Okay, so I've come across a small problem...

We scheduled DD's 4th birthday party for the weekend immediately after her birthday. I spoke to Mum, who has booked her flights, and so I did invites and dropped them all off to preschool yesterday. It's in nearly three weeks, so not really long notice, I thought reasonable.

While we have some friends and family coming most of the kids will be the girls from preschool and some of the boys.

When I picked her up yesterday, one of her favourite little friend's Mum's says, she's booked her DD's party for the same day, immediately after ours is scheduled to finish. She said she'd look into changing it. She tried this morning, but wasn't able to (it's at one of those playland places).

Now, we've known each other since we were pg, but we are no longer that close. I know her DD's birthday is close to mine, but she's never had a party including all DD's friends and I just didn't think to ask.

She's asking me if I can change the time to half an hour earlier, but that would mean us starting at 9:30am in the morning, which is not great in terms of preparation time. Also, DP's brother, SIL and niece probably won't arrive until late (not our problem, I know, but still). My Mum will only be staying until Sunday afternoon and I'm not sure I want to rush DD off to another party half an hour after her's. Plus, I'll have to tell everyone about the change in time. Several people have already told me they'd be coming.

I kinda assumed that even if the other Mum was going to have a party for her DD it would be the following day, since that's her DD's actual birthday.

Oh help, what do I do? The other thing is she's been communicating this via email, which are a bit short and not a great way of sorting something out. So I intend to call her to talk about it. I know she isn't pleased, as to be expected, but it isn't my fault!! I have really good reasons for not changing anything about our party, but that means DD will probably miss out on her little friend's party and her little friend might find that a fair few can't come. I don't mind if some choose the other party over ours (we do have 18 other kids on the list apart from this friend), but I have a dreadful feeling that since I got the invitations out first, it'll be less likely to be ours that they miss.

I can't believe I am spending the day worrying about this... Poor DD was so upset last night when I talked to her about perhaps not having her friend at her party or going to her friend's party. Life lesson, I guess, but not a nice one!