I dropped Harry Potter off at a nerf gun war with some kids from church this evening and I didn’t feel anxious the entire time he was gone.

I know, I know, your first thought is “Come on crazy lady, how awful can the church kids be?”

Here’s my answer, the church kids aren’t awful at all, but this is the first time since he was 2 that I can remember that him being genuine friends with the kids at church.

Yeah he’s still kinda new, but he doesn’t seem like the charity case or the pity invite here so I’m going to say he genuinely has friends or is on his way to making genuine friends.

I need to back up a couple of dozen paces and say this, Harry Potter is an extremely social kid. He’s always been that way. He’s an extrovert’s extrovert. He makes friends most places, gets along pretty well with most kids, and just loves hanging out with other kids.

And other kids seem to like him pretty well.

Now I’m just going to say that there are times when I look at this child and wonder how he is going to get along with other kids because he’s just… well weird, he’s weird…and then I see the other kids his age and it realize he’s actually not that weird. Apparently “flossing” on second base is a totally acceptable thing for an 8 year old to do… yeah.

So Harry Potter is social.

In Texas this child had a lot of friends. He had school friends, swim friends, bus friends, baseball friends, neighborhood friends… seriously so many friends that organizing his “social” calendar was just exhausting.

But he never really had friends at church.

I take full responsibility for this.

The people we went to church with in Texas were good people, but for whatever reason we just did not fit in.

It was like fitting a square peg in a round hole, it just did not work.

That was hard.

And it really wasn’t the other people, it was just us because I heard all the time how welcoming our congregation was. But as time passed it got harder and harder to be that square peg.

Because it was an uncomfortable situation we tried to spend as little time in it as possible, we were the in and out sort of church people. I dreaded Sunday all week which is a terrible but true thing. All week we fit in, we had amazing friends and neighbors, basically an all round blessed life, but church was just… really hard.  We tried to keep to ourselves, required as little help as possible, and spent our time with our “outside” church friends.

Because of the whole square peg thing,  Harry Potter had limited interaction with the other church kids. They stuck together and  tended to play on the same sports teams, go to the same schools, and spend lots of time together on the weekends. He didn’t do any of that so when we got to church on Sunday it was awkward for him.

No one was ever mean to him, they were always very polite, but like the rest of our family he just did not fit in with most kids, and for a super social kid this was puzzling (side note there were a few swim team kids that were amazing and really made church awesome for him)

And then we moved, and our first Sunday you could see the worry on his 7 year old face.

But within a few weeks we had been invited over by a family with a kid about his age and all of a sudden he knew one kid.

And within a couple more weeks he’d made a few more friends, and then a few more, and 5 months later it’s snowballed.

So when he found out about the nerf gun war he was pumped to go.

It wasn’t one of those things where he felt obligated to go so on Sunday he didn’t feel left out, he genuinely wanted to go see kids he considered to be friends.

Guys do you know how rare that has been for our family? Church friends? It’s pretty rare.

He left the party just glowing and said “Mom! I can’t believe I get to see those guys on Sunday too!”.

Seriously? This was an icing on the cake moment.

As a parent I’ve worried a lot about what the consequences of moving our kids 800 miles might be, and while there have been lots of tears, this was not one of those days.

Today was a good day. One of those days that you have to sit down and record so on the not so good days you have something to hold on to.

This was one of those days when I am reminded that there may be a reason we’ve found ourselves in Georgia during this season of our lives.

I cannot thank the sweet Georgia mothers enough for raising sons that have welcomed Harry Potter, this is what he needed during this time of his life, so thank you, thank you Georgia moms, you are doing amazing things!