Flowers and Trash

okay guys. I'm going to vent a little bit, so if you're not interested in hearing this... move along. Or, you know what, if you're a new-ish parent with a child, just take this into consideration PLEASE.

As you know, I'm an apartment manager. My complex is small, just 19 units, and we have a couple of nice little gardens that we are trying to get started; one in the front all along the building, and one inside our courtyard. Well, there are families that live here with children. I like all the families and every one pretty much gets along. Well, there are just a couple of children in particular who have decided to go out and make friends with EEEEVERYONE in the neighborhood. Good for them. I'm honestly very glad that they made friends. HOWEVER, I am not okay with them giving out the front gate code to all the kids in the neighborhood. The kids they tell the code to tell other kids and adults. So the whole neighborhood can get in. Which is not what we want. I have children running around here all day long. Some of them should be in school. There's a few of them that are 5-6 and they're just running around the neighborhood (mostly here) and they are destroying our gardens.

The kids will come inside the courtyard (which is not very big...) and they will play football or tag, and all thirty of them will run and trample all over the flowers and plants. "Play out front!" I have told them over and over. Well, guess what? As soon as I leave, BOOM. They're back inside. My residents are getting irritated, and some are even wanting to move because of this. Our courtyard looks like crap. It's all dead and gross. And all the apartments face the courtyard. So everyone can hear how loud these kids are.

Well, my darling husband came out one night after I had gone off to run some errands and he asked the kids (along with some adults who don't even live here) to go out front to play. "Oh we're just finishing up." One of the adults said, "Okay, finish up out front. I'm not asking. I'm telling you to." Clint tells them. Well, this is about the time when I get called. Clint tells me what's happening and continues to tell me that no one even went out front. Everyone stayed in the court yard.

I don't want to tell you how to raise your children. That's not my place. But I am going to ask all of you to please teach your children some respect and some manners. It's not okay to pick flowers on private property, and there are reasons why adults and authority figures ask children to do stuff. Like playing out front. It's so frustrating. My property looks like crap. My garden flowers are limp and some are completely ripped up. These kids are so disrespectful and destructive. They've messed with our sprinkler system, broken a sprinkler head, killed our grass and flowers, broken a part of our tree, and they leave their toys/shoes/trash all over the place! It's horrible. And I'm quickly loosing patience with it. I filled up an entire trash bag full of cookie wrappers, ziplock baggies, chip bags, band aids, and all sorts of other crap that those stupid kids have left around the property.

This is so stupid. This is how much trash I gathered out of just one of the area's in the front garden.

 I changed our gate code today, so hopefully this wont be as bad as it has been. Hopefully my poor garden perks up and lives. I don't freaking understand how some of these parents can just let their kids run around all day unsupervised. I had one adult come over and say "My nephew plays with the other kids here in the pool." I told her "Ma'am, we don't have a pool on this property." So then she just walked away confused and calling out for her nephew. I was shocked! Who does that!? I would like to know where my child is at all times, or at least know that my child is with another adult that I know and trust. Ugh, it just sickens me how some of the adults in my neighborhood genuinely seem like they could care less about their children. I don't know that to be a fact, that is just my opinion that I've gotten from observing what's been going on.