Our daughter lives in a new housing development in a

Our daughter lives in a new housing development in a growing suburb. Most of the couples living in her area are young professionals that are starting their families. My daughter and her husband recently had their first child so my daughter is home on maternity leave. She has been going for walks pushing the baby in the stroller. She reports that most driveways have a stroller parked in them and there is play ground equipment in the back yard. She has met many neighbors on her walks. Everyone is quite friendly and before long they are pointing out their key boxes to my daughter, in case she would ever need anything and the neighbors are not home.

I went to visit my daughter and to see my first grandchild. They were just going to go for a walk when I arrived so I went along with them. My daughter introduced me to several of the neighbors that were outside with their children or doing yard work. In our twelve block walk I counted ten pregnant women. My daughter laughed and said that there were probably twenty more in the other direction. As we were walking I noticed several fake rocks that people use as key boxes. I mentioned to my daughter that I hoped she was being less conspicuous with their key boxes. She laughed and told me about the multiple neighbors that had pointed our where their key boxes are located in case she needed to get in their house. She was amazed how trusting everyone is. She likes that feelings, but on the other hand she does not want her neighbors in her home when she is not around. She has been telling people that they have not invested in key boxes yet. She thinks that she will wait until she knows one neighbor really well and will give them a set of keys, rather than have a spare set in one of the key boxes. This way if they needed to have the neighbor access their house they could. We laughed that with everyone knowing where the keys are it did not even make since to lock the houses.

I told my daughter the story about her dad and I having our spare keys in a box that looked like a rock. We placed the rock in with our landscaping rocks by the front door. One night our friends dropped us off at our front door after a night out and drove off. Neither of us had our keys with us. We had to crawl around on the ground picking up the rocks looking for the key box. We did a really good job of hiding the key; we could not even find it.