Good Neighbors

With the wonderful summery weather we've had the past few days, I've realized once again how much I love our little neighborhood.  Brentwood is a cute little town of 7,000 right in the middle of the inner suburbs of St. Louis.  I say "inner suburbs" because urban sprawl here really is horrific--it's not as bad as D.C. or Houston, but there are actually people who commute 40 miles or more to downtown without going through a bit of rural area.  On our trips to visit Nonna and Pops, it takes almost an hour before we officially leave St. Louis's outer suburbs.  And even where we are it takes Ben over half an hour to drive to work, which makes me feel as if we're living way out in the boonies, since Ben's London commute consisted of a 7 minute walk by some of the city's tallest buildings.  The preppiness of it all also occasionally gets to me when I realize that there are 4 identical white luxury SUVs in line at our local Starbucks driveup window or when I see moms at the park dressed in skirts and with lipstick on(!) while their children play around them in Strasburg Children clothes.  And I completely don't get the monogramming fanaticism--seriously, I've seen it on cars, on baby bibs!?  Didn't even J.Crew ditch that fad as too preppy about five years ago?  But, again, good outweighs bad.

But, being relatively out of the hideousness of McMansion exurbia, Brentwood's a pretty nice area.  The public elementary school is literally six houses away, and our favorite park is less than a mile's walk through a tree-lined neighborhood.  There are a few businesses that we can walk to: the library, fire station (this is key for Jack), dry cleaner's, pharmacy, our insurance company, Whole Foods, Panera, Starbucks.  If the streets were set up a little more walker-friendly, we could even make it on foot to Target!  

The best thing about our new home is our neighbors.  We're in a row of 10 newly built houses that share a common back alley private drive that leads to all our garages.  In those 10 houses live 13 children between 7 months and 10 years of age!  So as you can imagine, the alley in back is home to frequent bike races and impromptu soccer matches.  I'd imagine it's like going back in time 50 years to stickball game years.  Except that the parents join in, too, jumping in and out of the games and talking to one another.  Saturday we walked outside and were greeted with drink and barbecue offers from both our neighbors whose kids were playing in the sprinkler and those who were making their first attempts at gardening.

It's also reassuring to know our neighbors so well when I read a story like this one that was briefly on CNN.com earlier today.  As I incredulously read the story to Ben, his jaw dropped and he said, "I could totally see Jack doing that!"  Me too.  And let me give you an example of exactly why we could see that happening.

Some background: although the big boy bed thing is going fairly well (our featherbed has been returned to its intended use and we've yet to have a falling out incident), Jack does like to get up and crack his door open after we've put him to bed.  We've now gotten used to hearing the creak of his door a few minutes after lights out.  He then spends at least 15 minutes jabbering away to himself before falling asleep; generally he recounts highlights of his day (presumably for the benefit of Waddle Waddle and Little Teddy), then ends by giving his animals kisses and singing the last line of his lullaby, "Goodnight Jack, we love you."

Saturday night, however, Jack seemed to go to sleep rather quickly.  It was a little late and he had spent a lot of time playing outside in the sun, so we chalked the lack of noise up to exhaustion.  In the process of opening the door, however, Jack kicks off all his covers, and he's still learning how to cover himself back up, so I've recently made a habit of stopping by his room before I go to sleep and straightening his covers.  I find it really sweet.  But when I went in to do that on Saturday, Jack wasn't in bed.  I patted the blankets and pulled them off the bed in shock and had a brief moment of panic before I realized exactly where he was.  When we weren't outside playing in the sun, we spent a good portion of Saturday in our guest room.  We had a huge buildup of laundry to fold and I (embarrassingly) still hadn't washed the sheets from our Easter Grammy and Granddad visit, so we spent a lot of time playing on the twin-sized guest bed with the trundle underneath it pulled halfway out so that Jack could jump up on the bed, too.  

Jack had apparently tried to recreate our afternoon fun, because there he was, snoozing away sans sheets, with no blanket, no pillowcase, not even a stuffed animal for companionship, just three bah-bahs (pacifiers, one for each hand and one for his mouth, on constant rotation) on the "Nonna Pops bed," as he had dubbed it earlier in the day.  We carried him back to his room, but Sunday morning, instead of wanting to snuggle in our bed for a while after waking up (as usual), Jack urged us to go to the guest room instead.  We politely declined.  At least we have an inkling that,  should he have a baby brother or sister who would need to be in a crib and in the nursery closer to our room, changing rooms and moving to a true big boy bed will not cause much emotional trauma for Jack.

Here's to hoping that by the time Jack has siblings who can toddle along after him he'll have turned his leadership skills toward more productive endeavors so that we won't end up on the CNN ticker on a slow news day.