Welcome to the Neighborhood

My husband doesn't get a lot of air time on this blog, but I thought I'd share his thoughts on what happened the other day, then I'll say my feelings and you can proceed to talk me down.

"How to Ensure Your Neighbors Never Mow Their Lawn Again

Yesterday afternoon, we received our first "welcome" to the neighborhood in the form of an anonymous letter. Here's what it said:

'Welcome to Texas! Hope the move went well and you have started to settle in and find this an area that you would like to raise your family.

Don't know how you did it in UTAH, but around here we cut our lawns, weed eat and edge. Your neighbors would appreciate you doing the same!

If you need help doing so let someone know. If you chose to use a lawn service instead of doing it yourself, have at it, there are plenty around.

But, please help keep this neighborhood nice and pretty for use all!

Thanks'

So.......we have some passive aggressive neighbors.

First I feel like I need to defend my position. We've lived in the house for 1 month and 5 days, and in that time we've mowed the lawn once. In all honesty, I should have mowed the lawn last week, but because it was the Fourth of July, the lawn didn't look very long or scraggly, I decided to put it off for another week. The grass still isn't very long, it has just started to seed, though, and now definitely needs to be cut. Yesterday, as we were going on a walk and I had not yet seen the letter, I was talking about my plan to clean up the yard this weekend, including mowing the lawn, trimming, and weeding the front garden.

Now that I've defended myself, it's time to start complaining.

Two major things are wrong with this. I don't mind the idea that someone is asking me to mow my lawn. That is totally an okay thing to do with your neighbors. But 1 - Doing it anonymously so that I can't respond in any way, and 2 - insulting my home state and putting them in some kind of self-righteous position, Really bugs me.

Number 1 - I can't respond. This is my biggest problem with this note. If it were and aggressive not like this, and it had an actual salutation, I could actually go up to the person, and say that their aggressive approach is not effective, but I could still appologize for the lawn being too long. However, not knowing who the person was, I have no way to communicate my feelings about the situation, and the way I see it, I only have one way of communication, and that is...mowing my lawn. So, if I want to show disapproval of the note, I can communicate that by: Not Mowing My Lawn. If I do mow my lawn, that could be taken as an affirmative response to the note, and the notewriter can then smile to their self-righteous little selves, feeling that they've converted me from my heathen Utah ways to their correct and proper Texas ways. Neither of those are good options.

Number 2 - Insulting my home state. This is where the letter really came off as self-righteous. That one little sentence was absolutely unnecessary. If they had simply said, "we try to keep the neighborhood clean by mowing, trimming, and weed-eating our yards", I would have thought, "Okay, I can help with that." But an attack on my home state really brings the note to a personal level.

As a third annoyance, but not nearly as offensive as the other two, the note comes in the guise of a "welcome" note. NO ONE(!) in the neighborhood has stopped by to say "Hi" to us in any way. The only neighbors that I've talked to are the people two houses down that go to church with us (who I met at church, and are, in fact, from Utah) and the father-in-law of my next door neighbors, who doesn't even live at the house, and who I ran into while mowing the lawn the first time. These "friendly Texans" who take such good care of their lawns and who are such better people than we lowly Utahns, have really shown us what it means to be a neighbor in Texas. Thanks.

I'm not giving up on the neighborhood. I still love it, and I feel like it's a great place to be. There's just one bad egg, which you'll get in any neighborhood. Just, if you've ever considered writing a note like that, please, Please, PLEASE! keep it impersonal, make sure you sign your name so that they have a way to respond, and if it's someone new to the neighborhood, consider talking to them in person, welcoming them sincerely to the neighborhood before you go about trying to convert them to your ways."

That was a lot of words, so here's a cute picture to break it up.

Anyway, I dealt with this kind of thing as an RA in college, and from my experience, these kinds of notes stem from feelings of superiority, entitlement and fear. Johnny covered superiority, but obviously the anonymity covers entitlement and fear as well. My first reaction to this letter, was who do these people think they are. For all they know we have a little girl with leukemia and we moved to Texas to be close to a specialist and we've spent all our income and savings on medical expenses and we spend our time with our dying child instead of unimportant things like mowing the lawn.

My second thought is, I'm pretty sure 99% of our neighbors would consider themselves Christians, and what does the Bible tell us? When you have a problem with your brother, you go and talk to your brother first. Nothing resolves issues quite as fast as walking a mile in someone else's shoes. What is a neighborhood, but a giant family? And thanks to one anonymous person, my relationship in this new family will be slightly tainted, even though we are ignoring this letter.

Pet Hospital

So, while we were getting ready to head to the cousins on Saturday, we noticed that Guido was sick. He was lethargic, and anyone who's seen Guido knows enough to see how serious that is. He was also meowing a lot, something he normally doesn't do. We didn't put him in his room when we left because we didn't worry about him destroying the furniture while we were gone, and we hoped that he would be alright until we got back.

Well, when we got back, he had eaten a little and drunken some water, but he had also thrown up a few times by his litter box and in my sewing room. We moved his cage and food out into the kitchen for the night to see if that would help him.

Sunday morning came and he could only walk a few steps at a time before he had to lay down. We carried him over to his litter box, but he walked away, so we left him by his food and water and went to church. When we came home, he had gone to his litter box, but he still couldn't walk very far. After much debate, we decided not to wait until Monday to take him to the vet. The DH took him to the Emergency Vet. They said he was in critical condition because he had a block somewhere in his urinary tract and his bladder was huge. He went into surgery and DH came home. We picked him up the next morning and took him to a regular vet. He still had an IV in his paw and a catheter. He hadn't eaten, so they were planning on giving him appetite enhancing drugs. He stayed at the vets overnight, and the soonest we can pick him up will be tonight, but we'll have to see how he's doing.

Guido's not very old, somewhere around 4, but now he has to be on a special diet to reduce whichever of the two possible blockages it was. I hope it's not wet food because he has refused to eat wet food in the past. Get well soon, Guido. I know you'll be back to normal soon. But I still won't let you claw the furniture when you come home. So don't get any ideas.

Happy Birthday America!

I love Independence Day. It is my 4th favorite holiday, but it's a close contender for 3rd. I was expecting to be a little stressed because we had things to do and Friday was productive, but not very restful. But no, we ended up having a great day!

We ate breakfast with the ward. They had tacos with the pancakes, eggs, and fruit, just in case you weren't sure we were in Texas. I would never have had tacos for breakfast, but I found myself wanting seconds. Go figure.

Then we went to my cousin's house. I was worried we wouldn't be able to find it, but we didn't have any problems. And we had tons of fun there. Really yummy food, games, and kids running around = fun apparently. We also went swimming. I haven't been swimming for years due to the fact that I don't really like water or water sports, and playing around in a pool is not my idea of fun. But I have been told it's the only way to survive Texas summers, especially for the first few years. So we packed up the swim gear and went. We even bought swimming diapers for G. He wasn't sure what to make of everything, but I think he ended up enjoying himself.

So happy birthday America! I'm glad we could celebrate you by doing American things--eating, talking, lounging, and forcing our children to try new things. I even made pies. And what's more American the pies? Well, me. And I'm glad we have all the freedoms we do in this country. It'd be hard to raise a kid somewhere where I knew he wouldn't be able to do what he wants and what he's good at when he grows up. So thank you to the original freedom fighters, and thank you to everyone in the military helping us fight for freedom now.

My Hands Upon My Head I Place

Not only is that song tons of fun to sing with kids, but it highlights my favorite G part this week, the hands. Not only are they ridiculously small (I don't know how they make them that small), but his little joints are just lines and his fingers plump out on either side. His knuckles are just dimples in his puggy hand. The lines on his palm are deep enough to catch pieces of lint in, but he normally gets them caught in between his fingers. I'm not sure why he always seems to have lint between his fingers since he doesn't open his fingers very often. Or why the lint is always blue. But I love that he likes to grab things, especially my fingers, and especially when he's eating. I'm in love, but you already knew that.



Pics of the house to come after we clean up this weekend.

Chubby cheeks

My favorite part of little G this week is his chubby cheeks. When his face is relaxed, they make such cute jowls. When he smiles, he has a little dimple that is just icing on the cake. And his little cheeks jiggle so cutely, take a look -

Me time

So my philosophy on motherhood so far is "take care of you, so you can take care of them", meaning, of course, that no one can give endlessly, you need to have something to draw from. I have found that I get really cranky a) when I'm really tired, or b) I haven't had any time to myself in awhile.

I try to have some time all my own every day, even if it's just taking a little longer in the shower. Sometimes I read, sometimes I blog. Sometimes it's really hard, especially when the little guy doesn't want to sleep, or when I have lots of housework, or when I crash cause the little guy doesn't want to sleep. It's hard right now cause I don't have any friends, parts of the house are still in conflict, and G seems to have a sixth sense that tells him when I'm not around any more.

So my gift to myself this week is time, just the knowledge that things will get easier, I will be able to have all the things I had before, and I will eventually feel like I did before my hormones exploded last year. In the meantime, I always have this:

He's cute even when he's mad and crying.

Favorite part of the week

So, there are just so many things to love about Baby G and my favorite thing about him keeps changing, so I thought I'd start posting the favorite part of the week every week. This week, wrists. Here's why: