Monday, June 08, 2009

A family moved into the townhouse next to ours. Previously, a nice hispanic family lived there - however, I had two complaints about them: 1) they played their music way too loud at all hours of the day/night and 2) it was like Cinco de Mayo every weekend with their huge family gatherings.

Anyway, the new family consists of two parents and four children. The two older boys are 8 and 7 years old and then there’s a 2 year old girl and a 7 month old boy. What’s great is that the two older boys, whom I shall call J8 and J7 (both of their names start with J so I’ll identify them by their initial and age), come over to get Jesse to play with them. At first I thought it was odd that they would want to play with a 2 year old, but they’re really more interested in his wagon and soccer ball and various other toys that make it to the outdoors.

The pluses to this are that he has friends to play with and it’s helping his verbal skills. I noticed almost right away that his sentences were becoming longer and more intelligible. And he gets excited to go play with them, although usually he’s just running around while they play with his stuff. He seems happy enough with that at this point though.

The big minus that I saw last night while I was out on the deck watching them is that he follows the leader. J8 was climbing up to our deck on the outside of the banister. Jesse immediately started to climb up that way, too, until I put the kibosh on that. J8 then decided to leap up to the landing, climbing like a monkey over the rail. Jesse, of course, is way too short to be able to do that, but he was standing there trying to figure out how to do it.

In any case, we like our new neighbors and their kids and I have a feeling that we’ll be getting to know them all much better as the summer progresses and our boys play together.