re: Ideas for my son to start inviting his friends to our house

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Anyone else go through this as a parent?

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No, but I went through it as a kid.

I ALWAYS went down the street to my friends' houses.

We hardly ever played at my house.

Nothing wrong with my house, but nothing about it made sense for congregating.

First of all, all four of the kids I played with lived within a few houses of each other down on the other end of the street.

Two of them had better sports yards.

We didn't have a good front yard for football or wiffleball. The backyard was laid out o.k. for wiffleball, but we had a creek bordering the backyard and you can easily see the problem with that. One errant foul ball and your ball just floated away.

We did have the best basketball driveway/goal, but we didn't often use it...I guess because everyone was so in the habit of everything always taking place down at the other end of the street.

We had an Atari, but two of the kids down the street had an Intellivision, which was better than Atari.

Two of the kids were brothers, their Dad didn't live at home and was rarely around, and their mother (I found out later) was an alcoholic who was not really functional. I didn't understand all that dysfunction at 10 years old, but I knew that if I was at their house their mom would leave us entirely alone, order us pizza for dinner, and we got to do pretty much whatever we wanted, and that was enough of a draw for me. Also they had movie channels and we did not at my house, and in 1980 or so that was important. Especially because no one over there would tell us we couldn't watch whatever was on them. :)

My advice is to be glad that he has friends and is actively engaged with them. Many, many kids these days do not interact that way any more. It's strange and a bit disturbing.

Know their parents...make sure he's not spending every weekend with a barely functional alcoholic like I was, but otherwise, playing with his friends like it's his job is what he's supposed to be doing at this stage of life.

Be grateful for the peace and quiet and don't take it personally.