Kids These Days

The Army Man was playing with Laura a few days ago when he made a surprising discovery-graffiti on our fence. Graffiti is not unheard of in our neighborhood (we’re right by a middle school and a high school), and this graffiti seemed pretty tame compared to some stuff we’ve seen. What was weird about this was that the graffiti was done from inside our backyard. You read that correctly. Graffiti in my own backyard. Now that’s weird.

We have a decent sized fence around our backyard, and we padlock the back gate and one of the side gates. The other side gate we keep closed but unlocked since that is our way in and out of the backyard, and it gets opened several times a week. So a kid must have opened that gate, snuck into our backyard, and wrote on one board of our fence. I was a bit freaked out at the thought of some huge teenager in our backyard until the Army Man pointed out that it appeared the graffiti was done in crayon and it seems like they just wrote random letters. Still not cool, but not as intimidating.

When we first moved in, we didn’t lock any of the gates and kids would cut through our backyard as a short cut on their way to school, so we’ve definitely had kids in the backyard before. I still can’t believe that kids these days would feel brave enough to walk through someone’s fenced in backyard. I also can’t believe that I just wrote “kids these days”. I suppose I’m getting old. Soon enough I’ll be sitting on my porch shaking my fist at the kids and telling them to get off my grass. In the meantime, our plan to get a dog is starting to sound smarter and smarter.