10 Things You Should Know Before Moving Next Door to Us

By Alicia Bayer © 2010

We have new neighbors next door and they include a 9-year-old girl and a 12-year old boy. The girl was playing in our yard today and it occurred to me that we should probably come with warning labels. She’s already quite wet and slightly blackberry stained. :)

So here, I offer up my list of cautions for potential neighbors…

1. Your children will probably always come home wet, dirty or covered in paint. I highly advise having them change into play clothes the minute they set foot in our yard.

2. You may hear wolf howls, badminton games, and games of tag way after dark. Yes, we have blinking badminton birdies for precisely this purpose.

3. We have weeds. We will not spray them. We will do crafts with them, dig them up, ignore them and do experiments on them, but don’t even think about asking us to dump chemicals on them.

4. Expect to hear screaming pretty much all day long, especially in the summer. Mostly it’s happy screaming, but it will still probably make you want to duct tape several layers of feather pillows around your head some days. Sorry.

5. Our children climb trees, throw spears, whittle with pocket knives, ride skateboards and do other dangerous things — often. We teach them to do things safely and they (mostly) listen.

6. Daryl bellows and I holler. We’re very nice anyway. If you had these four kids, you would too.

7. We occasionally have opossums in our garage. We will feed them, follow them around and befriend them. They are fantastic for homeowners and we just plain like them. Don’t worry — opossums move on after about two weeks.

8. Our yard is frequently full of obstacle courses, homemade water parks, tires, 8 million bikes, log structures and assorted contraptions.

9. If any of your family members venture outside, they will probably be recruited to take part in messy science experiments, monster parades, mud pies, tea parties, video shows, make believe games, nature crafts, role playing, long conversations and general mayhem. My kids like adults, so that includes you.

10. Your children will probably start pestering you to homeschool them.



Alicia Bayer lives with her husband, four kids, four cats and an occasional opossum in rural Minnesota. She has run the web site, "A Magical Childhood," since 2001 and writes daily at the following sites:

The Magical Childhood

Magic and Mayhem (personal homeschooling blog)
Mankato Attachment Parenting Examiner
Mankato Homeschooling Examiner