Cookies

A couple weekends ago, we had four teen and pre-teen girls come over and help us make cookies for our new neighbors. We were looking for ways to meet our new neighbors, to begin getting to know them and to begin sharing a bit of our lives with them.

We had a great time with the girls making cookies and decorating goodie bags. We decided to make cookies only for the apartments in our building. As it turns out, there are 24 apartments in each building, and we are the seventh and final building. That means that there are 168 apartments here! We made sugar cookies from the Real Simple December 2009 issue and some devil's food cake chocolate chip cookies from one of the girls' recipes. We also got some Hershey's Kisses and Reese's peanut butter cups to fill the bags. Michael worked on printing business cards with our contact information on them.

We went out on the following Sunday afternoon to give the cookies to our neighbors. The first two doors we knocked on had no response, but we were welcomed warmly at the third door. We chatted with our neighbor there for a fifteen minutes or so before we moved on to our other neighbors. Most doors stayed closed, and we left our little bags on the doorstep, hoping they'd find them soon. Of the people we met, most of them talked to us from cracked front doors or behind screen doors, suspicious until we explained we were neighbors just saying hello. Even then, people seemed confused--one girl asked if she should pay for the cookies.

There's still another 6 buildings worth of people we haven't met. I'm feeling a little bit the way I did my first week in XZ, unsure how to connect with people. We might need to make a lot more cookies...