Visits make life better.

 

March 15, 2022

Visits make life better.

We always enjoy having visitors come and stay with us, but recently we were especially excited to have our friend Dakota and her two young daughters Sloane and Norah come to stay with us from their home in New Mexico. Dakota’s husband, Andy is an Air Force pilot who is currently deployed so we offered to have Dakota and the girls come and stay with us for three weeks, to help out and to get a chance to spend time with what are the closets thing to grandchildren that we have.

Dakota was raised in Key West and was once upon a time Kathy’s mentee as part of the Take Stock In Children program and we have not only stayed in touch, but she and her family have become like family to us, so we were thrilled that the girls were making their first visit to Key West and getting to see the ocean for the first time.

We are certainly not used to having young children around full time and I must admit it was quite a handful, my admiration and appreciation for mothers and Dakota in particular rose significantly. Unless napping, they are a constant force of nature and require continued surveillance, but the rewards of having them around far outweigh the disruption. It was just awesome.

Of course, our regularly scheduled Key West life continued unabated. We were still active doing our normal activities, there were any number of fun things happening that we did in addition to all the excitement of having out of town visitors. This has been the second year that I have been attending Key West High School lacrosse games, both on the boys and girl’s side.

I really have enjoyed going to and photographing the games. It is great practice for my high-speed action photography. In addition, it is so fun to see so many of our friend’s kids who play on each team. The girls team has been especially enjoyable because they have had a terrific season and are quite good.

I also attended an event at the Studios of Key West that featured authors Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan and Hilary Jordan discussing the recent book that they edited called “Anonymous Sex”. The book features short stories featuring sex from a number of notable writers who are not identified. 

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But the most significant thing that we have been dealing with is the fun visiting children who were here. We did all kinds of fun stuff, including spending quite a bit of time playing in our small swimming pool. We also took the kids to Higg’s Beach where they saw and played in the ocean for the very first time ever.

We also took a visit to the Key West Butterfly Conservancy, where we had the pleasure of experiencing the thousands of butterflies, birds and the two flamingos that call the place home. It is always fun and beautiful to visit the butterfly garden.