Life and Kids

My beautiful daughter Everly was born this month. She is perfectly healthy and we are adjusting to another member in our family. On top of that, we are trying to potty train Harlo.

I've been thinking a lot recently in the process I've gone through since having our first daughter. Before we entered parenthood, it seemed that both of us never really had many close friends. There always seemed to be a few people that we liked to spend a lot of time with, but it never seemed to be at a satisfactory spot for us. Throughout my whole life I've never had a lot of friends.

When we had Harlo, we didn't have any close friends with kids...other than some family. This made it very difficult for us, because you know that if you have kids, having people over who don't have kids either doesn't last very long or is very sporadic in the schedule. Unlike when you don't have kids, you can't just set everything aside and play boardgames or video games. You have to work around the schedule of the kids. And often times, this does not go as planned.

One thing we've been actively pursuing over the last year is building more relationships with people around our age who also have young kids. What we found is that there are a lot of young families at Narrate who also feel this gap in their relationships. Don't get me wrong, I like my friends who don't have kids...but for me, it seems easier and less awkward to have people over with kids. Since everyone expects and knows that things could get crazy. This also makes us be very direct and intentional about pursuing people we don't know but who are in a similar spot as us (which was never natural for us). This is difficult to do at Narrate, since building relationships/community is not a priority (their perspective is that this should be done while serving next to each other...but is hard to do with a family that has young kids).

Are we satisfied with where we are at right now (relationships concerned)? Not yet, but we are actively building relationships with other families who are at a similar spot. And we are loving it!