Monday August 4, I woke up feeling pretty good. Still had a runny nose, but the body aches and headache seemed to have subsided. I officially started school with the kids. I was only going to take four weeks off, but we took 6. I figure it will take these next four weeks to get us into a routine so that when school starts officially according to their school, they will already be in the habit of sitting down everyday. It seemed to go well, but boy do they forget a lot! Milo was very excited that I included him in this routine as well. We had a good day and a good dinner and a fun FHE. Then Scott went out to finish the front yard for the party the next day. Jaime and Alix helped. The others went off to slumber land, lucky them!
Tuesday August 5 was National Night Out. Our stake has always encouraged us to get involved in this and get to know our neighbors. We did it in our last neighborhood and had awesome results. So we did it this year too. I decided we were going to do it, Scott did all the work! We had 8 of the 21 houses show up. Sounds like a lousy turn out but it was awesome! There were 20 adults and 14 children. It was a fun little get together. There are three babies on the street all born within weeks of each other (Keri being one of them) and another 2 year old (10 days older than Afton) and a nine year old. My kids were in heaven! The old “meanies” on the block showed up and brought homemade ice cream. They became the instant favorites!! We started at 7. The police showed up at 8:30. Don’t worry, we had registered our party with the city and so they sent out a city official to talk to everyone and bring goodies for the kids. Boy did the kids have fun. They got police car pins that flash, pencils, stickers, pads of paper and flyers. They thought it was the coolest thing. Plus I got a cool bag that will make a great beach/swim bag since I was the “host”. We finally closed shop and said our last goodbye’s at 9:30pm. It was sooooo fun! Everyone kept saying ‘thank you for organizing something like this. We’ve lived on the street for X years and we didn’t realize how many wonderful people lived here.’ It makes the world seem like such a better place when you realize how wonderful the people are that live right next door, or down the street two houses. Some of the older families said how happy they were to see kids playing on the street again. It had been too long since little kids ran in the neighborhood.
So obviously it’s working now. Good for you to do National Night Out! I didn’t even realize it had come and gone…our stake/ward doesn’t even mention it. But we are pretty close to the people on our little block. It is so nice to have good neighbors!