Post the Ninth - New Friends?

 I’m not an introverted person. I’m not extremely outgoing either. It really depends on the situation I suppose but one area in which I tend to be less outgoing is joining in on conversations with people I don’t know.

You know the scenario. You’re in a public place and a couple (or a group) of people strike up a conversation. You overhear and have something to contribute but you don’t know if they will welcome your input or be offended that you were listening.

I am a stay-at-home mom who doesn’t drive. I live in a city FAR from my family and childhood/high school friends. We have lived here for going on 3 years and in that time I have made maybe half a dozen friends, most of whom have moved away or are about to move away. Later this month I will be down to one person that isn’t my husband or my girls that I really get to spend time with. It’s quite rare that I get to have a conversation that doesn’t involve Scooby Doo.

Understandably I go a little crazy at times.

At the Easter event at Dubya’s work, while we were standing in line waiting to get P1’s face painted, there were three women in front of us talking about the Easter egg hunt. P1 was in the 0-2 year category (I would have put her in 3-5 but Dubya signed her up). The way the 0-2 hunt works, they set up a big, open area with eggs just scattered all over the ground in plain view. Since the kids are so young the parents walk with them as they pick up eggs. It is easy to understand why the parents go with them. Some of the children can’t even walk and the ones who can might get knocked down or lost in the group of adults with the kids who can’t. So yes, even our almost-3-year-old P1 was accompanied by her Daddy.

While it is understandable that the parents accompany their babies and toddlers, it also presents some problems:

• The company Dubya works for is very large. There are a LOT of people who turn up for the family events at Easter, Halloween and Christmas time. There are a lot of families with children in the 0-2 year range… So there are a lot of kids and a lot of parents participating in the egg hunt. This means that any one child (and parent) has a sea of other children and their parents to try to fight through to get any eggs. If you aren’t at the front of the group, by the time you get to a place that had eggs it has been picked clean.

• Parents get competitive and selfish. Parents not only do not limit the number of eggs they will allow their children to collect, but many even encourage their children to get more eggs than they should. (Last year, when I went into the fray with P1, we even had a parent urging their child to snatch an egg that P1 was reaching for right out from under her nose. I had to tell the child, “No. She was trying to pick that egg up. Let her get it please.”) Our rule is that P1 may get no more than 4 eggs (this year Dubya had trouble even helping her get that many, it was so bad). The reasons we do this are that she will get to go to other egg hunts (just this year there are four… one at Dubya’s work, one at Sam’s Club, one at home, one at church), we want to try to limit how much candy she has, and we want to teach her consideration for the other children and make sure everyone gets some of the eggs.As I stood waiting for Dubya and P1 (who were still struggling to get even a second egg), two children and their parents walked over next to me. One child’s bucket was filled to the brim with colorful plastic eggs (at least a dozen, likely more). The other child’s mother was bragging to the mother of the first “He got TEN eggs!” The child was barely old enough to walk and certainly was unlikely to have gotten ten eggs without a lot of encouragement (I remember when P1 was that age she would get one or two eggs and then was more interested in opening them than getting more). If there were 100 children participating in the egg hunt, at 10 eggs each the company would have to provide 1,000 candy filled eggs JUST for the 0-2 age group. They also do 3-5 and 6-10 age groups.P1 finished the hunt with four eggs, two or three of which she got because a volunteer running the egg hunt dropped them near her after most of the other kids were gone. At least the people running the event try to remedy the issue by giving eggs to the children who get bullied and ignored by greedy parents.

The women in front of us were talking about their kids experiences with the 0-2 egg hunt. They were talking about how many people there were and how few eggs their children were able to get. I thought about jumping in with the point about limiting the number of eggs we allowed our daughter to get and how much better it would be if the company tried to encourage parents to stick to a set number but wasn’t sure if I should.

I finally jumped in and the four of us had a lovely conversation (and no one even mentioned  Scooby!). I found out that all three of the other women were stay-at-home moms as well and that they all wanted more adult interaction. I must have been feeling especially brave because I suggested that we all get together for some play dates (or as I think of them, mom dates). We all exchanged phone numbers and hopefully will be getting together sometime soon.

Looks like stepping outside my comfort zone might have paid off. One thing is for sure… Even if none of these ladies actually follows through with any plans to get together, I’ve promised myself to put myself out there more in the hopes that I can have some mommy friends. After all… If I offend someone by trying to join the conversation I’ll likely never see them again anyway

BUT

If I join in and we hit it off, I just might.