- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 0
-
Sparkle (0)
The neighbor kids keep coming over and driving us crazy and I'm not sure what to do about it.
The three kids are, I'm guessing, about 12, 8 and 6. Eldest is a boy, the others are girls. When we moved into the house four years ago, as we were unloading things, they (along with a few other neighborhood kids) came over with cookies and welcomed us. The KIDS did. NOT the parents. As a matter of fact, I've never actually MET my adult neighbors. At this point, that's just as much of a failing on my part as it is on theirs, but when we first moved in - your kids come over, but you don't? Bizarre.
Then, a month or so after we moved in, we were having a party. BBQ in the yard, possibly for Drake's first birthday, I'm not sure. That or a housewarming. At any rate, the neighbor kids came over (then they would have been about 2, 4 and 8, mind you) BY THEMSELVES to see if they could play at the party. We told them to ask their parents and to tell their parents they were welcome to come over for a burger or something, figured it would be a good time to meet them. The kids ran home, then came back - still parentless - and said they could come to the party but their cousins were over, could the cousins come too? I said sure, thinking one or two more kids wouldn't be a big deal, right? They come back with like FOURTEEN KIDS or something ridiculous. Ages ranging from 2 years to about 14 years old. STILL NO ADULTS. And the neighbor kids were polite but their cousins? Rude as HELL. I was, frankly, shocked. And had no idea how to handle it. Who sends a swarm of kids to the new neighbor's house when they've never even come over to meet them or welcome them to the neighborhood? (And who lets their 2 and 4 year olds play outside alone unsupervised all the time??)
Then for a while I was convinced they were living in a drug house because there were tons of people coming in and out at all hours of the night and day, and cars leaving for short periods of time and then coming back off and on all day. But that died down after a year or two.
The kids have always been nice and polite. Aside from the party incident, they've come over a time or two for random things (school sales and such) over the years. When we see the parents out front they will wave and say hi, but that's it.
Now, for some reason this summer, the kids are coming over all the time.
It started in the late spring when the two girls started coming over and asking if they could play in our yard. We have a small yard with a small swingset and a couple toddler slides. We also have two dogs and we're not always diligent about cleaning up the poop, and we tend to leave yard toys out (like our toddler wagon and the plastic outdoor cars and the sandbox with no sand and so on) because we're lazy.
When they first asked, I was torn because I don't want to be the mean neighbor who gets her house egged and TP'd...but I also don't want to be the one who is held liable or sued if one of the kids gets hurt. (And then I am saddened that we live in a world where you can't just be NICE, you have to worry about being sued for being nice, but that's a whole other rant I think.) I wasn't sure I wanted to set a precedent for it, but at the same time I wasn't sure exactly how to say no or if I wanted to be the type of person who says no to letting kids have fun. Their yard is even smaller than ours (it's full of a deck and an oversized garage, and what little 'yard' is left seems to be just a dirt pit). So I let them. And they would come over every week or so, ask to play, play for a little bit, and then go home.
Then, naturally, my kids started wanting to go outside and play with the neighbors. And regardless of whether or not the neighbors
