I’m wondering if I’m suffering from a strange sort of nostalgia. This summer I’ve really had a chance to observe what it is like living in a subdivision with lots of kids. What I’ve seen is evidence of a pack effect, no actually more of a swarming effect. These 5, 6 and 7 year olds wander around the subdivision stopping here and there at people’s houses to play with kids. These swarms have come to my house to play with Alec. I don’t know some of these kids, they come in our yard and start playing with the toys. I’m in the kitchen and I see this 9 or 10 year old call his mother on a cell phone and ask to get in our pool. Did anyone ask me? Did anyone ask Alec or ask if he should ask him mom? Nooo. I look out the window again and I see kids taking buckets of water out of the pool and dumping it in the sandbox. I say please don’t put any more water in the sandbox, it has enough water in it. Alec calls to me that people are putting water in the sandbox, I look out the window a while later and the sandbox is now a pool of water. I tell everyone to stop putting water in the sandbox or they will have to leave. They look at me annoyed. Later I see kids flipping over the kiddie picnic table on the yard, I tell them to stop. And so on, it seems like everyday I have to tell kids to not do this and not do that. Is it just me but when I was a kid if a grown up who wasn’t my parent (especially at that age) told me not to do something, I listened. I seem to remember all my friends listening when my parents told them something. Granted we didn’t listen to our own parents very well but we sure listened to someone else. These kids don’t seem to listen to anyone. I hate it because I’m starting to feel more like the neighborhood cop than June Cleaver. It’s not just one group of kids either, it seems to be kids everywhere in the subdivision. I wonder if it’s from them being allowed to wander at will without any supervision. Some of these 5 year olds aren’t even sure where their house is, they just to know to follow the bigger kids to get back home. Alec gets frustrated because he’s not allowed to wander like they are but no way is he ready for that kind of responsibility or maybe rather that kind of chaos. It’s a strange experiment in child behaviour as I listen to the kids out the kitchen window. They don’t know I’m there and so I hear all kinds of interesting tidbits. I’ve heard from one of Alec’s friends that I’m mean because I don’t let Alec do all the things they want to. Then a few minutes later, I hear that friend saying to another friend, “gimme that bucket, gimme that bucket” and then I hear Alec say to her, “say please”. These help reinforce that I am making the right choice homeschooling.

I think kids today (ack I’m sounding like an old fogie complaining about today’s generation) need some accountability. Neighborhoods should have close connections so that way kids might think twice about their actions because it might make its way back home. Then maybe Officer Mom wouldn’t seem so strange to these kids, we’d all be “regular moms”.