Meet my Guest: Kim from The Art of Domestic Living

When Sandy first asked me about being a guest writer for her blog I told her that I was both honored and humbled, but mostly I just felt inadequate when talking about “entertaining.” Rarely do my husband and I host dinner parties or entertain on a regular basis, even though these are both goals that I would like to implement in the future. However, this “assignment” challenged me to think about my views of what I consider entertaining to be.

We built our home with the thought process that, “we are blessed to be able to build, let us share this blessing with others.” As I started thinking about how we open up our home to others I immediately thought of the following events:

* Our Sunday night activities. Most Sunday nights we have a standing invitation to some of our single friends to come over and play games like Settlers of Catan. Usually I serve a dessert or a snack, something simple, for us to enjoy. (Sometimes, it is even purchased from Costco!)

* The other regular night that we open up our home is Monday evenings. My husband started a neighborhood Bible study, and it just works to meet at our home. For this night, I rarely provide any sort of refreshments. We just open up our home as a meeting place.

* A couple of years ago, we opened up our home to approximately 30 teenagers who met at our place on a weekly basis. They started straggling into our home at 6:00AM for a Young Life training meeting! Thankfully all I had to do was set my alarm a few minutes before they arrived and unlock the front door.

It is unrealistic for my home to always be neat and tidy, let alone clean! Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy having a neat home, but I can’t let that dictate when people are welcome to come and visit. A perfect example of this just happened this past Sunday.

My in-laws unexpectedly “stopped over” since they were on our side of town. It was about time for supper, so I insisted that they stay. Thankfully I had some extra food planned and it was an easy meal to prepare. (This is not always the case!) However, the house was a mess! I had papers all over the kitchen counter, toys were located in all parts of our living area and I don’t know the last time I had cleaned my floors! Yet, I chose to focus on spending time with my extended family and I didn’t even apologize for my dirty house!

I want to encourage you to see that entertaining doesn’t have to be done on a big scale. Building relationships with others should always be the most important goal of entertaining. Most of the time people come to visit you, not to see how clean or unclean your house is. In fact, some might feel more at home in a house that isn’t perfectly clean!! When friends, family, and neighbors make impromptu visits, I strive to focus on this rather than the horror of discovering we are sharing the room with dust mites.

I’m so happy to introduce Kim as my guest today! Kim is a wife, a mom to 2 young girls, and a part-time home economics teacher. Besides loving her family, she enjoys sewing, knitting, cooking and reading blogs. Kim has been reading Reluctant Entertainer for almost 2 years, and it was my canning post on PEARS that drew her in. So head on over to The Art of Domestic Living and say hello to Kim!

TOP PHOTO: Kim used Reluctant Entertainer’s Apple Pie in a Jar canning recipe for her pie! Try it – it’s delicious!