One of my neighbors has three children and my daughter likes playing with her oldest daughter. My son likes playing with her son. While my daughter is at school, we often have a play date with the neighbor and my son enjoys playing with her son. She homeschools her daughter so her daughter is also at home or comes over to our place and plays together. 

If my daughter knows we had a playdate with them while she’s at school, she says, “That’s not fair! I want to play with her, too!” I understand her feelings but she needs to go to school and we don’t want to give up having play dates with them. (After school is too late to have a play date.) So the best solution for us is not telling her at all. So I told my son not to tell her about playing at their house and how much fun it was. Yesterday was one of those fun days that we visited our neighbor and enjoyed each other’s company.

After we picked up my daughter at school, my son put a big smile on  his face and asked his sister, “Do you think we went to Sarah’s house today?” Her suspicion was that we did so to confirm it she asked me, “So you guys went there and played with them, didn’t you?” I said, “Well…yes.” Since I don’t want to tell a lie to/in front of my kids. Then my daughter was screaming, “That’s not fair!” And my son got upset, too and complained about me like, “Why did you say we went there, mommy! You shouldn’t have told her! It was a secret!” And started crying.