Playdate ettiquette

I was wondering about what people think is acceptable behaviour when taking your older toddler/young child to play in someone else's home. I had my first "playdate" visit at the weekend and am still feeling a bit upset by it. While I was in the kitchen making lunch my 3yo and his friend from toddler group were so giddy with excitement that they went a bit crazy in the playroom. His friend's mum was in the room with them so while I knew they'd make a mess I thought she'd stop it going too far. I didn't see the room until after we'd had lunch and was shocked by it.

The whole floor was covered in toys making it impossible to walk across the room without stepping on things or falling over. A lot of the stuff on the floor was off the high shelves that the boys couldn't have reached so the other mum must have taken them down. The boys were taking things off shelves or out of boxes, looking at them for two seconds and then running over everything to get something else. It was absolute chaos and impossible to actually play in, because it was there wasn't an inch of clear surface anywhere. As soon as I saw it I told the boys that the room was too messy and we should tidy most things away because there was no room to play and that once it was tidy we could pick out what we wanted to play with and be able to do so comfortably.

I tried to get them to help me tidy things away (though tbh it was way too messy for that to really work). My son started helping but the other boy kept taking back the things I put away which made my son get really upset about having to tidy instead of mess so I picked up a couple of toys, put them in the hallway and told them to play out there until I cleared up the room. Through all of this the other mum sat on the couch doing things with her phone. She kept making big annoyed sighs which I initially assumed was due to her network dropping/phone freezing as she had told me she was trying to send an important message. After a few minutes, she stood up, put a couple of toys on a shelf and then told the boys that the room was tidy enough and to come back in. I felt mortified, realising that her sighs might have been because she was upset with me for being a 'buzzkill' and I was upset that maybe I was being overly anal about the mess instead of just letting the boys play. The thing is though that I know my son and when all of the toys are out he just gets hyper and eventually agitated, whereas if he has room to play he really gets his teeth into whatever game he's playing and is really happy and relaxed. After that I felt like I was in the wrong anytime I tried to put away something the boys had just abandoned.

Long before they left, my son got a bit down and he went off into the hall with two little toys and started playing by himself, while the other boy just went through the playroom picking things up and throwing them on the floor before going for something else. Eventually he started taking all my son's books off the shelves and using them as stepping stones on the floor. His mum just sat there almost unaware of it until I asked him was he picking out a book to read (in a bid to redirect him) and she told me that he wouldn't like that, he just liked putting them on the floor. I had to bite my tongue to stop myself from really !!!!ily asking her to stop him then. But instead I picked up a book and started reading it aloud and as it happened her son got quite into it and actually calmed down for a while.

When they eventually left and I tidied up I felt like crying. All afternoon I felt like I was ruining the boys play but once they'd left I nearly burst into tears at the mess. I don't know if my expectations were unrealistic and I was being too precious about the mess or if the main thing I did wrong was fail to be assertive enough with the two boys (and the other mum) about how they were playing. If I'm honest I've always thought that I was on the extremely lenient end of the parenting spectrum and I like to encourage my son to play very freely but I felt like a victorian school marm at times today. As it stands now I'm half tempted to never have child visitors again during bad weather aso that in future they can spend the afternoon in the garden.