Sass: Neighbors

We have moved into our new apartment and I find apartment living so sketchy. I never know what the "unspoken rules" are practiced in each new neighborhood, yet get the feeling that I am supposed to know these secrets rules and abide by them. Friday night I made the mistake of trying to unpack after the three youngest ones were in bed. I committed the worst sin in apartment living. I dropped a heavy glass jar on the kitchen floor. Big no-no. It didn't break...but oh the thud it made. As soon as it happened I wanted to hide. I wanted to knock on the floor and yell, "I'm sooo sorry!" Turns out, I didn't need to knock because I got my chance to apologize face-to-face. My downstairs neighbor bounded up the stairs (and I say bounded because he must have taken two stairs at a time from the sound and speed of his arrivial) and rapped on my door.
"That noise...what was it?!" he asked. I said, "I'm so sorry. I dropped a jar. It was an accident." He stood for a moment, in his boxer shorts, t-shirt and socks, blinking like mad at the room behind me. I could tell he had been asleep. I'm not a blinker when I wake up. Not even if I go from very dark to very bright...I may squint or even shut my eyes, but I don't blink rapidly. And for some reason it REALLY gets on my nerves when people do. You can fly up my stairs to interrogate me but you can't control your eyelids? WTF?
He said, "I have to go to work tomorrow and I sleep right under there." Again, I said, "I'm am truly very sorry. I'll try to be more quiet. It was an accident." Still, he stands there, blinking and finally says, "okay" and goes down the stairs. I don't understand, as we have the same floorplan, how he could be sleeping right under my kitchen...thus, he was sleeping in his kitchen?
I close the door and feel like shit. Skyler says to me (Skyler's 9), "Mom, was that guy in his underwear?" You'd have to understand that with four rambunctious children, everywhere I go I encounter people who aren't tolerant of children or my children's spiritedness. Believe you me, they are disciplined and they know their manners even if they don't always remember to practice them....they just also have ALOT of energy. So I constantly feel like Dennis the Menance...getting on people's nerves....too damn noisy.
On the flip side I am very tolerant of others who are noisy. I don't mind dogs barking. I just don't. I don't mind the shouts of kids playing even roughl, as long as nobody's getting hurt I'm cool. I don't mind our new neighbors (not in the apartment but in the house next door) who cuss out people who are "disrespecting me as a person" on the phone and then squeal out in their trucks. Don't care....nope....live and let live. Unless they are physically or verbally threatening me....I don't give a f--k.
Which leads me to this, my own unspoken rule for apartment living: We will be as quiet and as respectful of our neighbor's right to quiet-ness as possible with four children. This means I will go out of my way to take my kids to the park frequently to run off their energy as well as CONSTANT reminders to them that people live under us or as I tell Lukie, "People live under our floor." Lukie, who's 3, thinks mom has gone and lost her damn mind when I say that to him as he's a child who has always lived in homes where the only thing that was under us was dirt.
Part two of my unspoken rule is that in exchange for our respect to them, they have to try and be as tolerant of us as possible. They chose a downstairs unit fully knowing that an upstairs unit was above them that contained THREE bedrooms. Chances are real good that a family would be the tenants of the upstairs unit. And families often have young children.
Now I say that these are my unspoken rules because thus far they have been. They are my mantra when I get too stressed or as I tell my husband Phil, "too butt-clenched" about my kids and their noise level. I mean, I have flipped out because Skyler was walking too heavily on the floor. That's nonsense and I need to chill. He wasn't thumping, running or stomping. I'm just really too tense about all of this.
However, should an incident happen again or possibly, God forbid, a complaint to our landlords, my rules will be respectfully suggested to the powers-that-be or to our neighbors.
That all said, I miss having my own home dearly.