Block Party

This August marks 5 years since we moved into our house. And last weekend, for the first time, our street had a block party. It's hard being a non-cud-de-sac street, but we made it work. Our awesome neighbor two doors down got the ball rolling and did a lot of the organizing. Eric and I had quite an adventure with her and her children trying to find the place to pick up the police barricades to close our street (her GPS told her to stop in the middle of I-75). But in the end, several neighbors showed up, cooked out, played cornhole, and had a great time.

(I love how pretty much everyone in this picture is under the food tent)

We recently inherited a larger kiddie pool from a friend and coworker of mine (this was my lament a few weeks ago-- our kiddie pool was tiny). Cate loves it. We put it out front for the block party so that other kids could jump in. It turns out, the dogs on our street were all about cooling off in the pool.
Our fun neighbor, Abby, hung out with Cate by the pool for awhile since it was mostly her adorable dog, Brumby, that kept jumping in with Cate.
It was great to finally meet some of our neighbors that we've only seen in passing these last five years. I think in our culture today, we really don't get to know our neighbors. We keep to ourselves and prefer sitting in the privacy of the back deck than the people-watching of the front porch. We move into our houses thinking we already have friends and that we'll just invite them over to socialize with instead of walking across the street to talk to a neighbor. A sense of community was definitely sparked by the block party and our neighbors are already talking about organizing some Halloween fun and perhaps a winter progressive dinner. We love where we live, but now we have reason to love it even more!

~Melody :-)