I’ve just spent a very enjoyable evening with my family (including mom, sis and her daughter) and an old friend (and his wife) of my dad’s.

I mentioned it under There’s More and Time Flies.  My sister helped me scrub the house clean and rearrange the living room and she helped me prepare supper for them.  My sister is definitely the artistic one.  The way she arranged the food we prepared looked lovely.  It’s one of her favourite things, entertaining, so I had expert help on my side.

We spent the evening reminiscing about dad and the things that they used to get up to and generally about events in our lives.  As I mentioned before in the blog they had never met my children so it had been over 10 years since we last got together. 

But one of the nice things about old friends is how you can just pick up where you left off.  There was no awkwardness in our conversation tonight and it really did seem like only yesterday that we last met up.

It was funny though, my dad’s friend is quite a straight talking person.  He calls it as he sees it, so to speak.  He was summing up how we all looked,  and when he got to me he said I looked thinner and haggard!  What do you say to that apart from "yes, I probably do". 

The thinner part I don’t understand as I am still the same weight as before I got pregnant which is under 9 and a half stone, so whether it was the clothes I was wearing, I don’t know.

This in itself was (fairly) okay.  Sometimes it takes a person outside of the usual circle to make you stop and think.  But, we looked at some of the old photograph albums and there was one which mom had made up of mainly photos of me.  (She did it for both my sister and I.)

As he looked through, he laughed at some of the funny pictures, then said that I was never a good looking girl anyway, but I’ve matured!

At 43, I can’t get upset at comments like these as I always knew I was never the one to be picked at school dances for the slow numbers.  Even as I was older at nightclubs, it was the same.  I was usually the one to make up numbers. 

But today I’ve been feeling weepy and a bit hormonal and the comments have just slapped me in the face a little bit more than they should have. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not cross with him for the comments being made and in actual fact it was probably my just rewards for laughing at my sister when not one but two people thought she was my mom not my sister. 

I’m just the ugly daughter that’s all.