In the days when your baby is younger, maybe 3-6 months, there are a lot of moms who are available and open to a play date.  Maybe they have not been out of the house much, and maybe they are eager to see other parents or other babies and just not feel so alone.  These are also the times when coffee meet-ups are easy (no crawling babies!), and you can bring the baby anywhere with relative ease.

Fast-forward to 8-10 months, and you have a completely different situation.  People have more established relationships and friendships, and are maybe finding a good rhythm in their life as they even start to re-claim a little more of themselves back from the “all-in” required as a new mother.

This is where it gets tricky.  Those mothers are now back at work, and have rigid schedules that usually involve a lot less social time for the little one compared to before.  Just when the babies are learning to move and actually be social, they are confined to their homes – it’s no longer easier for their mother to bring them anywhere, and so they don’t venture out much – and if they do, it’s short-lived.

This is the scenario that me and a few of my mom friends have.  We want to keep the “play group party” going – keep those social activities that are so important to the little ones (and for us), but we are becoming rarer and rarer as the days go by.  And those we do meet have babies younger and younger than us – eventually the gap will be too large.

So what do we do?  Now it becomes time to create smaller and more intensive things for the little guys.  Trips that involve some play time, trips that are interesting for the babies, play dates at our homes, and relying more on ourselves to create our own environment for socialization than finding things that are existing already.  

I guess this is what happens for every parent as their children get older – you just have to be creative and come up with your own things, and make friends with those who are like minded. Thank goodness we have made some good friends here who are also as eager to be social, and who don’t want to sit at home in isolation all the time!