What's rotting in your kitchen?

So I personally think I live in the best neighborhood ever. It seems like everyone is a young family with kids, we have a community pool and playground and there's plenty of places for kids to ride their bikes. If you live in Vegas you know good neighborhoods are hard to come by. With this being a 24 hour town people work all hours. But in our neighborhood it seems more like a flashback to the 50's. Most of the houses have a Mom who stays at home and a Dad who goes off to work. You can find kids all the time playing in the street and everyone waves hello. I love it here. We bought our house out here hoping this is what it'd be like. It was different when we bought our other houses. They were for us. This one was for our new baby girl. We talked about how she could ride her bike to the pool with her friends and play on the paseo. But in all that we hoped we'd have great neighbors but didn't really have a definite idea of what that would be. We had great friends that we knew would come over all the time so we didn't really need to worry about neighbors that much. Until I met some of them. We have become good friends with 3 families in our neighborhood. We all have kids the same age and we all really like each other. Husbands and wives! We hit the neighborhood friend jackpot when we met ours. Same values, same likes and we have a great time when we get together. I never really thought about how friday and saturday nights would be different after we had kids. Before kids we'd meet friends, eat or go dancing. After kids your home on the weekend unless you can afford to pay a sitter $10 an hour. So one night the kids were all playing and it was time for dinner and we started talking about going somewhere. We decided it was way to much effort with 5 kids. So someone said "i have some asparagus that's going to go bad, I have some potatoes to use and someone said I have some chicken." and so 'What's rotting in your kitchen' tradition was started. Now on a friday or saturday night when no one has anything planned we get together for a couple hours of playtime and dinner. These nights have become such an important part of my family life. The neighbors became friends and now part of our family. There is nothing like thinking you've got nothing on and then spending a couple hours with some good friends.