We have a 5 year old!...and we have new (noisy) neighbours

It’s officially a new year, and nothing has really changed, but I guess that’s to be expected given it’s only the 2^nd day of the new year.

Andrew had a great 5^th birthday, and for the first year EVER of his life everyone was able to attend his party without illness!  Almost every year we’ve come down with something (tis the season!) but this year, totally healthy.  His Lego Star Wars theme party was lots of fun, and included a few Lego themed games, such as building the coolest Lego sculpture in 2 minutes, guessing how much Lego was in a glass jar, and a Lego Star Wars disc toss game.  There was a prize for each game, which was a cool idea and I think will be good for when Andrew’s a bit older but this year he focused a bit too much attention on the idea of winning a prize than just enjoying the game and being OK with someone else winning.  He got a little too focused on present opening, but for the most part he was a really good boy, and I know he felt really special on his big day.  He wore a really cute outfit with a green argyle sweater vest that GG gave him for Christmas, and Margaret and Emily were in matching sparkly dresses that words cannot describe, they were SO cute!  My bro and sil got them for them for Xmas.  So much cuteness.

I rang in the new year by myself, but that’s OK.  I think of New Year’s Eve as Andrew’s birthday, not NYE the way most people think of it.  Truth be told, James and I were both annoyed with the amount of noise going on around us that night.  Our new neighbours (who moved in about 2 days before Christmas) are very loud in general, and it sucks because our old neighbours were SO quiet.  It looks to be a whole bunch of young 20 something’s sharing the place, there are always people coming and going it seems, and they are all chain smokers and are constantly hanging out outside our front yard area – which will be problematic especially come time for us to start using our front yard for the kids’ play area.  I already find it frustrating though, as getting the kids in and out of the van means breathing in a lot of second hand smoke, which I’m not cool with.  Anyway…they also play loud music a lot, and the bass is ridiculously loud, to the point that you can feel the vibration of it in your skeleton.  If you open the cup cupboard, you’ll hear the cups all rattling, etc.  James did go over just after they moved in to let them know it was shaking our entire house and they said they’d turn it down, but if they turned it down one notch that’s all they did.  On New Year’s Eve I was willing to give more leeway as obviously a lot of people celebrate with parties, but it was SO annoying because the bass went from about 6pm till who knows when – I went to bed at 1:30 and I could still hear it then.  We’re lucky the babies can sleep through it as their wall is against the same wall their TV obviously is, and it shakes in their room, too.  (The babies got a noise machine for Xmas for their room, which helps drown out other noises, but still).  The same neighbours went out the back door at midnight on New Year’s and blew noise makers, but they were obviously the cheapest noise makers in the world and made it sound like a gaggle of geese was congregating outside our back door.  About 10 minutes later they went out front and did the same thing.  I get the whole ringing in the new year thing and I’m not saying I’ve never done it, because I have, but not more than once.  Usually you’d go outside, make a bit of noise, and then that’s that.  You don’t go from one side to the other over the span of 10 or 15 minutes.  Or maybe that’s just someone with little kids who’s sleep deprived talking, I don’t know!  I don’t particularly love obnoxious noise at the best of times, but particularly late at night it gets under my skin!!

I know I sound like the Scrooge of new year’s and I don’t mean to.  I think I’m just upset about our new neighbours, because I was so hopeful it would be a family like us with kids and we might finally have friends right in our neighbourhood and then it turned out to sort of be the opposite.  Now I’m worried we’ll end up having to move sooner than we wanted to and I HATE that.  I wish so much that we could afford to live in a detached house, but the only way that could ever happen is if we moved a lot farther out than we are now, and I hate the thought of James’ commute to work being even longer than it is now.  So yeah…Hopefully the noise next door calms down and it all works out so I don’t feel like we’re being chased out of here.  Time will tell!