The first play date

Last week, Jin had her first playdate.

She'd been growing closer, day by day, to a curly-haired friend she'd shared a classroom with since the start of term. Their commute home overlapped, and they were finding their way into each other's worlds one small step at a time. The little girl was picked up each afternoon by her Year 5 brother — a quiet, attentive boy who carried her bag when she was tired, scooped her into a hug, and walked her right to the classroom door each morning with one last embrace. It was, I thought, one of the loveliest things to watch.

I had been turning over the idea of slipping a note with my number through her brother's hands. Then one afternoon, the girls' mum came to collect her daughter herself — a small surprise after weeks of seeing only the brother. Because Jin had stayed back to wait alongside her friend, we had a moment to meet too.

We walked home together. Their family, it turned out, had arrived in New Zealand around the same time we did, from Iran. We talked about the older children's schooling, about the small communities our families had landed in, about how the younger ones were settling into class. By the time we reached our house, we discovered they lived just around the corner — a few minutes' walk away. Before saying goodbye, I suggested a playdate. We exchanged numbers and agreed on the following Thursday.

By happy coincidence, the children's nail polish Jin had been asking after for weeks arrived Thursday afternoon. She changed into her favourite outfit, turned the little bottles over in her hands, and kept drifting to the window to look out. While the older girls were at their piano lessons, the two children with their mum walked in.

The children toured our downstairs play room and music room before bolting toward the toys. The boy lit up at the PlayStation racing game my husband set up for him. The mums settled at the kitchen table over the cookies their mum freshly baked, still warm, and the snacks I'd laid out.

While the children played, we talked. She and I are both at Massey — she's working on a PhD, I'm finishing my Master's — and we lingered on that small coincidence with the delight of two students who hadn't expected to find each other in a school carpark. We talked about the daily fatigue of packing lunchboxes, about food that nourishes, about raising young children whose English is still arriving and whose first instinct is play, about life in a country with no relatives close by. The conversation kept opening into new rooms.

Meanwhile, the two little ones bounced on the trampoline, played house, and returned to the table with jewel stickers stuck on as earrings and necklaces, ready to paint our nails and toenails in every colour they could find. They didn't share a language yet, but they didn't seem to need one. Jin's small face stayed lit the whole evening — her first time, like her sisters, hosting a school friend in her own home.

As dusk came, the family gathered themselves to leave. Before they did, she offered, gently, that if I ever needed to take my husband to a medical appointment and had no one to mind the children, I should call her — she'd come. I answered that her two were welcome at ours any afternoon after school. A playdate at their place was set for the Thursday after next.

Through Jin, I think I've made a good friend too. Just as my older girls' Korean friendships have led to families spending afternoons together, to outings and shared meals, a child's small connection becomes the family's. The children make the first thread; the rest of us follow.