Quote:
Originally Posted by Zeej
Appreciate the words of wisdom. Also, what a fantastic idea for a thread. I'm the first in my friend group to have a kid so I'm finding it to be somewhat isolating and this is actually quite helpful.
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An interesting comment that I've often read, but it wasn't our experience at all.
When our kids were youngest it was most definitely extremely demanding, but our social life literally exploded.
(In fact, part of what made that period demanding was precisely keeping up with the demands of our new social life as a family - I mean it was a choice we made and was fun, but still a lot of work.)
I often say that we made more friends in our neighbourhood in the six months after our eldest was born, than in the previous six years that we lived in the exact same place.
Two decades later we still have a nucleus of close friends that we made back then when our kids were all babies.
Prior to becoming parents, as a couple in our early 30s our social circle based on a local bar and hip bistro was slowly but surely receding, as more and more people we'd been hanging out with became parents and the crowd became younger and younger.
I am not saying that we did it to bow to social pressure, as we'd always wanted kids. (Since I was a kid myself, in my case in fact.)
But it wasn't at all a step back socially and not sure if we had remained childless that our social life would have been exponentially more active.
Anyway, just our experience.