The 411: Playdate ready or not
We are hosting a playdate here at the house today. I have tidied up the house, let the roomba do its thing, and gave a reluctant Fuller a bath.
Let me ask you something. How do you define a “playdate?”
A while ago, when I was still working and Damon was the stay at home parent, I suggested that he ask if a certain little boy could come over and play with Fuller. This little boy was about two months older than Fuller. I my mind, the playdate would be a parent dropping off their child in our care for a few hours. The kids would play with Damon’s supervision.
But when we actually did the asking, the answer came back with a “how’s that work?” The parents of the little boy were thinking that both the child and the parent would stay, and since it was a SAHD and a SAHM that seemed kind of improper. And I guess at that age (around 19 months) it seemed odd to drop a child off at someone else’s house to play. Maybe. I’m just guessing here.
Now that our roles have reversed, with me being the stay at home parent, playdates with both parent and child visiting are becoming part of our daily lives. But here’s the thing: I wonder when the playdate will shift to just having the child over to play. Not that I have a problem with any of the parents of the playmates for Fuller, but sometimes I wish that I could just have another kid over to play with my kid, while I did some things around the house. But the norm in our social circles doesn’t seem to allow for that right now.
Am I being out of line here? Should I be just grateful that Fuller gets any social interaction at all? Or do I need to change our invitation style to say, “Do you want to leave Little Jimmy at our house for a few hours so that you can run some errands?”
I’m excited about today’s playdate because it is a mom and daughter who we have played with before. I am enjoying getting to know both the mom and the daughter, so it is a kind of treat for me too. We get to swap stories from the parenting trenches and glean from each other’s experience. But in the future, am I going to have to be BFF with all my kid’s future playmates parents? Because really, they may not like me.
playdate, playmates, parent and child relationships, parent to parent relationships
