One of those neighbors...

I am afraid we are becoming one of those neighbors. Again.
The ones who,when people talk about them, they roll their eyes. The ones who everyone immediately thinks of when something is amiss or just plain missing. The ones whose yard people shake their heads at.
When we first moved to Arizona and into our apartment, we were the only ones with an antenna sticking out of our balcony instead of a satellite dish. Our brand new house in Idaho was one of the last on the block to have sod. Or a fence. In Alabama, the wind would often blow the leaves into the neighbors yard before we could rake them up. And here, it is our first experience with a cul-de-sac and my kids are still trying to figure out the rules. All yards are free to run around in, but that means my kids often cross the boundries and leave our stuff in others' yards or "accidently" pick up stuff that belongs to someone else.
Monday it snowed 17 inches and I got a call from one of the neighbors.
"The last time it snowed, my kids left the snow shovel outside, and now we can't find it. I've called everyone else in the neighborhood, and no one has seen it. Did your kids maybe pick it up?" I am pretty sure we are the first people she called, but I dutifully go out to the garage to look around.
Our garage is even more of a mess than our storage room but there is only our snow shovel shoved in one of the corners.
"Nope. I don't see any extra shovels here. But I'll ask the kids" I promise. I am a little smug. We are not the culprits this time.
But my hubris gets the best of me. I actually do ask the kids and Paris gets silent. Great. "Paris, where is the shovel?"
"We found it in the circle and we needed it to chip away the ice in the creek in the forest..."
His story goes on but it is clear that we are the offenders after all. Not only have my kids taken the shovel, but they have left it outside all week in the forest.
I make him get dressed and retrieve it with instructions to do a lot of apologizing when he hands it back and I make a mental note to bake an extra batch of cookies next time I bake.