Hellobee Boards

How old is your oldest child? I have found a great new group of like minded friends in joining the PTO at my son's school.

I would say that I have two really good friends. We don't get together super regularly, but try to get together every few months, or do bigger events together. But I've been friends with them since college. For one of them, it did kind of fade a little when I had my first, but then she had her first around the same time I had my second, so now we'll get together for play dates.

One of my friends lives really close - so we'll get together with our kids for breakfast on the weekend. Or after bedtime, we'll go out for a drink or just hang out at the other's house. And we always get together for our kids' birthdays.

And then my other friend, we have a standing summer weekend together to bring our kids to an amusement park. And we're going on a Disney Cruise together next year. And then we'll get together every couple months for a play date with our kids.

It's hard when you both have families, but you just try to find a time and make it a priority. But that's certainly easier with already existing friends, at least in my experience.

@Modern Daisy: how often do you want to meet up with friends - monthly, quarterly, etc? I have been feeling like I am losing friends now too that we are not all in the same stage and are kids are not the same age or we live across town.
I am part of a monthly GNO group but I don't feel connected with them like I used to be - part of it is the group has grown so much and another part is it is hard for me to leave my house after I come home from work.
I would rather connect with 1-2 friends than a larger group so I am trying to schedule quarterly get togethers with some old friends from working out and monthly get togethers with coworkers/former coworkers. And then there are a handful of people I just text and see or talk to once a year either because they are out of state or it just seems impossible to get together.
I was hoping to make friends through my son at daycare but that has not happened yet. I see it happening for other families not necessarily at the daycare I am at though.
If we move, we would like to move to a neighborhood with more families to possibly connect with - I think if the neighborhood has amenities or a park that helps.

@Modern Daisy: sorry you feel this way, are you religious at all? Some of my lasting friendships have been made at church or church related events. I will say though that as I have gotten older I am more a person that rather do things with just my immediate family, over time I dont look forward to regularly hanging out with friends because work keeps me so busy I rather focus my free time on my family.

@Modern Daisy: fingers crossed you make some great connections at the class at church!

So what type of community do you live in? Small town? Big city? Rural? Urban? What are the centers of get togethers? Playgrounds? Church? School? Clubs? Gym? Running? Community groups? Mom clgroup? Mops?
Knowing that might help answer your questions

So for my personal situation, I live in a very urban area outside nyc. My friends had mostly been (unmarried, childless) work friends
of convienence in Manhattan and then we
moved here (across the Hudson River). I knew no one. Zero. Zilch
I had a kid
Reconnected with an acquaintance from college and sloowwwwly built a solid friendship. Took a year. She’s now my best friend here. I was introduced to another mom. Sloooowwwwly built a friendship (another year). I’ve met some
Moms at parks and at classes and always try to exchange numbers and throw out meeting for a play date or a walk. It’s incredibly hard. It’s like dating. Harder, maybe, because you need the kids to get along as well as the adults.
But I will say, even though you probably think all
of the other moms have close circles and have it all together and are “set” for friends, that’s probably not true. No one wants to admit they want or need friends. But there are
So many others in your situation; just look at this thread! It’s hard to make the initial effort and sometimes it won’t turn into a friendship bi tits worth the risk!

I found it a lot easier to have friendships when I had FT work and work friends. It's hard with three of them because it's harder to find families with kids the same age. And truthfully, I think in the back of my mind, being really honest, I don't really want "mom friends" and play dates, because I spend so much time doing mom stuff. It's not like I'm against having mom friends, but what I really miss are having friends that have nothing to do with motherhood and where we barely touch on that as a topic of conversation.

I haven't read the responses but I will say that the best thing for me has been to join a volunteer group and take up a craft. Right now I do Junior League and I also do ceramics. In both of those things I have made a lot of adult friends some of them are parents, some are not, some of them have grown children some have children slightly older than me. this helps me to avoid the dreaded trap of meeting only friends who have kids my same age and then we are all busy at the same times. there was a New York article that came out about a year ago that said that the most important thing for making adult friends is proximity. it is hard to take the time to meet with a group of friends or even meet one-on-one but if we all have to be at a meeting or at the studio at the same time every week we are likely to run into each other there. plus I get my Social needs met without having to put someone on the spot and force them to make plans. sometimes we will go get coffee or a drink or lunch after a meeting because everyone just happens to be free but if you had tried to get that group together on a random evening it would have been much harder to arrange. my children do extracurriculars and I do run into the people I know there but we are usually on the same schedules and are similarly limited. I am working on having really realistic expectations about friendship. Over the summer I was starting to feel a little bit isolated and frustrated and felt like I had to do all the heavy lifting in my relationships. after the school year got started back I got super busy and that helped me to understand that everyone is really busy. So if I catch up with a good friend at a meeting or happened to run into them at a soccer game and that's as much as we can accomplish I am satisfied with that. the old adage of it is a marathon not a Sprint I think certainly applies with friendship. the older our kids get the easier it will be too deep in those relationships so right now I think just keeping them active is key. sometimes I will just go through my last 3 months of text messages and send everybody a quick hello how are you text. I'm speaking of out-of-town friends and college friends and cousins and stuff. for some reason I'm doing it all at one time makes it seem less difficult. usually only two or three people will text me back with any substance but that is enough for me to get in touch with everyone at least once every couple of months. EDIT: sorry for the grammar errors I did voice to text to transcribe this response.

I've been lurking this thread and meant to make a comment but haven't had time to do that - late to the party but me too.

My dilemma:
- In this stage of life, finding a friend is harder than finding a husband. I want to be friends with someone who has kids around the same age as my DS and ideally we have similar # of kids, and our kids get along with each other and can play with each other. AND I can get along with this mom and vice versa, our age, our parenting methodology, and even our general approach to life needs to be somewhat similar. AND we need to live in 10 minute radius from each other. If you like to be friends with a certain mom and her kid(s), she may not have time for you because she has her own life and social circles. There seems to be a lot of that after we started school but sadly I haven't been able to make any friends because of the next point...

- I am very shy and awkward with a group of people I don't know / I don't know very well.

- I generally have no time to devote to anything other than DS, work, DH (note that DH is the last on the list ) I don't even have time for myself. So even if I wanted to do a yoga class, or do more school volunteering...etc. I didn't want to take up the responsibility.

So it is sad... while there seems to be a ton of moms everywhere, it is hard to meet them and be friends. I have a lot of acquaintances, but 0 close friends.

@Modern Daisy: Sorry for the late reply! Last year was my son's 5th birthday party so we rented the city pool and invited a bunch of people and paid to have two lifeguards. I will admit the party was at 6 which was the requirement of the pool (they are open to the public in the afternoon), but still the turnout was dismal. I think we probably had fewer than 20 people (that includes extended family and parents of the kids invited) when we had initially estimated 40 and some of them didn't even swim, so I had paid a lifeguard for 2 hours for no reason because I only needed two lifeguards if we had more than 30. I had all this food too, but a lot of people didn't stay to eat. I think that is what forced me to consider putting my attention into the volunteering and other hobby stuff that I had and just letting that be my social outlet. This year we did a family outing for my oldest when he turned 6. I was just too burned from that experience to do another big party! So I can identify with feeling disappointed in party turn out for sure. I think I ended up giving about the equivalent of a full sheet cake to the lifeguards to take home with them! It is so hard to maintain those close friends who live outside of your everyday geographic zone. we were supposed to get together today with some very good friends from college who have boys that are the same age as us but they had to cancel last minute. A year ago I think that would have stung a lot more but I have become a lot more jaded in the past year so I wasn't totally surprised. However I did offer to watch some local kids while their parents went to a destination wedding. We don't have quite as much in common with the local parents but the kids all love each other and I was glad to help. I really think that the volunteering and crafts thing so much with feeling awkward or even dealing with feelings of rejection. there have been times in the past year where I have felt awkward like I stuck my foot in my mouth at a meeting or whatever but then I remind myself that we are all there to achieve a common goal. At first I focused on making friends, but I have found that the more I focus on the projects we have going on rather than trying to make friends, the more quality people I end up meeting. I did publicity for one volunteer organization and I met a ton of people that way because I had to call the newspapers, etc.