trouble on a pink princess bike

Let's pretend my life is normal, even quaint.  Picture it: fresh baked cookies on the cooling rack, a child neatly pressed heading off to an afternoon Birthday party with a gift and the cake, the adults off for a little browsing at the library, a cup of coffee, and a slow Sunday drive...all of that is true, well okay Beach wasn't neatly pressed but she was wearing clean-ish clothing.  

Anyway we came home after a nice hour out, like I said at the library & on a drive.  We pull in & there is that pink princess bike.  Which as Beach's parent's is a really strange thing to find in our driveway.  It was a mystery for about 17 seconds.  That is about how long it took me to walk through the front door and find this little girl inside my house. 

I found out her name is Nina and she likes chocolate chip cookies and her dad said she could come to Beach's and he said she could play with Beach's gold glitter even after I said we shouldn't.  So we let her stay and eat cookies since she seemed very comfortable at our house.  And there is a good reason she felt so at ease, when her brother showed up he explained she had been missing for an hour!  I had to chase her around the yard to catch her to make her go home with her brother.  She really wanted to stay here.  It was a little awkward considering I really have no true idea who she is but since she was going to be 'so grounded' I gave her one more cookie, put her on her bike, and waved good-bye.

Really?!?!?! 

And yesterday we were watching Holes when the Police knocked on the door to tell us there was situation with one of the neighbors (Crazy Jim) & gun shots (which were really fire works) and we needed to get to a secure location on the south side of our house until the gun issue was handled.  I would like to point out the Police were the only ones with actual guns and had one of them not been so good looking I would have been very scared watching the Cops, weapons drawn, sneaking around the place.  I might have not face booked the incident and unloaded the dishwasher... Wait, where was I going with this? Oh-yeah, nothing in our 5 years here on the little farm in the hood has ever made me think twice about locking our doors until I came home to find a home owner's worse nightmare, an unattended three year old girl standing in my kitchen petting my dogs.