I think it’s a “mom of twins”, “one kid feels left out” sort of thing. At age 8, cliques etc. aren’t so solidly formed, and an addition to the group is pretty rapidly absorbed. Who knows, your daughter might find she likes the twin a lot.
I do find the presentation a bit odd: she said that she “always allows”. I would NOT, however, be surprised if a mom said something like “I was wondering if my other daughter might perhaps come along, we’ll pay for the ticket of course, she doesn’t have anything else going on and her sister (invitee) would feel bad if her twin was home while she was having fun”.
Older kids, my answer might be a bit different. Ditto if the event were something less flexible and harder to fit in another person.
Similarly with the 5 year old, and the neighbor’s cousins: I’d have let 'em bring the 4 year old but suggested that the 8/10 year olds might be too old for little-kid stuff.
Forgot to mention: my attitude has always been “the more the merrier”, and the minute the mom mentioned the existence of the twin sister I’d have probably interrupted and said “Oh, bring her too - it’ll be fun!” before she had the chance to ask.
Maybe you only read what you wanted to read, but we didn’t know this twin sister even existed until her mother told us we would be hosting her at the party. My daughter knew of her, but they had never even said two words to each other. Still haven’t.
Again, I’m all for inclusiveness and in principle don’t have a problem adding a person, but it was the way the mother sort of decided it would be happening, rather than make a polite request for it to happen. I wrote the OP to educate myself about whether the assumed inclusiveness was culturally-inspired, but I guess I didn’t expect our own behavior to be considered “rude and shitty”. Color me surprised. :rolleyes:
If the twins are “joined at the hip” (which at least there mom thinks they are) I would probably view this in a similar light to requesting an RSVP from what I thought was a single person and have them reply that they will be coming with their husband/wife. It is by no means a perfect analogy, but it fits in some ways.
Well, if you were any kind of host you would have investigated the family situation of every kid you invited. I wonder how this thread would have gone if you had written it from the perspective of the mother of the twins, asking if you were out of line? I suspect the word “snowflake” would have made at least one appearance.
I have to assume it is. I personally don’t run background checks on people I invite to my kids’ parties. And while I do know about some invitees’ family situations, there are others whom I meet for the first time when they show up at the party.
No, I realize you didn’t set out to exclude the kid. Your kid didn’t think it was important enough to mention, so you had no way of knowing. That kind of thing happens to the best of us, and all we can do is try to fix the situation when we find out that we’ve accidentally done a rude thing. And when you found out you had accidentally excluded an 8 year old child from something her twin sister is attending, your reaction was NOT “oh gosh, our daughter never told us Whatsherface had a twin, by all means bring both of them.” Instead it was “oh, um, well I guess she can come to the part where nobody will be interacting with each other.” In other words, you’re still for all intents and purposes excluding the kid.
Except this time around you knew you were excluding her. And I just can’t give you a Good Manners Pass for that, because in my (implicitly requested) opinion, that’s just plain shitty and rude.
Mind you, that’s not saying that the other mom wasn’t equally rude by American standards. But there was plenty of blame to go around in this particular situation.
I disagree that the exclusion was rude; there’s no reason to invite a kid that her daughter doesn’t even know, nor is she honor-bound to extend an invitation when the twins’ mother calls her. If people with twins treat them like a single entity, that’s their problem. The twins’ mother is free to decline the invitation, send her invited daughter alone, or very delicately ask if the other girl can be included (acknowledging that altering a host’s guest list is rude as shit), but it shouldn’t be a given.
Maybe you only read what you wanted to read, but we didn’t know this twin sister even existed until her mother told us we would be hosting her at the party. My daughter knew of her, but they had never even said two words to each other. Still haven’t.