Hi - very lighthearted in the grand scheme of things but annoying to me nonetheless!
We live in a detached house. We have a large front area of grass outside our living room window which is ours and we’ve worked on with edging, decorative stones, small shrubs around the outside etc. It extends down to the street footpath and beyond that is the road.
Next to that on one side is our drive. On the other side is a path that leads to a neighbour’s garden gate and on the other side of that, their bits of a ‘block’ of parking spaces for a very small terrace.
Neighbour has a child about 2 who frequently runs all over our front garden and around our drive. This is usually when she’s putting him into the car as, instead of carrying him from the house to the car (as I do with my similar aged child) she seems to stay finishing up in the house, whilst the front door is open and he runs off.
He usually runs from their door, across our front garden and onto our drive. It usually results in, Benny Hill esque, her running around our drive/cars trying to retrieve him as he runs off more.
We’ve had solar lights broken as one occasion he ran onto our garden and started pulling them out and the decorative stones get scattered most times.
Today, I get a notification that someone is at our door, checked it to see his gran and him are stood right up on our drive, practically at our front door.
He’s wanting to see the Halloween decorations we’ve started putting up (early I know, do it for fun for my own children!) Instead of removing him, to look from the path, as I absolutely don’t mind people doing and everyone is usually very respectful every year, she then lifts him up, nearly bumping him off my car in the process and standing nigh on top of my car, pointing things out to him which went on for ages before they left.
This is happening so many times now - I absolutely appreciate toddlers are fast and opportunistic (!) but I don’t think there’s too young an age to teach not wandering onto people’s property or take measures to stop it happening after the first few times!
If she happens to pull up on an evening and we’re also there getting ours out, she carries him out and into the house then.
Aside from the annoyance to me, I’m also worried he’s going to get hurt from the road or as our drive has a step on it he could easily fall on; the other day, our Ring captured him getting right across our drive, nearly onto next door’s the other way, whilst you can hear her asking where he’s gone. We both have big cars you can’t see past from her house.
Can you/would you say something to her - I don’t want to be a ‘nasty’ neighbour as I know how toddlers are but equally, it’s not somewhere I want children running about on or to feel responsible if he hurts himself?