Sunday, August 1, 2010

Feeling like parenting failure

My son is 4. I love him dearly. Most things go fine around here but one area that I feel like I really suck at is finding him friends his age.

In our area it seems as though all 4 year olds are in preschool, which is something that we can't afford right now as we have to pay a sitter to come in 2 days a week to watch *both* the kids so I can do school work. Also things around here are *expensive*. I went looking around. There is one thats $35 a day but it is also 18 3-5 year olds in a basement with no windows...uh, no, not gonna happen. Then there is one that is 9 hours a week (3 days of 3 hours a day) for $265 a month. So those are pretty much it without trying to get into a program with the local Y which would be way less than ideal as one location has no parking so I would be trudging downtown with both kids in January. Ugh. Or the other location which is about 40 mins from my house and only runs 3 hours at a time so there wouldn't be any point in coming home with Ivy once we were done dropping off Aaron...and what on earth would I do with just Ivy in that town for 3 hours?? There is a serious lack of indoor stuff here in the winter.

I have tried meeting other parents at the park but there are problems with this. One is that Aaron doesn't hang out and PLAY with people at the park...he is busy running etc. The second problem is that I am busy running left for Ivy and right for Aaron and can't manage to try to strike up a conversation with a parent even if I managed to find the guts to *Talk* to someone I didn't know out of the blue.

We have tried local story times etc but there are either very few attendees or the ones that come all have younger kids. Same story with our local meetup.

I would try to post something on craigslist but 1. you never know who you are gonna find that way and 2. I wouldn't even know what to post it under.

I am just out of ways to figure out how to get some age appropriate friends for Aaron and it makes me sad. I grew up with few friends and still have very few friends, I can think of a whole two that I am close with and see regularly, if my son wants more than that and wants to be social, I want to help facilitate that....but I am running out of ideas!!