Gratitude Post #18

Today, I am grateful for the wonderful neighborhood we live in.  I love our neighborhood and the wonderful neighbors that we have.  When Kevin and I were looking for a home in Phoenix thirteen years ago, we did not really have much of a clue as to what we were looking for besides the kind of house that we wanted, which for me, included a bathtub, since the house that we had in the Avenues in Salt Lake did not have a bathtub, but only a small shower.  I knew that I wanted a pool as well.  And grass.  A lot of homes in the desert southwest have "kitty litter" front yards, which is rocks that are low maintenance and don't require water, but you do need to rake the rocks regularly for your yard to look nice.  We found our house after Kevin was working here and looking while I was still living in Salt Lake, and we had to move quickly since it was a sellers market at the time.  We had Dillan as our only child at the time, and he was 1 1/2, so we were not thinking about schools at all.  But we found the perfect location for some great schools.  We are equidistant to the elementary school, middle school, and high school, which are all in walking distance.  The ward that we live in is amazing, but that really is for a different post.  What makes our neighborhood so great is the community that we have here.  A lot of neighborhoods in this day and age have people that come and go through their garages and do not see each other.  But here, we know all of our neighbors (and we are very glad that we have new neighbors next door), and every spring there is an Easter Egg Hunt with a golden egg as the major prize and a brunch, and then in the fall there is another gathering sometimes with a hay ride, and there has even been a band.  It was so fun to go trick or treating in our neighborhood and find more people that we don't see regularly.  One evening when we were out at a swim meet this summer, we came home to find our driveway flooded.  Neither Kevin or I could figure out what had happened.  As I was scooping the water out with a bucket onto the lawn (you don't waste water here, so I put it to good use to water the lawn) and as I was doing so, a car pulled up and a man came out that I hadn't met before that said that he had come by and seen the flooding, so he turned off the main water valve.  Who knows how much more water would have been wasted if not for our kind neighbor?  Our neighbor just to the north of us had a blood clot and was whisked away in a ambulance and we were glad to know them and be able to keeps tabs on them and Chloe and her friend made a get well poster for our neighbor that she loved and put in her hospital room until she returned.  And even though I apologize to them when our children get extra wild and crazy in the backyard, they tell me that they love hearing the sound of kids playing.  I know that Heavenly Father was guiding us to our home when we were searching for a new home.