Neighbourhood kids

Yesterday I chatted with our neighbours over the trash cans. The family next door consists of four loud kids and parents from different parts of the country. I love listening to the dialect mix in the youngest kids. The oldest daughter is 7 or 8, and while I was talking about cats and holidays with the mom, she asked her mom if she could go visit me and Min after lunch. Before the mom could reply I said we had other plans for the afternoon, blueberry picking that was.
A couple of months ago the 7 or 8 year old came ringing on our door, she was very polite and asked to come inside. I wanted to know if something was the matter, but she just wanted to chat and hang out. Shortly after she sat down, she pointed at a glass bowl and said "I see you have candy". I let her eat as much as she wanted, and the fact that the 7 year old didn't throw up, is a miracle. She sat on the bed in the guest room while I folded laundry, and she talked nonstop about her little siblings, her friends at school and her teacher who is so nice to her.

Min was outside making sandbags, probably thankful the kid didn't speak English. A week earlier another 7-year old used the one English word she knew (train) over and over again. Our neighbour's kid had just gotten a cell phone, and the alarm was set for when she had to go home for dinner. She ran all over the apartment to look for her boots when the phone rang. It took her a few seconds to sprint around the house and over to the neighbourhood house, and she yelled she wanted to come visit tomorrow and the day after and the day after as well. I smiled a little, knowing she would come to a closed door the following afternoon.

"Is that normal?" Min asked when the kid had disappeared. "Kids visiting grown ups without their parents or other kids to play with?" I shrugged, remembered I visited our tenants when I was a kid. I played a game on their computer, but it got boring pretty fast. I guess there are less restrictions on where kids can go in Norway, we don't have many kidnappings and the few sickos are decades between.