"Any chance you're free Saturday?"

This is your sign to send the last-minute invite.

I often assume that people are busy. There have been times in my life where my husband and I have been booked out on weekends for 7 months straight (that was an insane wedding year when we were invited to 13 weddings). We’re very lucky to have the kind of a community where we’re surrounded by people and get to see them pretty often.

It’s a rare thing then to have a “slow” weekend at home. But even still, I get the bug of wanting to see people. I get to work from home most of the time, but that means that social interactions are pretty limited. Just this past weekend, I sent out a text to neighbors we haven’t seen in a while:

“Hey!! Any chance you guys are free on Saturday?”

We’ve been like ships passing in the night with these friends where one of us is almost always out of town. The last series of texts was the same thing of trying to do a last-minute get together.

“This keeps happening! We’ll be out of state for a wedding all weekend.”

I didn’t let this deter me from seeing them. Instead of saying “darn, we’ll have to pick another date!” like I did the last time, I sent a specific follow-up:

“What about the last two weekends in August?”

It’s so easy to say “we should hang out soon” and not pick a date. I’m very guilty of this myself! You don’t want to seem too eager or type-A that you’re actually putting it on the calendar. But people are busy and have lots of moving pieces in their lives. Even Ina said “We don’t say, ‘Let’s get together’ and then not pick a date.”

I have other friends that I do a quarterly dinner with, as hilariously business-y as that sounds. But you know what that means? We have a 3-month timeframe to make it work, and (except for a few months because of some extra circumstances) we’ve kept it going for almost two years now.

You might be thinking at this point that I’ve done a bait-and-switch with this article, as I’m talking about making plans months in advance. But here we go:

There are two kinds of invites, and both are needed.

Sometimes, you need to do the months-out planning. There are different phases of life that just are busier than others, different seasons of the year, different reasons why it’s harder to see people. But there’s also the glimmers and a special place in my heart for the last-minute get-together.

Those neighbors were busy on Saturday, but I didn’t let that stop me from getting to see people. I texted another group of friends who we hadn’t seen in a while and we actually hadn’t had over before:

“Hey!! Any chance you guys are free on Saturday?”

This time, most of the group was available! We picked a time for “linner” that was flexible between nap schedules, and I pulled together an easy menu that was mostly prepped in advance. We ate bruschetta off of the teacup saucers from our plate set and dessert off of paper plates since I hadn’t run the dishwasher. I pulled a mis-mash of beers together and made a strawberry lemon-limeade from what we had in the fridge. They both asked what they could bring and we ended up with a smorgasburg of desserts that was laughably abundant for just 6 people.

All that to say that it wasn’t a picture-perfect dinner party with flowers and place settings. It was relaxed, impromptu, and, most importantly, fun. And it happened because I took the risk of rejection that they might be busy, but thankfully they happened to be free.

I even got to try out a recipe I’m writing for the book!

This is your sign to send the last-minute invite, pick an actual date in advance if needed, and keep at it if you want to have people over.