Playgroups...

Today I took the girls to our first playdate with a local moms group I found. The meeting location was only around the corner at a local farm. The lady that owns it puts on a story time/craft time every tuesday morning at 9:30 AM (I, of course, thought it was 9 AM so we had to wait 15 min. for anyone to even show up). Best part was it was free. Since Arianna loves nothing more than to read books these types of events are great for her.

They read a book about dinosaurs who eat alot and then read a book (and for the life of me I can't remember the name, its a well known book) about an old woman who ate lots of food at Thanksgiving and then we made a paper bag puppet of the old woman and they gave us little cut outs of the all the food in the book for the puppet to 'eat'. Arianna LOVED this craft - she kept going back to get more food pieces instead of taking them out of her bag!

I was disappointed in the playgroup though. After the story time/craft time was over we all stuck around and as it turns out there wasn't another child there over 1 year old so I ended up spending all my time with Arianna, to Daria's dismay (poor kid, I really feel she gets the shaft 90% of the time). The organizer of the group assured me there really are more kids her age and I hope we meet them soon. I really felt out of place - one kid too old and one kid too young. The worst was when one mom asked me about my experience with Arianna introducing food. I hate going into too much detail about her with people I don't know...

Do I tell her we didn't introduce solid foods until 10 months because her reflux was so bad? Do I tell her we didn't use formula and I pumped for 13 months (some moms are sensitive to that for some reason)? Do I tell her about her prematurity and her failure to thrive? Do I tell her she's 32 months when she hardly looks old enough to be 2?

This is hard for me. I love my daughter and I don't want to say anything that will change people's opinion of her before they even know her.

Arianna did really well the entire time - only throwing one small fit before story time began and I was able to get her to calm down before her 'drama queen pose'. I was really proud of her... but disappointed that there were no kids for her to play with.

Daria also did fabulously - didn't cry once and even sat on my lap being very cute for a while. She was extra good when I took Arianna to the bathroom - everyone said she didn't cry at all. Very nice to hear!

I really hope that the next playdate has some more kids her age to interact with.