Dog in a nest

A few months ago  family moved into the house next to ours. For the most part it's been awesome having neighbours. Their kids love playing with Iago, they are always giving us gifts (mostly food, but sometimes I score fantastic homemade jewellery too!) and they help out with other random stuff - like assisting us to fill in the Hungarian census and telling us when we've left our car headlights on.

Unfortunately there has been one smallish downside to having neighbours. They make us feel guilty about not cleaning our house and the yard enough :( I don't know how they find the time with three kids and full-time jobs, but they always seem to be cleaning. If they're not washing their car, they're sweeping the driveway, and it feels like we hear their vaccuum cleaner through the walls every second day. Normally this wouldn't really bother us, but as we share a yard with our neighbours, we feel like grotty slobs every time we step outside and discover that they've been cleaning again while we've been inside doing nothing more productive than playing computer games and doing the occasional load of  laundry. Also, we feel guilty that our leaf strewn driveway is somehow dragging down their well-kept path.

So, in the spirit of neighbourlyness, we've tried to do more to keep things tidy. It's difficult as I don't really understand the Hungarian obsession with sweeping and raking everything ALL THE TIME. Honestly, even if all people have out the front of their homes is a small patch of dirt, you can bet money that it will be the most pristine dirt ever, full of rake lines and completely free of leaves and other clutter. I don't get it. What's the big problem with letting the leaves stay where they fall? 

Anyway, in spite of this objection, Daniel and I spent some time this weekend raking up the leaves in our yard (well, really only half the yard as our neighbours already took care of most of the work). It seems like every tree in Hungary has decided to shed its leaves over the past week so raking up was a pretty big job. But we managed it. The only issue was what to do with the big pile of leaves at the end. Seeing as we don't really understand why we gathered the leaves in the first place, we weren't entirely sure what the protocol was for getting rid of them...so we just made a big pile and shoved them under a tree.

Which brings me finally to the point of this post. I came home from work today to find Iago sound asleep in the middle of the pile of leaves. It was the cutest thing ever :) He reminded me of a little bird hanging out in its nest. Awwwww. It kinda made the whole raking thing worthwhile.

- Amanda