It's Always Fun When Grandpa Comes.....

Unless you have anxiety disorders.  Then it's stressful because you don't know what could happen.  When my husband asked if his father could come for a visit, i said 'sure'.   Because there was a very good chance that it wouldn't happen at all.  Anyway, it was over 3 months away so it seemed ok.  Not that I was doing a lot of planning that far in advance.

When it looked like it was going to work out after all I was still ok with it.  Ocd was not acting out much, so I kind of forgot what it could be like.  Then came the dog collecting my dirty socks from the basement floor and bringing them back into the living room and here was OCD wondering if the house would ever feel 'uncontaminated' again.  I was anxious and i tried to clean what i could. 

That's when I realized that Grandpa coming to visit may be very nice for my dh, and even my kids but for me it would be work and potentially anxiety-provoking.  So one night Bruce and I had a long talk where we decided that having Grandpa sleep at a hotel would give both him and me breathing space.  It would not be 24/hours a day company.  It's not like we are good friends or anything.  But I also wanted my husband to be able to spend time with his 84 yr old dad as,well, he's 84.

I don't know how much of my dislike of overnighters (altho I do let my dd have guests overnight) is because I'm introverted and like to have my space- or whether it's all due to OCD.

On the plus side, his dad wasn't insulted, Bruce will spend the nights with his dad at the hotel for extra male-bonding time ( and because FIL needs that extra care, as we found out by talking to the nurse at his assisted living place) and I don't have to clean up my daughter's room to make it ready for him as we have no guest rooms in our house.  Bruce is away on a business trip for the week and Katrina is sleeping with me at night.  She's getting tall and likes to sleep sideways and kick around in the bed so having all 3 of us sleep together probably wouldn't work out so well anymore anyway. (Sniff, sniff, my baby is growing up.)

It would be great if I were the type of person who would just say 'great, I'll add more potatoes to the pot' when people want to come over, but I'm not, and actually never really have been.

Hey, 4 years ago I would have freaked out even more because there would have been lots of places IN my house that were 'contaminated' and couldn't be touched and that there was no way I could have people just wandering around my house unsupervised.  Now it's basically the laundry room that's off limits and don't go touching the garbage can with your hands if you can help it- altho the dogs brush against it and I live with that.