Adventures in Homeschooling Socialization, I guess?

Yesterday (Wednesday, January 26; it's taken me a while to finish this) was beautiful but chilly. First sunny day in a while, but in the low 40s. So the meet-up we usually have at parks on Wednesdays met at a coffee shop. The organizer is a super planner, and did call them and ask if it would be okay. Everyone brought board games. I was on the fence about going, but Mal wanted to take Sum Swamp (a birthday present from Uncle Khrys and Aunt Mei Li a couple of years ago; he still loves it!). I tried to prepare him with the idea that if everyone brought a game, we probably wouldn't have time to play them all,

First, after we'd been there a bit, one of my friends came up and said, "I wanted to come talk to you for a minute before you take off without saying anything." This is what I do. A lot of times, Mal is having fun, and then he's ready to go. So we go. When I got home, I messaged her, "Irish Goodbyes; they're my jam." She texted back, "100%."

I guess I don't understand the point of making sure people know you're leaving. I mean, if I knew we were needing to plan something or someone had told me to check in with them before I left, okay. But there are often 20+ moms and dads at these events. And if I don't tell EVERYONE good-bye, then how do I pick who to tell? If two people are in a conversation, I really don't want to get it off-track by insinuating myself into it just to say, "Miss me, folks!"

Anyway, yesterday, we were there for about an hour. Mal played one game with a friend of his (not the game he'd brought; I was proud of him). Then the other kid wanted to play a different game with a different kid. Mal REALLY wanted to play his game, and his two best friends were in the middle of another game altogether.

There is a sweet maybe 4-year-old boy who is super sweet and friendly. He loves our dog. I think he just doesn't have a lot of language skills yet. He understands things, and responds. He's just a cute little guy who loves playing with everyone, but doesn't talk much. I asked him if he wanted to play Sum Swamp, and he did. Mal got to play, and I helped this kiddo a bit, then his mom realized we were playing and jumped in. Later, she thanked me for showing him the game... and I thanked her for letting him play the whole thing, because Mal was so keyed up to play it. Actually, the boy won. And Mal was a GREAT sport about it! I was pretty proud.

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By the way, yes, it was in the high 40s and yes, my son was wearing shorts and a t-shirt.

Also, since this was indoors and Omicron isn't quite peaked here, AND all of the employees had on masks, we wore ours. I told Mal before the other kids got there, "It's possible that we're the only ones who are wearing masks. That's okay." And we were. It wasn't any big deal.

Later...

Hey, guess what? One of the kids there got sick and tested positive for Covid 2 days later. Fortunately, she's fine; had all of her shots and had a mild case. 

Yesterday (Sunday, January 30), Mal wanted to go to a park we've never been to before (he does this pretty often; it's tricky finding new ones!), so we did. He ended up finding a playmate and hanging out for two hours! I walked the dog around, did some training, was a little bored, honestly. It was a gorgeous day, though.

Okay, well, I was going to write more about planning our upcoming vacation, but Mal is having an existential crisis because he just realized that the house we're going to build isn't going to look like the modern farmhouse $1.4M house we looked at yesterday. So I have to go take care of that.