Our Daughter Is Friendly

It's fairly easy for Hunter to make friends. (Keeping them is another story.) Everywhere we go it seems that she makes a new "best friend". She doesn't seem to care about race, color, creed, or sex for that matter, which is a very good thing. At the lake, the mall, the park, McDonald's Playland, she can be spotted dragging some poor kid by the hand over to meet her mom.

At school this usually takes the form of handing out our phone number to new friends that she makes on the playground or in carline. She's devastated when they don't call. Because, really, if she came home with a girl's phone number, I probably wouldn't let her call them either. But this week we had a couple of interesting experiences.

On Thursday when I picked her up she informed me that she "has a friend coming over today at four and another one spending the night on Saturday night."

Ok, let's go over this again. Parents don't just drop their kids off at the home of someone they've never laid eyes on before. Especially not to spend the night.

I told her, "You did the right thing by giving them your phone number. If they call [which they won't] then I'll talk to the mom and maybe we can meet at the park or something."

Right as I'm finishing up this sentence and pulling into the garage, my cell phone rings (we use my cell phone as our home phone now) and it's a lady named Heather who states that they just moved here and haven't met anyone and that my daughter gave her daughter Avery our phone number and would we like to meet at the park to play for a little while. (!)

Wow. I was shocked. Sadly, on Thursday I had some major dental work done and was in no kind of mood to take Hurricane McCaigers to the park. (That would be a different story for a different post entitled "You Know You Might Be A Redneck When...")

Anyway, Hunter was devastated. But I promise that I'll call them next week and see if they want to try again.

Then yesterday she comes home and runs up to her room to make preparations for her friend spending the night. Now, Hunter has only had one friend spend the night and it was on her birthday last year. It went well but just isn't something that I'm really into. What if they fight? What if they won't go to sleep? What if she wants to go home in the middle of the night? (I pulled that one when I was in 3rd grade.) I can't imagine letting her spend the night with someone unless it was someone that we really knew and trusted.

Again, "Hunnie, if her mom calls then we'll talk about it. Her mom will probably want to meet us and see our house. Maybe we could go to the park together...IF she calls. And then we'll talk about spending the night." About 5pm last night the phone rings. It's a little girl named Sydney, wanting to talk to Hunter. After they talk for a minute Hunter comes and says, "Sydney's mom wants to talk to you."

And so, I talk to Sydney's mom. She's saying "are you sure it's ok" and "Sydney's really excited about it" and "Hunter also invited her to go to church with you on Sunday, are you sure that's ok too?"

Wow. My daughter, the little evangelist. I don't know what we've gotten ourselves into here, but I figure a movie (I rented Despereux for them), maybe some pizza & dessert, playing outside, then church tomorrow. (I'm just assumming that "sleep" will come somewhere between "playing outside" and "church tomorrow". Please God, let it come.)

Should be interesting. Say a prayer for us.

I've already threatened the boys with bodily harm if they pester them to death. And Parker promised to "not even look at Brittney when she comes".

Well buddy, her name is Sydney and I don't know if you have to go that far, but I'll take it.