I cannot believe what I read this morning!

Today I received a letter from the council inviting me to a meeting regarding 'Anti Social Behaviour'. I shall quote from the letter - " I have received reports of anti social behaviour complaints against members of your household. The allegations are noise nuisance and intimidation of the household members of X XX Road".

The only members of my household are myself & Lillie. What has angered me so much is that since the beginning of this year I have endured countless nights of being woken up by my next door neighbours at 12/1am. I live with depression and a good nights sleep makes all the difference to how I function. I have now drafted up an agenda of complaints only to 'discuss', not to 'report' as such at this imminent meeting which will demonstrate how tolerant I have been over the period of time since they moved in back in mid 2007. What also angers me is that both members of the next doors household have worked during the day, but now they have a 2 week old baby do they expect silence during the daytime now the new mum stays at home?

Yes, Lillie is a fairly noisy child who laughs, cries, has temper tantrums, sings & plays during the day. For much of the time she is happily occupied, as you can see from our blog. I certainly do not allow her to be excessively loud at home or outside of it. And she is never impolite or unfriendly towards our neighbours. In fact I am frequently told how lovely she is. As for my intimidating the neighbours, well thats a joke in itself. If knocking at someones door to politely ask that they move their rubbish bins away from the outside of my house because they are blocking the public footpath as intimidation, then I have the meaning of the word totally wrong. In fact I endured a threat from the new mum in which I responded in a manner that stated I certainly do not scare easily!

I shall confess now that at times I have been a 'loud mouth' and have got into fights which may have come across as me being an intimidating individual to those who do not know me. But these days I work very hard to avoid this, as I wish to chase a career that does not tolerate any aggressive behaviour. Anyhow, I would argue that I am not naturally aggressive, just that I have endured moments in my life where I have had to stand up for myself in the face of adversity. Afterall, I am still only human & will not allow someone to abuse me or my children in any way without my responding back.

I just feel the truth regarding these apparent complaints against Lillie & I have been exaggarated and I am looking forward to this meeting. I now have the opportunity to put my case across. I feel on one hand that I am being discriminated against for HEdding Lillie, as there would be hardly any noise coming from our house for most part of the the day if she was in school. On the other hand I feel completely outraged that there are adults out there who are also parents, yet at the same time some can be so spiteful to young children within their own community.

Some people in this world never cease to amaze me at times & unfortunately its sometimes in a very ugly way... Thank God for the beautiful souls out there that restore peoples' faith in mankind...