The sh!t leaves the diaper for the fan

Let's jump on Coolio's "Fantastic Voyage" time machine and move ahead to one year later. Our pride and joy is crawling up a storm and aside from smiling ear to ear over her discovery of this newfound mobility you're just relieved that she is developing normally and all you can think about is how much she is learning about being a human.

To give some background for this stage of the story, our child is in daycare. She wakes up, on average, at 6:30 in the morning and is out of the house by 7:15 am and in that time frame she has to get dressed and fed, which for a one year old is no quickie. By the time she was done, if Mom wasn't ready to leave we'd play on the floor for a few minutes. They didn't arrive back home until 6:30 in the evening and after dinner and a bath there was probably 30 minutes of play time before bed. If you can do the math our less than 20lb baby had, at most, a maximum of 45 minutes to potentially crawl on our floors, but if you know a baby you know there are long stops and starts to explore and play. If I had to say she may have actually crawled on our floors about 15 minutes a day.

Those 15 minutes and admittedly more on the weekends, sent TD and TDA in to such a tizzy that the banging led to slamming common area doors in our faces, making comments under their breath as we passed by, finger pointing to friends and eventually letter writing, which led to my first experience with a verbal attack from TD. The letter was left under our door so the sleuth in me can easily assume that TD never filed a formal complaint with her landlord, the Boston Housing Authority, which would have been sent to our management company and the board of trustees. Instead I was told we were being rude by "making unusual noises at unusual times" and that "we should show some more respect". I can understand that it's unusual to somebody who doesn't work that somebody would actually try to start their day before 9am, but when the rest of society is typically up by 6am you're going to have to deal.

Now I admit this was a mistake, but I let my ego get the better of me. I took the letter and turned it over and drew a stick figure set of directions on what a baby is, what a crawling baby does and what their parents do to protect them from being hurt and ended my little comic strip with the quote "Your behavior is beyond childish. Stop harassing us." and proceeded to tape it to TD and TDA's door. Within 30 minutes TD pounded on my door and began shouting at me although the first thing out of her mouth was "You're right the behavior is childish....." and for ten solid minutes went on a rant like no other. The first thing I said to her, after hearing about her heart attack, other chronic illnesses, the fact that she's live there for 11 years was "If you need peace and quiet to comfortably live your life then perhaps living in the city wasn't the best decision" which is when I got "You're the one with the family. You should move. Families don't belong in the city." Knowing I was not speaking with a rational person at this point I repeated "stop harassing my family" and eventually closed my door.

Their banging became an obsession and that's when I brought the management company in. They advised us to contact the police should they do it again. So on July 19th, my birthday no less, with a couple of guests over to celebrate my 33rd I am on the phone with the Boston Police Department explaining the situation.