It's a BAG!

Our bus stop is at a fairly busy intersection in the morning. Ben, a typical 2-year old, has 100% energy in the morning, only 50% balance, and 0% sense of self preservation.  So, the trip to the bus stop usually entails me chasing Ben down the sidewalk ensuring that he does not walk into the street and/or off the sidewalk into the street.  A super relaxing start to the day!  (By the way, it's amazing just how many drivers are on their cell phones in the morning driving on residential roads and are completely oblivious to the flashing lights of a bus. Scary!)

Well, after about 3 days I was tired of that routine, so I thought I would distract Ben and/or Caroline by having them take the newspaper up from the sidewalk of our neighbor to located at the corner of the bus stop up to her doorstep.  I figured the neighbor (who we had not yet met) wouldn't mind, and it would occupy the kids for a minute while at the bus stop and they would be safely away from the street.

In what is still an amazing turn of events to me, it turns out that our neighbor had just started chemotherapy when we moved to the neighborhood, and she she came out one day to tell us that she was so grateful that she didn't have to trek all the way out to the street to get her paper in the cold winter weather. Our neighbor looked so tired that day, that I thought it would be nice to take our bus stop self preservation project one step further and leave our neighbor some little surprises on her doorstep from time to time (paper valentines or little flowers or something cheerful) to let her know we were thinking about her.  Over the past few months, we've had a lot of fun with this arrangement -- little notes from us sometimes, little notes for us sometimes. 

Today, the tables were turned on us.  Our neighbor left the kids each a bag with a some cookies and a little bunny palm pet.  You can imagine how exciting this was for the kids.  (It was like Christmas morning exciting.)  Ben cracked me up, though, instead of showing the gifts to his bus stop buddies, he screamed out, "I GOT A BAG!!!"  The old joke about the box being better than the gift still holds true!

My only worry (why would I worry when something nice happens?? I think that's the 'mom' programming kicking in...) is that the kids will now expect something nice as a reward when they do something nice for someone else.  I just want them to learn to be kind for the sake of kindness.  It's a hard lesson to teach.