New Friends

The past few days I have been thinking a lot about my kids' 'socialization'. Like every other homeschooler, I hate that word. It just sounds so ignorant to me. I went to Mom's Night Out for the Neighborhood on Wednesday and the topic of homeschooling came up. The moms who were most interested had very young children (2 and under) so they were still open to the idea. Of course, their biggest fear was that homeschooling made for unsocialized kids. I patiently defended my children's social abilities and went home second guessing the number of friends my children have.

Thursday, we went to homeschool day at a local indoor water resort. All of my fears vanished when I saw all the kids that we knew. By the end of the afternoon, I was actually pretty tired of hearing kids ask me, "Where's ... (insert either of my children's names here)?" I think the best part of the whole day was that we all made some new friends. Of course, my kids met new kids, but I had a complete stranger come up and introduce herself to me. She had seen me at OHVA outings. She introduced me to her neighbor who was an unschooler. I thoroughly felt like I was in the middle of a LoA moment. We hit it off very well. She was disappointed that we did not live closer. I personally was thrilled by the reassurance that there are tons of homeschoolers/unschoolers out there that we still haven't met. It just seemed like our possible pool (pardon the pun) of friends suddenly got much bigger :-)