Last year, one of my homeschooling goals was to meet more homeschoolers so my daughters would hopefully make some more friends.  Between our chaotic lives of the last few years and friends moving away, they each have only one friend.  Thankfully, Gabrielle's friend lives only five minutes away, so they can see each other pretty frequently.

Well, that goal fell by the wayside as we confronted life without a babysitter (our oldest son, who had the nerve to grow up and go away to college), with tutoring and speech therapy multiple times a week, with a new baby, and with non-napping twins.  We didn't manage to do anything extra by which anyone might have made friends.  However, we still regularly saw our friends who also have seven children of roughly the same ages.

Unfortunately, they moved to Florida this summer.  And Mary's one friend is away until Christmas.  And then this happened.

Ryan and I were doing math.  The instructions said to make a tally mark chart. "On the drawing board write some of the child's friends' names along the left side.  Choose an appropriate question, such as the number of people living in their home, number of animals they have, or how many letters in their names." And the example shows five children's names.

I sat there, trying to think of who we could put on this chart.  Immediately I thought of our friends who moved to Florida.  And then I thought, "Well, there's ...um....uh.... NOBODY!!!!"  My child, who will be six next week, doesn't really know any other families well enough to make this sort of a chart.

Something has to change.