By the time your children have figured out how to do #2 on or around the toilet, there's an amazing chance you've already lost every real world friend you've ever had. Not because you're terrible or your kids are terrible or you insist on talking about your child's doodies, but because the energy and time it takes to maintain real world friendships are long gone. For some of us, this was true without even adding kids to the equation, which was weird because of the constant doody talk.
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"Say 'Doodies!'"
Early along, my husband and I figured something out -- these baby humans will be older one day, and maybe they'll even be fun to hang out with. Why not train them to like the things we like so they'll do them with us now that we don't have any friends? It's like the Bible says, "Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it." Yes, the writer of this verse (God?) probably meant "Teach your kids to love God (me?) and they will always love God (me?)" but there's no reason you can't apply the same principle to making your kids take up your stupid hobbies with you.
For our family, that means my daughters watch musicals and do Pinterest crafts with me and my son plays music with his dad. Or the girls play Minecraft with dad and I sulk, because what's so great about digitized LEGOs? If I wanted to spend the rest of my life marveling at pretend worlds THAT LOOK TERRIBLE, I would have stuck with the Star Wars movies. The point is that raising a family takes forever, and you're going to need some shared interests to pass the time if you don't want to go bananas. Hey, if your thing is playing Barbies and Hot Wheels and intentionally losing Candyland after an hour of gameplay, then young children are probably a blast for you. If not, don't feel bad about your parenting skills. It's them, not you. And know your kids are going to be way more fun in a few years.
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