Dear Amy: Every year, with the help of my husband and six children, I throw myself a birthday party at a local roller rink. All I want is to party and rollerblade with my family and friends like I'm still young.
We rent out the entire venue and invite many families. We serve a handful of refreshments and play fun music. It's a blast, and I usually look forward to it every year, except this year.
I'm dreading it because one family of neighbors are terrible guests. They bring extra people without asking, their four kids come blazing down the middle of the rink and have knocked people down, and last year they took the water bottles from the refreshment table and threw them down the stairs, where they burst open.
The parents never do anything about it and never offer to help clean up the mess.
They know I have this party every year. So how do I avoid inviting them when I know they are going to ask about it? I feel like my only option is to cancel it for a few years and hope they forget about it.
Amy says: Yes, you could cancel your celebration and hope that these neighbors forget about it. You also could hope that they will join a traveling circus and take their act elsewhere.
Or ... you could simply not invite them.
If they ask you about it, you could tell them, truthfully: "We're trimming the guest list down this year; we're going to keep things smaller and more contained. Unfortunately, your group isn't included this year. Maybe sometime in the future we'll expand it again."
