...and will continue to let our child joyfully run through the sprinkler on 90 degree days like yesterday...
...despite what our neighbor to the north has to say about it...
...because if this is what bad parenting looks like on the face of a child...
...I like being a 'bad' parent.Okay, I think I must explain.
We have an older woman that is our neighbor to the north and for some reason, she has decided that she doesn't like us very much...including Kaitlin because she is a 'naughty child' and we are 'bad parents'.
Kaitlin dared to run through the spray (on the sidewalk...not even on her grass) of her automatic sprinklers once and actually yelled at her to "get off her property."
In the six years we've lived in this house, we've had only a handful of conversations with this woman and I've had only one personally. It was soon after we moved in and let's just say I had a cool response to my attempt to 'make friends' with our new neighbor.
Since then, our waves or neighborly 'hellos' have been either ignored or met with an upturned nose.
Usually, we're happy to mainly to let it slide off our backs and move on with our day...
However, Justin has been the unlucky recipient of her 'wrath' on more than one occasion.
One instance was a few winters ago and Justin thought he would try to be nice and shovel her sidewalk and she came out an yelled at him for shoveling the snow from her sidewalk onto her lawn...the nerve!
But most recent incident, and the fuel behind this post, happened last week when Justin was mowing our lawn.
This is usually my job, but since my leg is still healing, Justin has taken it over for now.
Anyway, she felt that Justin came over a few inches onto her lawn and proceeded to yell at him...evidently we mow our lawn too short and it 'looks bad' and of course we are too poor to afford professionals to take care of our lawn like she does.
Then, it was again pointed out that we are bad parents as we allow our child to run through sprinklers.
Justin is also a lazy bum because he hasn't 'bothered' to get a job since losing his job. (Nevermind that it was an involuntary lay-off and that the city we happen to live in currently has the highest unemployment rate in our entire state. There are many things I could call my hubby :-), but lazy is definitely not one of them!)
Despite this, clearly Justin believes that he is 'God's gift to everyone' (he said that a little spit actually came out on that one she was so worked up).
Also, there is a rather large tree in her yard that overhangs onto our yard and she said that if it happens to fall on our garage, her insurance company is not liable. She proceeded to say that she hopes it does.
Who says something like that?!?
The day that this happened, Justin had to call me at work to vent and I don't blame him. He commented that if it had been a man that had talked to him in that way, there probably would have been a little scuffle...but, since she is a women and an elder, he really tried to be respectful.
The whole thing just really aggravates me, but what can I do other than shake my head.
It just really makes me wonder what has happened to this women that has made her so amazingly bitter...
Okay...
I'm done now...
I'm going to go look at those pictures of Kaitlin in the sprinkler again so that I can smile and move on with my day!
