I like to say money can’t buy good neighbors. Sure you can buy a nice house in a nice neighborhood, but you pay for the house and land not knowing your neighbors. Even if your have good neighbors, it may take time to build a relationship with them. Common interest help speed things up, perhaps you work for the same company, go to the same church, have mutual friends, or have children the same age. Kids really help speed things along because they see someone around their age and immediately want to play. So the question is asked, “Can I go play at their house?” or “Can they come in our house to play?” This requires you to make contact with your neighbors which usually ends up with you getting to know your neighbor.

Having good neighbors is what led me to send out an email to see if a few would be able to help move a swingset from one neighbor’s house to ours. Each offered back their schedules and said they would talk to another neighbor who wasn’t included on the email. When the time came to move the swingset we gathered and rounded up a few more neighbors who were just hanging out. In all six neighbors took the time out of their Sunday evening to lift a heavy swingset, carry it across the street, and help place it where our vandalized swingset had been. They didn’t ask for anything in return, they just acted neighborly. I hope to be able to return the favor to each one of them because that is what neighbors do. In the process all the kids came out to see the spectacle and I hope learned the lesson of being a good neighbor.

So thank you to my neighbors who helped or offered to help move the swingset, who gave us their swingset, or who put out the word that a swingset was available! Each and everyone defines what it means to be neighborly.

With the old, broken swingset laying in pieces all around me I felt sad. I realized part of the hurt feelings I had the day I saw this laying in a heap was for all the memories we had with the swingset. We had put it together as a family and played on it as a family. Then I realized we had made a few memories the night before as we began the process of moving the new swingset out of the neighbors yard. From a couple of my neighbors trying to help me figure out the best way to get it from one house to the other, to all the kids that helped move this piece or that piece. It is funny how we place our memories “in” things. We are afraid of loosing something or having to give something up because it holds memories. What we really are afraid of is forgetting our memories. We feel the only way to hold on to them, is to hold on to the things that remind us of them. What we realize when we deconstruct those things that our memories are in, we build new memories that carry the old ones with them. The memory of the vandalization will probably always be with us, but we will remember that it help us build new memories and strengthen the old ones.

Everyone is quiet, but my 3 year old has decided he wants to talk to me. I do my best to get him to use his “quiet” voice, which is still louder than I would prefer. To distract him I get him to start counting his fingers. One, two, three, four four. “Five” I whisper, “Oh yeah right daddy. five” he responds. He recounts his fingers getting up to five, holding his hand up to my face wiggling his fingers. He is doing a good job using his quiet voice and people around us don’t seem bothered. Then he says “Right, let’s count something else daddy. Lets count teeth.” Knowing this will keep him busy, I nod my head and smile. He responds by sticking his finger into his mouth, and the silence is broken abruptly.

I have no illusions that my kids will stay quiet through an hour of church on Sunday. With our first son, it was relatively easy to keep him quiet. We would sit next to my in-laws so he could rotate laps every few minutes, which seemed to keep him content. When our second son arrived things continued to go smoothly until he was old enough to annoy his brother, and be annoyed by his brother. Still, we were able to keep some type of separation between them with four adults. We did get to a point where my wife and I would split the kids up and arrive at church separately. I would sit with one son in the middle of the church, my wife would sit with the other in the front. When our third son came along we decided to change from the quiet 8 a.m. mass to the more kid friendly 10 a.m. mass. If our kids were going to talk and move around, it would not be distracting to the other parents trying to contain their kids. Our oldest son also could go to Sunday school, which helped keep the fighting and noise to a minimum.

Quiet is a relative term. My oldest son started a new tradition when we would eat. After saying the Lords Prayer my son would exclaim “Woo-Hoo”. We loved his enthusiasm so we encouraged it. One Sunday sitting in the third row back right in front of the priest we did the sign of the cross to which my son finished by exclaiming “Woo-Hoo”. After the initial shock, the priest started laughing. All the grandparents and parents around us came up to us after mass to say how cute that was. We were embarrassed, but we laughed the whole way home with him giggling in the back. Kids sitting still quietly for an hour is impossible, so you find a happy medium.

For those times when the little ones have a meltdown or think it is comedy hour with the people sitting behind you, there is always the trip to the back of the church. For each child this seemed to work for a couple weeks. Then they realized they could either see their mommy, or mommy could hear them. This mean’t either going down to the basement or walking outside. I made the mistake of going outside once on a sunny day. My second son was with me and he declared “Church is over lets play” before the door had even closed behind me. When I quickly returned inside the people in the back were all laughing and giving me the “I’m so sorry” look. So the church basement became the last stop before the car. Fortunately none of my kids wanted to go into the basement. It is generally dimly lit, and provides no line of sight to mommy. This is a blessing and a curse because once I get to the back of the church they would quiet down, but the trip back usually had them yelling “I don’t want to go downstairs”.

So here I am, sitting in church in what has been an unusaully quiet day. My oldest son is always quiet, my 5 year old tries his best and is generally sucessful. My 3 year old and 1 year old are the challenges, and most days the one year old has to go to the back more than the three year old. I would say the pattern is getting better. When my 3 year old was a year and a half he came into my beadroom with blood on his chin. He wasn’t crying, just told us he got an “owie”. We looked at his mouth to see where he had cut his lip only to see one of his front teeth were broken. The dentist tried to save the tooth, but in the end had to pull it out.

“I’m missing a TOOOOOOTH!” my son yelled out, “Oh no DADDDY! I am missing a TOOOOTH!”. My little trick to get my son to count to keep him quiet just took the inevitable turn for the worse. Everyone sitting around us started laughing, my two oldest sons were snickering, and my wife and I could hardly contain ourselves. “Daddy you are missing a tooth! Mommy, mommy, are you missing a tooth!?” The miracle of children is that they can be distracted easily most of the time. We distracted him to get him to quiet down until church was over. After we got to the car we all had a good laugh about what had happened. I looked at my wife and said “How could I have known asking him to count would have led to that?” She laughed and we went on to enjoy the day. Next time I will have him say the alphabet, nothing could go wrong with that right?