Nerf guns and soccer balls

I’m not very good at telling stories, but I have some anecdotes to contribute to fit in with everyone else’s kid stories haha

So every day or every other day the two downstairs neighbor kids come up wanting to play, either with our keyboard or our nerf guns or the ship-in-a-bottle sitting on a bookshelf in the study. Before, our next door neighbors used to be the ones knocking on our door and asking for our “pistolas” (nerf guns), but they moved a month or two ago, and now Devin and Cissy have taken their place. They’re pretty cool kids, actually, with lots of personality. The first few times they would come over, they would always introduce themselves with their age; Devin would hold up four fingers and say “I’m four. I’m four!” And of course Cissy, not to be outdone, would hold up her two fingers and say, “I’m two, I’m two!”

When we moved in our doorbell didn’t work, but a few weeks ago I started tinkering around with the doorbell box in the kitchen and discovered–after clearing away an inch of dust–that the wires just had to be reconnected, which we did. Devin and Cissy have had a hayday with the doorbell since then. It got to the point that we would always know it was them at the door because they would ring the doorbell like five hundred times (although we’ve been working on the “just once” deal and they’re doing very well :))

The other day Devin came over and opened our game closet, hoping to find an interesting game to play with. He pointed at Mastermind, and I said, “No, that’s boring, you won’t want to play with that.” But he insisted, so I took it down for him to play with. After awhile of putting the colored pegs in the board thingey, he looked up at me and said, “I like Boring!” I just about died with that one.
Today they came up just as we were making dinner, so they only stayed a little while, eating the grapes we had set out in a glass bowl on the table. They really wanted to stay, so their mom eventually said, “Well, we have to go down and let them eat dinner now, but maybe they’ll come out and play later.” Which we did.

This evening it was sunny (finally!), so we went out and found them playing around with their mom in the grass to the side of the apartments. We had our nerf guns and soccer ball with us. After sneaking around and bombarding them with nerf balls, we just played around with Devin and Cissy while talking to their mom.

Devin liked to chase us around and try to get us with the soccer ball, and we pretended to fall down, smitten by his fatal soccerball throwage. One time when I “fell” to the ground and was just lying there on the grass, I was looking up at the sky and all of a sudden for a second I felt kind of nostalgic, kind of like a kid again. It was nice.

Whether they’re your own or your neighbor’s, kids are destined to be in our lives for a reason. We’ve had a good time at this apartment with our neighbors.