I was  working on a really boring blog post last week in my free time, which boiled down to about 1 sentence a day. I thought maybe today I'd finish and post, but something much more pressing is on my mind.

We moved from a very hip and happening neighborhood to a very sleepy one with a tragic lack of local businesses. Our closest coffee shop within a 1 mile radius is the nearby Dunkin Donuts. The newest restaurant of note getting ready to break ground and open its doors to the Independence Park neighborhood is Olive Garden.

But we didn't move here for hip and happening. We moved here for the kids, and man we didn't go wrong.

Take last Friday. After walking Bela and Mae the three blocks to school in the morning, our babysitter arrived to take Gillian off my hands. I hopped on the train and headed to work. I spent the day hablando español  and hopped that train back.

As I approached our house, I caught glimpse of Bela and Mae running around in circles in the front yard. They were waiting for their new friends to come over: a pair of 7 year old twins who visit the woman across the street every day after school.

The girls pulled up, exploded out of their car, and ran ahead of me with Bela and Mae into our house. They ran upstairs and played with Calico Critters. They ran downstairs and did puzzles and painting. Their dad came to get them and they burst into tears.

The girls and I headed to the kitchen to start dinner and someone came a-knocking at our back door. Enter the 12 year old boy from down the street and a friend of his from school. Four pairs of feet went running up the stairs again. They played with guinea pigs upstairs. They threw a bunch of crap around in the basement and made a mess downstairs. They ran outside.

The boys left for a Sox game, and the girls headed out to the front yard after dinner to clean the guinea pig cage.  This drew the attention of some other little friends of ours: the two little grand-daughters of one of our neighbors. They also have a guinea pig at home, so they sat in our yard, did some sidewalk chalking, and played with the girls and the piggies.

By this point I was thinking to myself how incredible this all was. We were hanging out in our yard, entertaining every child on the block, talking to parents and passersby alike. Could it get any better?

And it did. We met for the first time the little girl who lives three doors down. She is very close to Mae's age and owns an impressive array of dress up clothes. I know this because it took me the next 40 minutes to drag my kids out of their house.

I feel at times like I'm on the set of some very wholesome, strangely utopic family movie. I keep waiting for our house to get broken into, for someone to steal the junk out of our back yard, break the windows of my car. Snub me on the sidewalk.

But every day, something super duper nice happens around here. The neighbor lady bakes us two dozen cookies (and we eat them in 24 hours). We get invited over for playdates, sleep overs, fall festivals, bike rides. All of these kids were here before us, and yet none of them played together before. I honestly feel like Bela (and to a lesser extent, Mae) has brought this neighborhood together in a new way.

And how cool is that?