I could ask him to keep his visit short. His parents and his brother and a close friend all live in the same area as my mother so he's got plenty of excuses to leave early. Thanks for the suggestion.
I don't have any family, but I my best female friend is 40 so she's like a big sister to me. I have been to her house on New Year's Day every year now for 3 years and she takes me in on Easter Sunday and I sometimes go to her's for a weekend when H has DD4.
She helped me through the last 3 months of my pregnancy with dd4 and she went shopping with me to buy baby clothes and stuff. She got so excited about it, it was almost as if she was the one who was giving birth! Then of course I had a little girl and she's got 3 son's so she wents nuts over my little girl, carrying her around everywhere and putting tiny dresses on her.
She knew her birth weight and the exact time of birth if anyone asked her
She says I'm like the little sister she never had. Her husband's mother is 83 and really lovely and I see her at family ocassions. She's always chatty and brings biscuits and she loves my dd4. I have sort of adopted her as a grandmother figure.
Basically I think I have adopted them all as a surrogate family. They feel like my family.
I have limited contact with H's mother (email and visit maybe twice a year) and I'm still friends with H's brother as we've been friend's for nearly 18 years - that's how I met H, so a little M break up isn't going to change that ).
I have various other friends I socialise with, no one I think of as parental, though. I guess I have to parent myself, it teaches me to look out for myself and my dd4.
).