Noise.

[rivka]

Several times in the last two months, we've gotten a call from the woman who rents the studio apartment beneath our house, asking us to keep Alex quieter because she is sleeping. It particularly bothers her when Alex runs back and forth along our main room, or when Alex has a friend over and they're running around together. Each time, we have taken Alex outside or blocked her in so that she can't run around.

All of these complaints have happened after 9:30am, and usually much later. Today, for example, she called at 10:30. I ran into her outside later, and finally asked what her work and sleep schedules are. She said that she works from 3:30pm to midnight, and "the earliest I'm ever awake is 11:30."

My question is this: when someone works a late shift, is it reasonable for them to expect their neighbors to keep nighttime-style quiet levels during the day? So far we have responded as though it is, and I do have sympathy for her need to sleep. But I am also starting to feel annoyed about it.

Morning is the biggest part of Alex's day - in the afternoon, there's often less than two hours between the post-nap snack and dinner preparation. Morning is when kids her age socialize. If we're supposed to be quiet until at least after 11:30, that means never being able to host playgroup. "Active play belongs outside" is a hard rule to enforce with a toddler - they tend to be active all day long, or to switch back and forth between quiet and active play in short bursts, and they need to be active even when the weather is too bad to play outside. We do go out a lot - the children's museum, the science center, the library, (if weather will ever permit it again) the park, and just for long get-out-of-the-house walks in the neighborhood. But we can't always go out all morning long.

The rest of our house is not really set up for playing. Alex's room is on the third floor, at the top of an extremely steep and dangerous flight of steps. It doesn't have much floor space, and we don't keep any of her toys up there - it's just for sleeping. The second floor has our bedroom and study, which are cluttered with furniture, cords and cables, and a million things she's not supposed to mess with. Our indoor play space is pretty much the living-dining room, period. (We have a back courtyard for outdoor play space, but I know from bitter experience that sound travels very well from the basement apartment to the courtyard, and presumably vice versa.)

So: should we require Alex to be sedentary whenever she's indoors before lunchtime? Or is our neighbor expecting too much? I'm looking for honest opinions here, and not just back patting, because I fully recognize that my prior experience with this neighbor is coloring my view of the situation. I just keep thinking, "She's got a lot of damn gall, to be complaining to us about noise."

Comments

[saoba.livejournal.com]

I've been a shift worker and I understand the myriad hassles of sleeping when others are awake. Although frankly in my case the most annoying part was that everything was closed when I was awake and not at work. Did you know it's hard to get your hair cut at two am?

That said, she's asking you to curtail the activities of your family to accomodate her schedule. Keeping noise to a minimum in the main room of your house for one half of your child's waking hours isn't reasonable.

Look, the fact is that most of the world runs on a daytime schedule. The city is going to do construction work- during daylight hours. People are going to walk along the sidewalk out front talking and laughing- during daylight hours. There's going to be traffic, noise and everyday activity. Such, my young onions, is the life of the shift worker. You learn to sleep through the noise or you shift your sleep schedule (if she was in bed by 2 am she'd be getting in 7 hours of rack time before 930) or you don't last on a shift work job.

Not letting hordes of toddlers run around doing the elephant dance at six am- reasonable. Not letting one child act like a child for over one half of the day in her own home- not so reasonable.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Former graveyard shift worker agrees: damn tootin'. When I worked from eight at night to four or five in the morning, I was not infrequently woken from my daytime slumber by children playing next door, trucks driving up and down the street, construction work, or the sun. If you're gonna work that kind of shift, you have to learn to cope. Telling the rest of the world to STFU may be viscerally satisfying for a few minutes, but the only way to get good sleep is make your own adjustments in your own personal space.

... feh.