Florida Family Time

Tony and I just got home from Peru, and I was sitting down to write about our trip when I realized I never finished writing about our last trip. Such a blog slacker.

After our visit to Costa Rica, I ditched Tony and popped up to Florida to sign the paperwork on our new house and hang out with my family. We found a cute furnished home on the golf course, just a block from my parents, and we’re hoping it will be a hit with snowbirds seeking a seasonal rental. It was in pretty good shape, but the previous owners had rented it out for a long time without much TLC.

I did a cursory inventory of the house and hauled a lot of bedding, dishes, and random objects to a local thrift shop and the garbage. The sellers seemed to have dumped all their unwanted junk at this house before signing it over to us.

I have mixed feelings about owning a home in a 55+ neighborhood, even if it bills itself as a “fun and affordable active adult community where everything you could possibly want, need, or dream of doing in your retirement years is just a golf car ride away.” The town makes a few exceptions for buyers who are (just barely) too young for the ‘hood. When I got my Villages ID, the community center workers made me feel like a teenager. “You’re so youuuuuung!” they crooned.

We decided to task my mom with the job of getting the place rent-worthy. She found many ridiculous former “fixes,” such as shutters hung upside down and kitchen drawers reinforced with a paint stirrer and a broken yardstick. She swore she could make the repairs and decorate by the end of September. The only stipulation: “I have a vision, and you don’t get to say anything about it.” Hmmm… I don’t know many contractors that include a clause like that. But hey, she’s doing it for free and she has a knack for this. We call her “business” La La La Decorating. (You know, like when you hold your hands over your ears and say, “La la la, I can’t hear you!”)

Lucky for me, my whole family decided to spend spring break in The Villages. My sister, Kate, and her gang drove down from Michigan, and my brother, Mike, and his clan popped by Florida en route from Korea to their new home in Abu Dhabi. My other sister, Megan, and her family recently moved to Florida, so they drove about five hours to join the fun.

That was a whole lot of chaos at my parents’ house, so I hauled all seven nieces and nephews up the street to my vacant house. They played with legos and army men, made slime, wrestled, and colored. We had an epic pillow fight with the many trash-bound pillows left by the previous owners.

For my Super Auntie moment, I had planned a special presentation about Costa Rica. The little cuties all sat at my feet like they were in circle time at school while I shared fun facts about the different places we visited and showed pictures on my phone of the animals we spotted on our trip. At the end, I leaned down and whispered, “Guess what? I brought some of the animals back for you.”

They paraded to the living room, where my oldest nephew, Nico, had helped me set up an exhibit of stuffed animals. He made a sign and positioned the sloths, bats, squirrel monkeys, white-faced monkeys, armadillos, and a macaw on the TV cabinet. He and I had come up with a system for each kid to draw a number, and then they would go in that order to choose their animal to keep. I worried that they would fight over a specific animal or get upset if they didn’t get the one they wanted, but it all went smoothly. Their cherubic smiles swelled my heart and eased my distress at spending a cubic ton of cash on amazon to get those toys.

Of course, there was the requisite dancing in the Spanish Springs town square (accessible by golf cart from my parents’ – and, gulp, now our neighborhood).