My daughter doesn't have friends yet, there you go I said it.

I have a confession and now September is quickly approaching I feel the need - the desire to get it off my chest. I feel a huge amount of guilt for this because my daughter doesn't have any real friends yet and with her due to start nursery in September I worry this will affect her ability to make friends when she starts there. She's been at a nursery before but it all went tits up - you can read about that disaster here if you'd like to click here! but because she wasn't there for very long at all, I didn't even meet any of the other parents! She only went 3 mornings a week which she loved and she came out chatting away about the other kids she had been playing with that day. So I guess that shows she can make friends, right?

But I didn't make any effort to find out who these children were. I didn't try to make contact with their parents for play dates. See, the truth is - I'm rubbish at making mum friends!

Which means we don't have that group of friends we see often, she doesn't have a best friend yet and she doesn't get invited to parties, have many play dates or anything like that. She does interact with other children don't get me wrong but we don't have that friendship group we see a lot.

I'm really not very good at making friends anymore, my whole world is in this house, my kids and my husband, so I've really struggled with making mum friends more so since having Isabelle than before. Most of my friends don't have their own children yet so it's not like I've got friends with kids for her to play with.

I feel so guilty that she desperately wants a best friend but she doesn't have one.

Will I have rubbed off on her and she'll struggle to make a best friend or two at nursery in September? I hate the idea of her being the only one without a friendship group as she grows up. Now I can sit here and pretend that I'm going to try my hardest to make friends with the mums at the nursery but I'm not sure I will. Hopefully I will.

I'm going to have a little birthday party for her, it'll probably be something cheap and creative and invite children from her nursery so hopefully that will a) give her an opportunity to build friendships further and b) let me meet the other parents properly to be able to set up play dates c) get rid of the guilt for not having her a birthday party this year, which I recently confessed to in a post about her brothers birthday celebrations, he actually had a 3rd birthday with lots of toddlers invited, oh more mum guilt, you can read about that by clicking here!

I know I'm being silly, she's only 3 - how much can this affect the rest of her life? I also know that I can't be alone in feeling like this, how many mums avoid play groups because they make them feel awkward and like all the other mums are clicky? all those mums probably felt the same at one stage. Sometimes mums are lucky and their friends have babies at the same time but majority of us are in it alone to start with, finding our feet and trying to find new people to have a coffee with... then some parents go back to work, whilst others like me stay at home with the children. It's hard to make new mum friends especially if you've had a traumatic birth, if you're so tired from no sleep or struggling with something like breastfeeding in the early days, then you get into bad habits of avoiding the baby groups you'd probably love but won't give them a proper chance.

And, oh, dear husband, if you read this, don't you dare comment with how I should have gone to more baby groups with her! I went to some... anyway, it's really not too late for me to find a lovely weekend play group for YOU to take her to if you so wish darling? *Nah, I'm sure you understand because you're lovely and you watch me every day with the children hardly ever leaving there side, sometimes there's been tears huh?... moving on.

Surely she will realise how to make friends anyway, she has interacted with other kids, she has her brother and her big family, nursery will help them to learn the friendship if she struggles? Although, I'm 28 years old and not that great at it myself, I'm sure she'll be fine won't she?

Ah. We'll see in September!