Our Neighborhood

So the kids who live next to us are now old enough to do things like cat sit. They've offered their pet sitting services to the neighborhood, and we had them watch the cats when we were out of town. The brother and sister are a team, so they both do the job together. When we asked them what they charge, they suggested an absurdly low rate so I suggested something a little higher. They said okay, and the girl said "Wow, that's really generous." The rate was 2/3 of what I used to pay our adult cat sitter when we used to actually go out of town for meaningful amounts of time (like, before we had kids).

So anyway, the kids watched the cats and played with them and did a good job. Because they live right across the street, their Mom can also keep an eye on our house or help out if anything were to go wrong. When we came back into town last night, you know what we found? We found 1/3 of our cash still there on the counter, with a note from them that said that we had paid them too much and they couldn't take that much. So they had basically taken only 2/3 of what we had said we'd pay them.

The girl is getting old enough so that she'll be ready to babysit in a year or two. I'll have her sit for the kids any day.

Things like this are what would make it really hard to leave our neighborhood.