We are the Really Very Best Neighbors

After Michael and I had been living in our house for a little less than a year, we got a nasty (and anonymous) letter in the mail from one of our neighbors.  They were not so nicely asking us to clean up our yard, which as you can imagine was overrun with broken down cars, beer bottles and firecracker remnants.  Or had some kid toys in it.  Either way.  IT'S BASICALLY THE SAME THING.  The letter also requested that we remove the extension cord that was sticking out the window from the girls' room (we had missed it when taking down the Christmas lights) because it was decreasing property value in our neighborhood.  At first I was really upset by the letter, but now Michael and I joke about it pretty regularly.  We're pretty sure it was written either by the guy who sits on a lawn chair at the edge of his open garage all day every day and stares at our house, or by the guy across the street who mows 2x/week and spends at least 6 hours every Saturday doing...something?..to his yard (beyond the mowing and trimming I'm not sure what's left.  To his credit his lawn does look very nice!).  We're leaning toward obsessive lawn mowing guy, especially after we caught him blowing his leaves into our leaf pile because you wouldn't want to have a pile of leaves at the curb in front of your house in the middle of fall.  Anyway, so every time we do anything outside, we joke about how we're ruining the neighborhood.  It's all in good fun (at least for us!).  Our latest plot to decimate property values was executed on Sunday when Michael put up our Christmas lights.  BEFORE Thanksgiving.  I KNOW.  

(for the record, he put them up because it was 65 degrees out and we decided that would be better than trying to climb around on the roof when it was icy and snowing in 2 weeks.  We won't turn them on nightly until after Thanksgiving :))

Come Spring our neighbor will be extra thrilled that we didn't spray our lawn with any hazardous chemicals to keep away the dandelions.  Michael even briefly considered getting backyard chickens (which is legal in our city) but then decided that getting chickens just to spite someone probably isn't a very good reason ;-)

Tonight you get a picture of our beautiful lights, and also a couple of the girls who BEGGED to go outside in their bathing suits to play in the rain today.  I said that they could put on their suits if they also put on something to cover their legs as well as coats and hats.  Maya was pouting that I wouldn't let her go out with barefeet so that she could better "ice skate" on the deck.  Um, no.

So tacky!  Who are these crazy people???

Ugh, they should really take pride in their neighborhood.

"Charlotte, do 'ballet feet'"!