How do you all get to know your neighbors? We know our most immediate neighbors (right next door and across the street), but not the ones farther down the road. I imagine that going for walks would help, but I’m thinking we’re going to have to put that off ’til warmer weather. We don’t do well with the cold but, even if we wanted to go ahead and get out and get some fresh air, I’m not sure that even a BOB stroller would handle some of the winter precipitation we keep finding all over our street! (Our street doesn’t seem to get salted/de-iced/plowed well, for some reason, even when the rest of the neighborhood is pretty clear.)
We are, though, working on getting to know some people outside of our neighborhood. We don’t really know anyone at church yet, but we have found one (finally!) to attend regularly, so hopefully that will happen soon. And I went to one Mom’s Night Out on Thursday (with a group to the east) and have another tomorrow night for a more local (but less Christ-centered) group. So we’ll see what happens. The girls have friends at dance classes, too, but none of them really live nearby.
What do you do? How do you meet/get to know the neighbors? How do you meet/get to know people in general?
We need to do a much better job of getting to know our neighbors. We are going to have new people moving into the other side of our twin, so I am really going to make an effort to be friendly and sociable, by bringing over dinner and inviting them over to our house. I’ve also joined a playgroup in the past to meet new people, but never really made any lasting friendships there. This is something we really need to work on and is one of our goals. We know that God wants for us to be in community with others and we need to do a better job.
I am a bit timid in that area, too. When I was younger, everywhere we moved (which was lots), I had a Tupperware party in the first month or two and invited neighbor gals and wives of my husband’s coworkers (I actually became the TW lady in several of those locales so I could get to know the neighbors!). In later years, I made it a point to take bread or other baked goods to the neighbors to introduce myself and our homeschooled children to the neighbors. When we lived in the country, I did the new-baking thing, then every Christmas we’d take cookies to 13 local families (and that was quite a drive out there!) — we didn’t see them again most of the year, but they knew we were there. One winter early on, when snow was several feet deep on our loooooong farm driveway, a local deputy plowed all the way up to our house. It was HIS way of being neighborly back–and I have to believe it was related to the hand I reached out first.