Odd Man Out

I had a good run being the mysterious and elusive neighbor for 3 years. All it takes is one persistent person to coax a recluse like myself out of my cocoon. Last year we got a new neighbor, B, who has a girl Jordy's age and they are even in the same class at school. How perfect is that? Apparently not perfect enough, because I never made anything happen to get them together. Because ya see, that would take effort. So, B kept telling me about this group and kept inviting me.

I gave myself a little pep talk about this being an essential part of life that brings about a sense of community...yadda, yadda. First off, this is a coffee group and I have to explain that I don't drink coffee or tea which usually goes unnoticed except in situations like this. Then the standard questions:

Do you work? Nope, I stay home. All the other ladies work part time. Which is usually met with something like "wow, how is that? I couldn't do that."

What brought you here? I used this as an opportunity to remove all doubt about the question I'm sure was on every one's mind when I said no to coffee. Usually "the question" is answered when I say that my husband graduated from BYU.

How many kids do you have? 4. The response I got made me laugh out loud. All the ladies there have 2 kids. Some of the ladies are older than me and some were younger but their kids were little. 1st grade was the oldest kid any of them had. There were hands going up in the air, gasps, holy cows, that's amazing, I can hardly handle 2, what are their ages, how old are you! It was also funny to see what label I had in the neighborhood. I was known as "oh, you're the one with the belly bars on the house." "Oh, you're the one with all the fun toys." The nicest one I got was the "oh, you're the cool Mom." This was from the time it snowed and I hooked the sled to the back of the 4 wheeler and pulled the kids through the neighborhood.

I just went to my second one this week and there was someone there that wasn't there the last time and sure enough we went through the same questions with the same responses. Hilarious. It has been really fun to be able to put Mom's with the kids I see at school when I volunteer in the classroom. I had no idea that so many of Jordy's friends lived so close. I really need to make more of an effort to be social. I have 11 super nice ladies that live within a couple of blocks of me. I may be the odd man out on a few things (which always makes me sing in my head "one of these moms is doing her own thing.........now it's time to play our song" or something like that. The song was used a lot in one of my favorite kids shows way back in the day) but, in general we have most things in common.