Drinks, Anyone?

I'm not really a drinker. I've been known to have an occasional cocktail, but it happens about twice a year. My husband isn't one either. Most of my friends don't drink a lot. I suppose it's just the way I was raised. I don't have any personal or religious objection to drinking. For heaven's sake, the college I went to had an on site program for alcoholic priests. So it's not church, but just the way I was raised. My parent's don't drink and we never had alcohol in my house when I was growing up. So it was natural to me that when I had kids, I would follow the same path. It took a while to convince my husband that I was serious, but he eventually believed I was and came around.

We don't go to parties where alcohol is served and I think it's inappropriate for adults to drink in front of their underage children, ESPECIALLY if they will be driving afterward. Talk about sending a mixed message. If your kids see you down a couple of beers at dinner then pile everyone in the SUV to drive home, then when you start spouting off about not drinking an driving, they'll think you are the world's biggest hypocrite. Which brings me to my point...

I'm pretty picky about with whom my children associate. As a result, they don't have a lot of friends. They know a lot of kids at school, but I feel like I need to know the parents really well before I will let my kids play at someone else's house. So I am at a Girl Scout event last week and am introduced to another mom. Our girls are both in scouts and in the same class at school. The kids really want to have a play date. And as I am listening to this woman, I am kind of shocked. She is telling me about how her 3 year old son has fallen in their pool three times this year and how her kids clean up all the beer cans around their backyard. Then the dad comes up and tells me how much he hates the scorpions in his yard and that his buddies all come over to drink and they get out a black light and kill the scorpions with the empty beer cans. And I am thinking, "Seriously? Is this really ok with most people?"

I think I am pretty reasonable. I limit tv to shows I approve of. And I don't approve of Hannah Montana, SpongeBob, etc. Internet is monitored and my oldest daughter has e-mail (though I have the password and she can only write to people in her address book). I have allowed one sleepover. Fun stuff is contingent upon clean rooms and completing chores, but I have no objection to birthday parties and roller skating and such. So is it really unreasonable to want their friends parents to have some standards? Am I of touch? Should I lighten up?

In all honesty, most of the non-drinking, no smoking, my kind of standards people in this neighborhood have been mostly unfriendly towards us. So what's a mom to do? I can either let me kids play in someone else's unsupervised pool and drink leftover beer or they can turn into home dwelling hermits with no social skills (like me). Any advice?