our back yard neighbour

Jason and I have lived here in this house for two and a half years. For those of you who don't know, we live in a new development - the kind of house where our backyard neighbour's kitchen, is less than fifty feet from our over sized, great room window.

When we moved here, we expected to get to know our neighbours, or at the very least, know their names. If you ever come to visit us, you will notice us talking about Tim and Anita, and Maria: they are our side neighbours (less than 10 feet either way). As for the others on our street, or in behind us, we have more descriptive names for them: MTS guy, the ones in so-and-so's old house, bungalow guy, green bungalow people, destructo's house, the ones who never open their blinds, and lastly our favourites...the people in behind us.

The descriptive name for the people in behind has evolved over the past year - thanks in part to their ever-entertaining actions...and also to our imagination.

*here we go again, it's time for me to add a small explanation here: We have tried to learn most of our neighbours names. Last Christmas, we hand delivered Christmas cards with our names, and location on them to each house. We have also made small talk across the yards - but their names remain a mystery. We do know that MTS guy is Rob, but we don't know his wife's name (more on that in a future post) or his children's names...and because I snuck a peek at the enumeration list when I voted last time, I know where John lives.

Ok, back to the story...

The family in the house behind us consists of a mother, a father, two young girls under the age of 6, and a family cat under the age of one. The mother runs a daycare from her home (except for two weeks in July when the whole family left for a vacation), and dad appears to work a 9-5 job. For the first while, we didn't have a descriptive name for this family - until they built a wonky fence. They then became the wonky fence people, whose fence did not provide enough privacy to keep the colour and style of the mother's underwear private. So then their descriptive name had more to do with her underwear and Saturday evenings than anything else.

Now all the while we are getting to know this family through (even the intimate details we didn't care to know) the windows, we recognized that the mother/wife/woman/day care worker was unstoppable! This woman is constantly on the go - she does everything! I see her washing her windows - in the middle of the week, in the middle of the day! She starts the BBQ for dinner as soon as the last day care bud is gone - and she makes the family dinner by herself! I once saw her laying on her hammock on the deck, reading a book, and BBQing! Did I mention that she also acted as the lead carpenter/architect/foreman during the building of said deck? She gets her hair done every six weeks - cut and colour!

So now we have adopted a new descriptive name for the family in the house across the back from us. According to a particular person who visits us here, everyone household should have one of these...A STEPFORD WIFE.

Yup, and when they went for two weeks of vacation time in early July, we think that the husband was having her motherboard updated.