Finding Friends

New place, new people and children who are growing and changing and moving into the stage where they don’t necessarily want to have all the same friends. My job to help them find friends. Friends who will be a good influence, friends who will share their interests and from a busy mama’s perspective friends that it will be relatively easy to get them together with! There are children on our street, but so far it’s been boys except for the little girl next door and many of them are in school or preschool and not available during the day. We try to keep the weekends as family time so that limits friend making time on Saturdays and Sunday gets pretty well taken up with church.

So that’s the who-is-available-to-be-a-friend problem.

Here’s the other problem. The one who needs friends the worst is Mouse. Buggle and Bull have each other and increasingly they go into engineering and construction mode together and are perfectly content. Mouse doesn’t find engineering at all soul satisfying and often finds their projects (let’s see how many boxes of snow we can stack on a sled and still pull it) to be more like work than play. So she pesters them because she doesn’t want to do what they’re doing and does want their attention. That pestering happens when we get together with potential new friends too and then she can’t figure out why no one wants to play with her.

Sigh…

She loves being around people, she’s very creative, and people who don’t mind her great desire for physical contact do fine with her, but she’s not easy for most children to be friends with. So I’ll keep working on it and working with her to understand that she can’t just leap on people and that there are better ways to make friends than by demanding their attention. I’ll work with the boys too to figure out how to incorporate her into the things they love, and how to join into her ideas without taking them over and turning them into their kind of play.

Give and take, give and take…..it’s how things function best but it can be so hard for children (and adults) to remember and practice…