Did you know these three cute little faces are the heads of a top secret, most wanted, neighborhood ruining crime ring!?! This is part of their induction ceremony where you have to hijack an airplane…

Are you done laughing yet? No? I’ll wait……

According to my neighbor my 7 year old niece and my 8 year old son are extreme criminals and the police will be here to take them away any day now. They insist that Deidra and Noah stole a pirate statue from their garden and did something with it. Sure, they just shoved a statue that is half their own height into their pockets and walked away laughing hysterically at their own criminal genius!!

Time to lock them away!

The neighbor asked on the day the statue went missing because he noticed the kids near that area. The statue was there when he left for work and gone when he returned home. The kids were in my driveway. Which is near, but not close to the precious garden statues. Not only that, they were gone most of that day, leaving for day camp at 8:30 am and returning home around 2:30 pm.

This explanation was obviously not enough for our neighbors. They insist it was our children. And this happened maybe one week after we moved in. Sure, I get it new kid on the block, gotta give him a hard time. Could we be any more 4th grade immature!!!!?!?! Seriously.

At first I figured it wasn’t a big deal and the neighbor would eventually find his statue precariously placed in someone else’s garden, probably doing something that looked naughty. But, that hasn’t happened yet and the neighbor has managed to tell everyone on our street about the little crime ring.

Little did he know that my boys have a natural talent for making friends. Recently there was a large group of kids sitting out front just chittering away about non-sense. One boy said, “Neighbor X told my dad that Noah and some girl stole stuff out of his yard.” and before any of my boys could spout a defense, another boy said, “That’s impossible. Kid Y was saying how it got broken when they were playing basketball and they just tossed it in the big green trash cans out front.”

And I bet you can guess where Kid Y lives. I surely don’t have to connect the dots for you there. It’s pretty easy to figure out what happened. If this keeps up though I am considering telling these neighbors that I’m preparing a defamation of character suit against them. It’s getting a little out of hand and I’m running out of neighborly patience.

So, watch out …. this crime ring is coming to garden near you! Do you know where your garden statues are!?!