A Mommy Story

Apparently pregnancy hormones make me a wee bit evil sometimes. Or maybe I’m just blaming the hormones to seem less bitchy to all of you.

I’ve complained about our neighbors before. Their four kids see no boundaries between their house and ours. They leave their bikes in our driveway, our side yard is their play area, they pee on our fence, and they sometimes come up to peer into our house.

Right now the neighbor kids are using our side yard to play baseball. They have put down planks of wood on our grass, and in the space between the two houses (where we can’t see them, because there are no windows there), they are tossing a large bouncy ball, hitting it with a plastic bat, and running the “bases”. I occasionally hear a loud thump as the ball hits our house, or the fence that they’re playing up against.

I’m really getting sick of this. While I’m sorry these kids have nowhere to play (they have a backyard, but it’s full of dog poop, so they won’t play there), it is our yard they’re playing in, and our house that is getting hit. A few weeks ago I went outside and politely asked the kids not to hit our house or climb our fence, which resulted in them telling their mother that I yelled at them.

From inside my house, I could hear their mom yelling every obscenity she could think of about me and my family, all because I had the nerve to ask her kids to mind the rules of my property. It eventually forced me to go outside and explain that I didn’t yell at them – I simply asked them to please be more careful and to ask us if they needed inside our fence to get the ball instead of climbing it instead. She calmed down, but complained that there was nowhere in the neighborhood for them to play. Trying to keep the neighborly peace, I told her I understood, but I didn’t want our stuff destroyed or them to get hurt by climbing our (not-all-that-stable) fence.

She yelled at her kids, but of course it did little good. They’re still out doing the same things every night, and she’s fully aware of it, because she can see them out the window. She says she doesn’t want them playing in the street – well, that’s great, but is tearing up our property a better option?

What I wanted to tell her at the time was if they wanted more room to play, they should have picked a bigger lot in the neighborhood – we specifically picked our lot because it gave us a huge amount of yard. It’s our yard, that we’re mowing and paying for, that they’re tearing up. But because the neighbors have a hair-trigger explosive temper, I admit I’m a little afraid of telling it like it is.

Today, though, hearing them constantly abusing our house has made me devise the evil passive-aggressive plan that I will put in place after this baby is born: it’s time to do some creative landscaping, I think.

First, along the outside of the fence on the side yard I’m going to plant rose bushes: rose bushes with lots of big thorns. Next, I’m going to extend the landscaping out from our porch to provide less open space between houses.

And finally, I’m going to add some decorative landscape edging:

It will go around everything, including our poor baby oak tree in the front yard that they’ve nearly hacked to death. I may not go with this particular edging, but you can bet it will be pointy on top. Oh yes, it will be pointy.

Basically, I plan to make our front and side yards as unfriendly to playtime as possible. One fall on something thorny or pointy will make them think twice about playing on someone else’s property. It’s not like we let Cordy play out there, anyway – that’s why we have the gigantic fenced in back yard, full of child-friendly activities.

I don’t want to see these kids get hurt, but hopefully putting out a few more dangerous items in will discourage them from using our yard. If I could throw in a few roving porcupines, I would, but I doubt the city ordinances allow that.

The good news is that the neighbors tell us they’ll be moving out in a few months. They say they’ve got a house they’re moving to, and will let this one be foreclosed on. Of course, they’ve made that promise before, but failed to make good on it. Maybe it’ll happen this time.