I feel that as of late, I haven’t had anything I could brag about. Well, now I do. So I’m going to.

We have awesome neighbors across the street. He is always outside, doing something in his yard. The lawn is always mowed. The flower gardens are immaculate. Even during the winter, he stays on top of yard maintenance. Not only does he take care of himself during the winter, he helps us out too.

While CJ was working full-time, the neighbor would come over and snow blow for the kids and me. Even now that CJ is home, the neighbor will still do our driveway and sidewalk if his own is done and we haven’t gotten to ours yet.

I normally get him a little something at the end of the season, as a thank you. This year, as we are struggling a bit, I just made him a batch of cookies. I wanted to be able to thank him in any way I could for just being so amazing.

Later that afternoon, his wife came over to our house. They apparently had decided to do some spring cleaning and wanted to know if we were interested in their trampoline. She said it had been a while since their kids used it (they are high schoolers and older) and they wanted us to have it.

I asked CJ later, since he was the one who had answered the door, if he had made sure to say that the cookies were meant as a thank you, not a prompt for more. He just laughed and said, “You know they like to give stuff to the kids.” I agreed, because they have given things to the kids before – but those were things like outgrown tricycles and old basketball hoops. Not something like this.

Despite how he has always professed his dislike for trampolines, CJ graciously accepted. Then he set it up the very next day. I think he was genuinely excited about it. MJ was chomping at the bit to get on it. The girls thought it was fun, but didn’t really enjoy it to the same degree.

When he got up for school the morning after it was up, MJ wanted nothing more then to “jump” as soon as we would let him. Obviously it had to wait until he came home from school and had his lunch. But then he spent two hours outside. Just bouncing around. CJ took his computer out to the table to try to work while watching (as per mom’s orders), but then didn’t get much work done as he ended up jumping as well.

So thank you, my dear neighbors, for bring what I am sure will be hours of fun to our summer. We needed a pick me up.