CP/QF Crazy: Why don't smaller families invite us over?

I was digging around in my "Draft" folder when I found this post that I started but never finished. When I first started learning about CP/QF large families, there were four aligned bloggers who wrote weekly question and answer columns for large families.  The four moms were The Headmistress at "The Common Room", KimC at "In A Shoe", Kimberly at "Raising Olives", and Connie at "Smockity Frocks".   The questions and answers ran anywhere to straightforward logistics questions on how to raise kids through absolute crazy stuff.    I remember reading this answer from KimC and realizing that women who are 2nd or 3rd generation large-family homeschoolers may honestly not understand why small families blanch or sweat at the thought of inviting a very large or huge family over to their house.

Is it normal to have a very small social network with a large family? Seems like we never get invites to anything now that we are a family of 7. I don’t mind at all being the hostess. Just wondering if this is normal, and how to maintain our friendships with other families.

Yes, it’s normal. We have the privilege now of knowing many large families, and many smaller families that love large families. I don’t think this is common though. When I was growing up in a large family, invitations were few and far between. We often had families to our home but invitations were rarely returned. This was fine with my parents, because it’s much easier to host a family of 4 for dinner than to move 10 or 15 people out the door to a friend’s house for dinner. In fact, when those rare invitations arrived, it wasn’t uncommon for Dad to respond with a suggestion that they just come to our house instead.

And to be quite honest, I much prefer to host for the very same reason. I’m a homebody at heart. If it were up to me, we would do as my dad did, but we don’t. The rest of my household does not share my sentiments, so we happily load up into the van when invitations arrive – and I’m always glad we did. :)

In your case, I have two suggestions:

Be the hostess. If your friends don’t invite you over, invite them instead. Often. More often than I do.

Cultivate friendships with other large families. Let’s face it: a big family can easily triple the headcount for a small family, but barely double it for a larger family. If your friends have big families, yours is less likely to overwhelm them.

I'm sorry. I lost most of the answer because I was panic sweating at the thought of hosting a family of 15 or more at my house.

 *begins deep breathing while reminding myself I don't know anyone with 13 children IRL*

Let's tackle the reasons I can think of:

1) Inviting KimC's family over for a dinner will blow my food budget. 
Right now, my family consists of two adults and one preschooler.  When I cook dinners, we consume around 4 servings - two for my husband, one for me, plus a serving that my son will be given a tiny amount, probably not eat that serving, but my husband or I will eat the rest of for breakfast or lunch the next day.   I make a lot of casseroles and sheet pan meals that are around 12 servings total.   When we eat every meal at home - which is very rare even during a pandemic - we need 2 casseroles a week with a day that my husband and I eat soup or salad from the pantry.

Invite KimC's family over and we need at least 18 servings for a single meal. That's 4.5 days of dinner for my family (which would include 3 single lunch servings).  Cost-wise, dinners are the major spender on my food budget so that single meal consumes around 25% of my weekly food budget.   That's assuming that everyone is satisfied with a single serving; that's pretty unlikely since people tend to eat more at social gatherings than when by themselves.  If people average 1.5 servings each,  we're going to need 27 servings which all of the food my family consumers for dinner in a week - and that's 50% of my food budget gone in one evening.

There have been times in the last few years where we literally could not afford to invite KimC's family over no matter how much we liked them; we just plain didn't have the money.

2) Inviting KimC's family over for dinner doubles my cooking time for the week.
I need an hour to prep and cook a casserole that will feed my family for half a week.   Most of the time I make the two casseroles on two different days.    That's two hours of food preparation time per week.  Figure 15 minutes of shopping, 15 minutes of travel time and 15 minutes of cleaning up dishes used in the meal and for eating the casserole.   That's roughly 3 hours of food preparation time for dinner weekly. 

If I invite KimC's family over, I'd save a bit of time in making two identical casseroles at one so let's say that takes 1.25 hours.  I'd still need 15 minutes to get the ingredients.  I wouldn't gain any travel time - but doing all of the dishes created from that one dinner would take 30 minutes.   That one dinner would take 2 hours to prep - but I'd still need to do roughly 3 hours of food prep to feed my family for the week.

3) Serving 18 people dinner at once would stretch my kitchen supplies to the breaking point.
I think I could do it - but there's no reserve left over.  I would need to use both big casserole pans to make 27 servings.  We own enough dishes and silverware for everyone to eat at once - but some people would be using plates while others used bowls and a person could have either a fork or a spoon and knife - but not both.   I do not have enough glasses for everyone - so I'd need to purchase some disposable cups for drinks.  Actually, I wouldn't invite that large of a crowd over without being able to purchase disposable cutlery and plates for everyone simply because using all of my dishes and silverware at once means we're going to be doing dishes for a few hours -and I don't want to.

4) There's never going to be a point where I have age-appropriate toys for all the age-groups in KimC's family.  
Right now, I have toys available for kids between 0-5 years and teens.   My son is three - but we've still got some baby toys floating around and some of his toys will interest older preschoolers or kindergarteners.  Similarly, eventually kids are old enough to play the selection of board games we have available - but most of ours are geared more towards teens and adults like Scrabble or Apples to Apples.  I don't have any of the games I remember playing in elementary or junior high like Clue, Sorry!, or Trouble.  We also played Twister a lot; I'm going to assume that one is a no-go in CP/QF families because of the incidental physical contact.  I don't have any sports toys for soccer, football, kickball or basketball which we played a lot as kids.  We don't have a swing set for that age group although we do have a tractor tire sandbox. 

I suspect this is the case for most small families.  Most US families have one, two or three closely spaced children.  This lets families use the same sets of toys, equipment and clothing more easily and lets them donate or sell the clothing they don't need any more.  By comparison, large families have multiple children in each age category so they've got the toys needed to entertain visiting kids of any age.

5) Fitting 15 people in my home will not be comfortable for anyone!
If we had a nice day in the late spring, summer or early fall, I have enough space in my very large yards that we could host a family of 15 outside easily enough.  I probably even have enough quilts for all of the kids to be able to sit on blankets in the yard for dinner.   This is the first time in my life, though, where I had that large of an entertainment space available.  My parents' house could not fit 15 people plus the five of us in the yard.  The apartment I rented as a single adult certainly didn't have space for 15 people outside - and we didn't have a community center for rent, either. 

Now, if the weather turns cold, very windy, snowy or rainy. we're screwed.  I know that CP/QF homes work by having every available space ready to be used of kids of all possible ages; that is not how my house works!

I theoretically have five downstairs rooms available for use - but four of those 'rooms' are an L-shaped pseudo-open plan office-kitchen-dining-room-living room.  The office is a poorly built addition that lacks enough insulation or any connection to the HVAC system so it's cold in the winter and hot in the summer.  The kitchen and dining room used to have a wall between them, but someone knocked the wall years ago.  At the same time, they removed the only gravity return vent for the HVAC system to return cold air from the second story to the furnace; to use the upstairs, we had to run a new gravity vent up through a pre-existing strangely placed closet in the living room.  Fitting 18 people into the main room would be unpleasant.  We have a bathroom on the first floor and we do have a single bedroom next to the bathroom that is serving as a craft-laundry-dressing room for my husband and I.   Having that area ready for use for board games of all ages would give everyone just enough room to fit and be reasonably comfortable - but I don't want to go through the work of cleaning out that whole room on top of doubling my cooking time.

KimC's dad's method of inviting small families over to the large family's house makes a ton of sense.  Adding three people to a family of 15 is much more manageable financially and logistically. 

So - that's why the invites tend to be one directional; small families can be literally overwhelmed at all of the extra work and money needed to host a huge family.