I’m afraid of quite a few things. Fairly realistic, sensible things – like heights, thunderstorms (don’t look for me on the “Dumbfsck golfers competing for the Darwin Awards finals” show), large unknown dogs. Things like that. And meeting new people – right up there near the top of the list. My own personal weirdness, coupled with intense shyness IRL, has pretty much made that a lock for me.

So about 3 weeks ago I got an email about a local secular parenting group. And when I say “local”, it’s not just Denver, Boulder and Ft. Collins (decidedly, um, not so local as one might suppose), it’s much, much closer to us. Close enough to actually have some of the activities within 5 miles of us.

One of the activities was heading out to one of our local-ish parks for the TrainRideandPettingZoo. School Girl loves petting zoos, no matter how sad and lame they actually turn out to be. In fairness, the petting zoo at the Stock Show pretty much outstrips every other petting zoo on earth in terms of sheer awesomeness, so she’s a bit jaded. Never even mentioned the train. Last week we went to the Railroad Museum, so that kind of spoiled her a bit on the “baby train” thing.

So after our 2nd hospital visit (just a recheck on some things) in 2 days, we had breakfast, packed some water and an extra shirt and headed off for the park.

It was…better than I had feared. Of the 8 people that said they were coming, there were 3 mums there with a total of 6 kids, including School Girl. One of them was having a homestudy meeting with her SW, so she wound up not making it. One of the other mums was an adoptive parent as well; their youngest had had her finalization back in April, and she had two other kids, both school age but a little older than School Girl.

And the other mum, who I wound up spending the most time with, had two kids. School Girl spent a huge amount of time playing in the creek with her new buddy. They sat and talked in the grass for a while, played on the rocks in the creek, wound up getting soaked from head to toe (I didn’t ask – no actual screams of terror were involved, and some things you just don’t want to know), and we wound up having an invitation for a sleepover. Think we might start with a playdate during the day first…

It was so nice to be able to let my guard down, ever so slightly. I had people I could commiserate with over the increasing lack of church-state separation at school, what an uphill slog it can be to teach critical thinking skills without school support, and being able to talk about kids’ stuff without the blank stares most often (sadly) found at skeptic gatherings in general. We (as in possibly all 3 of us) are going to have to go back for another playday.