To play or not to play?

We have lots of "little" neighbors. By little, I mean age 6 and younger. If I recall correctly, we have 10 ... and that is not including the 3 that just moved a week ago and the other neighbor girl who's 14. For the most part, our little neighbors are just the epitome of sweet, innocent children who never bother us (that is, without mentioning the discovery of crunched crackers on our doorstep or stickers on our cars). But the greatest thing about all these little neighbors are the play mates Dan and I have. The entire scenario began about 6 weeks back or so when our doorbell rang. Dan went to answer the door to find two of our little neighbors looking back up at him.
"Can your kids come out and play?" one of them asked.
"We don't have any kids," Dan replied (I can just imagine him thinking that that answer would stop any further questions ... haha).
"Oh. Well, can you come out and play?"
No amount of stalling or telling these children that we were boring grown-ups would convince them that we wouldn't be great play mates. Dan appeased them by saying he had to ask his wife (later these little play mates called me Dan's "mom" - I assume because he had to ask me for "permission to play") and then came to tell me that we had new friends who wanted to play (we found out that these children came to ring our doorbell "every day" but "no one would come to the door"). I suddenly felt guilty telling them we couldn't go out and play - I didn't honestly have a good enough reason to say no. That day we learned a new version of basketball that involves a beach ball, a plastic play house with the roof missing (as the "basket"), and teams set up rather unfairly as two boys against one girl. After that day, we thought we had them convinced that we really weren't any fun. . . .
Everyday after that my lovely little neighbors would beg us to go out and play with them again. They have figured out which vehicles we own so if they see both vehicles at the complex, they just know that we are home and as bored as they are without anyone to play with. Not exactly ready to get trashed again at the new game of basketball, I always tried to stall them by saying I was fixing dinner (days later I was informed rather pragmatically that I was "always busy with dinner and nothing else"). Eventually the doorbell stopped ringing. We thought we had shifted back into our solitary existence, when the doorbell rang today. Once again Dan went to the door. I him heard him talking to little voices and then he came back and said, "Do you want to go play?"
"No," I informed him. I was busily involved reading a book.
"Oh," Dan laughed. "Well, I told them I would go out and play with them."
Then my guilty conscious kicked in - I couldn't let my husband out-do me.
"Let me finish my book and then I'll come out," I told him through my begrudging attitude.
Moments later I was learning all kinds of fascinating things like horses are hatched from eggs and dinosaurs grow in their mommy's tummy, that a person can know someone once but then not know who they are anymore if you haven't seen them for a little while, and that lady bugs are "bad" if they have "different" spots. I played with Mrs. Mary, Leloni, and Sally (or was it Sarah?) the horses, but I never did do it right - I had to learn how by watching. And Dan was busy playing a renewed game of basketball and I endlessly heard the phrase, "You have to block me!!" usually followed immediately by, "That's not fair! You're too big!" coming from Dan's little play mate.

To play or not to play? When your conscience won't let you stay inside on a beautiful day reading a book, I suppose one is resigned to the latter.