyone catches up with each other and meets new friends. My family, all boys were banned to the upstairs with pizza or they went out for fast food, which made a fun tradition for my husband and boys. Their only complaint has been how loud the party gets, but when you put that many women in one house all talking it does get loud.

Over the years we have weathered lots of problems together, celebrated lots of achievements, changed things in our community for the better. We’ve now seen many of our kids grow up and move out leaving us with empty nests, but we have each other which help fill some of the emptiness and give us strength to look for new passions and new directions. Also we can catch up on what everyone’s kids are doing out in the world,

which has been so interesting and fun to hear about.

The new rule change is, we don’t have to go home when are kids are in bed, we couldn’t possibly stay up that late…