Love Thy Neighbor

We are all moved into our new house.  We love it!!! 

 

We were also told the neighborhood is full of younger kids.  This is great because our old neighborhood had all older kids and baby J always felt left out because she couldn’t roam the neighborhood with the older kids.

I couldn’t help but feel sad as I watched as she sat at the end of our driveway and just watched as the kids rode their bikes around the block or played basketball or swords and guns.  She would try to join in but at the end would just end up sitting and watching with this sad look on her face.  As a mother, this broke my heart.  So I was very excited to know the new neighborhood would have kids her age.

The neighbors to our left are very quiet and you really don’t hear much from them at all.  The neighbors to our right and 2 houses down have a little girl the same age as J.  She came over and they rode bikes together and played with their baby dolls and then played in the backyard on the swings.  J was in heaven and I was one happy mommy to know my little girl had kids to play with.

Then our neighbors to the right of us moved in.  They have 4 kids ages 2, 3, 8 and 11.  All girls, except the 11 yr old.  I thought this was fantastic – more kids to play with.  It didn’t take long before I realized this was not going to be a good thing.

These kids have no boundaries and the two little ones speak very little or no English.  The second we open the garage door we have them all in our driveway wanting J to come out and play.  Okay guys she cannot play all day every day, we have stuff to do.  They run the neighborhood and have no supervision – even the little ones.  We still have a lot of construction going on down our street.  We bought a new house and they are still building houses on our street.  So there is a lot of construction going on and these kids are all up in the construction sites and playing in the trash and dirt.  Again no supervision and no my kid cannot go and play there.

They love our dog and seem to smother her whenever they see her.  They will even call her into the road or into their house.  Sorry kids – the dog needs to stay in our yard and in our house and out of the road.  Our dog is very tolerant but I am worried that if one of the kids hurts her that she will nip at them.  One thing I definitely don’t want to deal with.  I try to explain they need to be gentle with the dog.  I try to explain they shouldn’t be in the construction sites.  I try to explain that J has boundaries and cannot run the neighborhood.  Unfortunately, I feel all of this is just a waste of my breathe as the little ones don’t understand what I am even saying and the older ones just plain don’t care what I am saying.

We live on an awesome lot that is on a pond.  We love the view and were so excited to have a nice big backyard.  Sadly due to the situation with the neighbors we will be putting up a fence very soon.  One – we just don’t have any privacy from these guys.  They are always in our yard and calling the dog.  Two – I can’t have the dog bite anyone and I just don’t trust them to not make that happen.  Three – the parents don’t really speak English either, so talking to them has been difficult already and the last thing I need is to have a feud with our neighbors after a month of living there because we all know I speak my mind and it is not always pretty.

Sigh!  So today I will be getting fence quotes.  Guess the old saying is true “Good fences make better neighbors”.