OPK's (Other People's Kid's)

I am going to rant here for just a minute.

Typically, I don't mind when the neighbor kids come over to play. My kids love it. The great outdoors is so much funner (Ryan's word) when there are friends to play with. I especially like that they seem to be able to entertain themselves for hours. Did you notice my bolded word?? H-o-u-r-s! That is time that my house comes to a standstill, the vibrations from running, jumping, crazy kids comes to a halt and my head comes out of the spin and I find myself faced forward.

We had this wonderfully, sweet older lady that lived behind us. Her name was Mary and she loved to do yard work. Everytime she was outside, she'd take a few minutes to chat with my kids or myself. Then, a couple years ago on Christmas Eve, she died. The family had to sell the house. When this happens, you get new neighbors.

I so had this idea that we would have wonderful neighbors who we got along great with and we'd help out from time to time when they were on vacation and so on. Do you envision my idea of walking through the meadow, dancing with the butterflies??? This is so not reality for us. We do have a few neighbors that we are more friendly with but they happen to be the ones without children. Hmmm.....maybe there is something to that???!!

Anyway, back to my rantings....

The new neighbors have been pretty friendly but there have been quite a few different faces of people living there and I'm perplexed as to who is who and who is the real owner. I see a little boy there quite often and I assume he is younger than Kara. Needless to say, we haven't had many problems.

Now here comes the fun part....

One of the young ladies has apparently taken on a babysitting job and I can only hope that it doesn't last all summer. (Ooops...I suppose I shouldn't say that because perhaps there is a real need there. Life isn't all about me!) Ok, let me rephrase that, I hope that I am not having to be the bouncer all summer long.

Out of politeness, I always require that my children check to make sure it is alright with the parents if they can go into backyards to play and I always want that politeness from other people towards our backyard. However, the babysitting young lady isn't familiar with my law of backyard politeness. The three kids she is watching are 5, 4 and 2. She's been popping them over the fence for them to play without even checking to see if that was alright with us.

I didn't say anything to her because I thought to myself...oh, just let them play for a little bit and then you can send them home while we eat. Well, in two seconds flat, the three girls had everything in a stir. They quickly became known as the 'mean girls'. I felt that I needed to be out there with them during this visit. The thing that got me is that as soon as the babysitter popped them over the fence, she disappeared and I became the babysitter. They were our visitors until I sent them home so my kids could go to bed.

Today, first thing this morning, I looked out my window and who do you think I saw? Yes, indeed....I saw the three little girls that came to visit yesterday. I was so hoping that they weren't popping over the fence before I had my coffee. Much to my surprise, they didn't come for a visit until late this afternoon. However, they were here for two seconds and I had to send one of them home for trying to kick Kara down the slide and then proceeded to tell me she didn't have to listen to me. Of course, I set her straight. The funny thing is, while I was standing there having this stern conversation with this five year old, the babysitter was just sitting there in her lawn chair texting whoever without any concern as to what was going on. Interesting, I thought to myself. The little girl was back in my yard, five minutes later.

After dinner, I was informed by my kids that the 'mean girl' said that when she is bigger, she's going to beat me up and kick me in the nuts and then I'll say, oh, you were the girl that was in my backyard. Should I be worried???? I miss Mary :-)