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Before I had my son, my husband and I had a pretty active social life. We had friends over to watch anime once or twice a week, and he had his gaming group that came over. (RPG's, not miniatures).

After the baby was born, our friends stopped wanting to come over because we always had to stop what we were doing to cater to the needs of our child.

We both work, so it is hard for us to schedule anything during the week, and it is hard to get a babysitter during the weekends.

how do we get back into the swing of hobbies and having friends over with a 2 and a half year old? Has anyone else been through this?

Yes. Ive got a 5y/o son and an almost 2 y/o daughter. My son was always pretty awesome as far as letting me playing my hobbies. My daughter on the other hand is literally the devil incarnate. Sometimes theres just nothing you can do about it. I think something that works for me, is from time to time, get one of your parents or a sibling to watch your child. Its good for everyone really. You guys need time for your needs every once in awhile too.

Besides, soonish, your child should be getting to the age where you can rent him/her a movie and plunk um down infront of the tv for a little while. Im not saying the tv should be a baby sitter, but it will distract your kid from wanting to get into your games and such all the time

The other part is that our friends pretty much abandoned us, and we need outlets to make new friends.

Ahhhh. Yea some of your friends will leave you in the dust the minute a baby enters the picture. I guess the best thing to do would be to make some adds on craigslist or at local gaming stores and such looking for parents that have the same interests. It can suck sometimes having children for those reasons. Its just something that you either fix, or suck up for a few years until you can reasonably get out again.
I know its not a fun answer but unless you can teach your child how to be a dungeon master, thats about it for now
And if you do, Id love to play with you guys that would be a first for sure

thanks. we do have him painting dollar store army men when we paint our minis, so he feels included.

Yep you just have to get friends with kids. Any frind who would abandon you wern't geed friends anywho. My wife got hooked on farmville so I have to do most of the child raising. I've found the little einsine videos are random enough to keep you attention while I paint. You'll learn to do lots of things with a baby in your lap. Meet married friends and have little cook outs and movie parties. Go to the park. Hope this helps

It is frustrating sometimes, especially when friends abandon you for having a machine that turns money into poo. My folks live 450 miles away, so we don't have that to fall back on, whilst the wife's are pretty unreliable, at least on the baby sitting front. We settled on having a night off a week each - I game Tuesdays, she sees her sister/pals Thursdays. But it's very hard to socialise together. My 2 1/2 year old likes to sit on my lap and "help make my model", which keeps him pretty cheery.

As for the new friends thing, that's really tough. A lot of the wife's friends, and a couple of mine, really cut ties with us after she got pregnant. However, I find that through my local gaming group there's a lot of other dads in the same position, which has meant more time with other likeminded folk. So, all of the better.

What I would say is that now that Dan (#1 son) is an interactive person, friends seem more keen to come hang out again. However, #2 is due in 3 weeks, so gork knows what'll happen then. Hey ho...

I find that through my local gaming group there's a lot of other dads in the same position, which has meant more time with other likeminded folk. So, all of the better.

This

However, #2 is due in 3 weeks, so gork knows what'll happen then. Hey ho...

Grats

sexiest_hero wrote:

Grats

Cheers bro. Though I'd just about got used to getting sleep again...

Hmmmm sleep, can someone remind me what its like?

Sorry to hear that your friends abandoned you, sounds rather douchey of them.

A gaming group sounds like a good idea. I'm certainly thinking of doing the same thing, but I don't get much time to do hobby stuff as it is without getting out of the house one night week.

I figure that once you/your husband are out there you will soon make some friend with similar interests. Good luck

Speaking as one, Uncles are your best friends.

The Uncle gets all the satisfaction of being involved with the child at all the good times, but never has to do any real work other then babysit every so often.

Get an Uncle or Aunt to watch over the little one.

Sorry to be dim but why do people abandon friends when a babby pops up on the scene?

@Golden eyed: absolutely. Wife has 2 bros, and we've taken advantage of younger bro on occasion, though he doesn't drive, which is awkward, whilst the othe works abroad. Nice if you can get it though! And, as an uncle, taking my 12 and 9 yr old nephews to Conflict was great fun (ah, corrupting youth!)

@Chibi: Damned if I know. Lack of frame of reference maybe, or fear of child as impromptu operational bio-titan. Mind you, I'm very lucky, as my geek (read:male) friends stuck about.

@lorana: A little bit of hope, maybe: one of the my friends that totally disappeared (my closest female friend, actually) has now come back into our friend-life now that she too has bred. Small comfort, I know, but these things do tend to come round eventually, or so it seems.

graven

Chibi Bodge-Battle wrote:Sorry to be dim but why do people abandon friends when a babby pops up on the scene?

All sorts of reasons.

1) Some people dislike babies.
2) Some people feel that the baby gets too much attention, meaning that their friend therefore does not pay as much attention to them.
3) Some people with children get a bit crazy. Most people without children do not want to hear about another persons child every moment they are with the parent.
4) Sometimes it is hard for people with children to get out and be social - so people just drift apart.
5) Some people are just rubbish, so will ditch people as soon as anything changes.

Not that I am trying to say they are good reasons, but it takes all sorts to make a world.

loranafaeriequeen wrote:The other part is that our friends pretty much abandoned us, and we need outlets to make new friends.

You'll find a whole new slew of friends once the kids start pre-school and then regular school.

loranafaeriequeen wrote:Before I had my son, my husband and I had a pretty active social life. We had friends over to watch anime once or twice a week, and he had his gaming group that came over. (RPG's, not miniatures).

After the baby was born, our friends stopped wanting to come over because we always had to stop what we were doing to cater to the needs of our child.

We both work, so it is hard for us to schedule anything during the week, and it is hard to get a babysitter during the weekends.

how do we get back into the swing of hobbies and having friends over with a 2 and a half year old? Has anyone else been through this?

Get friends who are couples and have children.

They understand the difficulties. The children play with each other which gets them off your hands for a while.

If you have some 'broody' couple friends they may be more amenable to getting together with your children.

We have married friends with children.
(We're also married - but childless and cannot have them).

We still visit our 'breeder' friends (when we can) considering that they live in different cities/towns suburbs and all over 180 kms away (although one did come from the same town as my wife). OK, it takes a lot more to organise it and arrange everything, but it does happen.

Your friends who abandoned you are the selfish ones. You will meet new people and make new friends (and probably new gaming buddies) when the kids get older.

Frazzled wrote:You'll find a whole new slew of friends once the kids start pre-school and then regular school.

Pretty much that. Look for new friends in places where you take your kid. You'll find other people with kids who will have some comprehension of what parenthood is like and make allowances for fellow parents.

Options, wait until your kids are asleep. My kids are in bed by 8 so if we're doing anything with friends we usually don't have them over until then so the midgets are asleep and out of our hair. Alternately, babysitter. It's important for parents to get out of the house and away from the munchkins any way. Hire one for date night or game night.

Wow, this is such a down to earth topic. I still really can't imagine what it would be like to have kids of your own...

I do have one friend who has a little guy, and it's actually made going there even more fun, because theres always something the kid breaks and we can laugh our arses off.

Soladrin wrote:Wow, this is such a down to earth topic. I still really can't imagine what it would be like to have kids of your own...

I do have one friend who has a little guy, and it's actually made going there even more fun, because theres always something the kid breaks and we can laugh our arses off.

Ahh destruction... the joy of youth!

We've started Warhammer as a way to kind of get back into our hobbies and have something that's not tv or internet related to do together and hopefully with others. I've never been into gaming itself, but I really like the minis, and I think I can get into the game once I learn it.

The day before mother's day when I get my free time that I've requested for mother's day, I plan to go to a local hobby shop and paint elves for a good portion of the day.

Part of my other problem is that I'm too geeky to be girly and too girly to be geeky, so I don't fit in a lot of places. My husband's friends are mostly single men, and my friends are mostly single women. the ones who are left.

Many of the people that I know with children are pretty boring. Especially my cousins, who want to bake cookies with their daughters while wearing matching aprons. Ugh! It's like I'm supposed to turn into some child-devoted mindless zombie who's all domestic.

Don't worry, once they hit elementary you'll barely have a life. Once they hit Jr. High you are purely full time taxi.

Oh god your cousins are THOSE types lol. Seriously, goto the local store, youll find parents that play there, and youll already have a couple common grounds things to start off on. Being a geeky chick anyways would be a little hard Id imagine, I havnt met to many of your type. Luckily my wife has grown nerdy simply by being around me to much.
Good luck on your friend search, it does suck loosing friends because of children

@OP: Let me begin with the disclaimer that I like children and look forward to having kids in a few years. But I also think that your claim that your friends abandoned you is pretty presumptuous and unfair. After all, couldn't it be that you abandoned them? You and your husband, rather than your friends, are the ones who decided to radically change your lifestyle and priorities by having children.

And, to be fair, being around a couple with kids can get pretty tiresome as the children are the de facto center of your attention rather than the anime, RPG, wargames, or whatever thing it was that you and your friends had in common before. Frankly, I am just not as interested in your kids as you are. Visiting you only to have to play with your kids for hours is not totally appealing to me. It's not that I hate your kids or kids in general, it's just that as a working adult I too have a limited amount of free time (don't get me started on new parents annoyingly whining that people without kids "don't understand" responsibility or sacrifice--major turn off from hanging out with them, btw) and I'd rather spend that time on my interests or an interest we have in common rather than helping your take care of your children.

In some situations, friends are close enough to survive being left behind by new parents. But I would imagine that those cases involve the new parents making an effort to keep up those friendships by hanging out with their friends when grandparents or other caretakers have the kids and by not going on and on about them in their absence. Life after parenthood isn't about everyone else conforming to your new situation. It's about you dealing with your new situation.

I'm a parent (non-resident now, mind...), but I find other people's kids to be a total irritation. I just do, I can't help it.
As Manchu said, if you expect other people to find your kids as fascinating as you do, prepare for disappointment.
Kids are noisy, messy, snotty in the nose department, grubby of hand (which is fun, because they love to touch pretty much everything that doesn't belong to them...), they like to run around shouting basically. If you knew an adult like that, you wouldn't wanna hang out with them.

You don't mind when they're your own. But someone else's?

No thanks.

Well said, Manchu.

Guess the care and understanding of another persons' predicament getting squished into pulp was to be expected.

The OP is not whether or not you like kids. It is not whether or not you would dump friends with kids.

The OP asked for advise having seen friends desert them.
"It's your fault for having kids cos I don't wanna hang with brats" doesn't help.
"Make more of an effort yourself" is not much more useful as the question was, "What do we do to help ourselves?"

apart from which,

Kids are noisy, messy, snotty in the nose department, grubby of hand (which is fun, because they love to touch pretty much everything that doesn't belong to them...), they like to run around shouting basically. If you knew an adult like that, you wouldn't wanna hang out with them.

sounds like a lot of what goes on with "adults" hanging out together after closing time.

I love other people's children because they remind me of my own daughter.

The other parent couples my wife and I associate with are the same.

Our children often play together, have sleep-overs and all that kind of thing. The families of different ages mix nicely -- for example my daughter is now 10 and she is very happy to play with a four year old as am I. (Marble race building is great!)

It all depends on personalities.

Don't judge anyone, just find friends like you.

Sorry to go OT but, YAY! marble races!
(we built them in our desks with books and rules at school )

loranafaeriequeen wrote:After the baby was born, our friends stopped wanting to come over because we always had to stop what we were doing to cater to the needs of our child.

how do we get back into the swing of hobbies and having friends over with a 2 and a half year old?

Has anyone else been through this?

If you're constantly stopping things at random times to deal with the kid, of course, it's going to be a pain for the rest of the group - their time is literally being governed by an infant!

You'll need to find friends with toddlers of similar age themselves. You can do play dates and such to help spread the work along - 2 parents can watch 4 kids, making time for other stuff to go on.

Loads of others - it takes time.

loranafaeriequeen wrote:The other part is that our friends pretty much abandoned us, and we need outlets to make new friends.

Does your kid go to preschool / mommy & me? Failing that, you can post in the local game store looking for other parent gamers.

Or, you can take away your friends birth control, and then they'll join you sooner rather than later.
___

sexiest_hero wrote: I find that through my local gaming group there's a lot of other dads in the same position, which has meant more time with other likeminded folk.

Exactly so. Lots of good people out there, if only one would look harder.