Respect

Chapter 23

"Man I knew life would be alright
But who could've known it'd be this good?
Oh and they tell me
It gets better, better, better, better
This is more than life
This is paradise."
Jeremih "Paradise"

Maia

Sandcastles can withstand a small breeze with an average foundation, but they come crumbling down into piles of wet sand when the tide comes in.

That didn't happen today because we built them a couple of feet away from the shore. When I say we, I mean: Joshua, Kyrie, Lauryn, and me. I just noticed how the first letters of our names follow the order of the alphabet.

Before we built sandcastles, Kyrie and I played football in the water. I was good; I should have played girls flag football in high school. We also got on the jet skis and went parasailing, but we had to go one at a time because someone had to watch the kids at the shore.

Anyway, I'm not a master at making sandcastles, but Kyrie came to the rescue when it came to making the windows and doors without making any cracks since we wanted to be fancy. We made towers and even a moat with a drawbridge like in the medieval times. The only difference was that instead of crocodiles being in the water, we had a sea turtle, a fish, and a starfish since they were included in a sand toy set I bought at Target. The kids ended up flooding the sandcastles, so we decided to knock everything down. It was bittersweet, considering all the time and effort we put into the project, but I did take pictures of our creation. After that, we began packing up because we had been at the beach all day and we were hungry. I also wanted to leave because I could feel sand getting in all the wrong places.

Lozza started whining because she didn't want to leave. If she was crying for no reason, I would have done the countdown which makes the kids hush up real quick, but I knew she was still curious about the beach. I assured her that we would come back in the future and we had to go home to change before we go out to eat. Her eyes lit up and she raced Joshua to the car.

That girl has been in love with food since she was a baby. She wasn't really chunky with the small rolls she had, especially with her getting in some exercise with all the crawling she was doing in the house and eventually running after taking her first steps. Lauryn still has those beautiful chubby cheeks that I will love forever because I can pinch them.

In the words of Wizkid, "We in Miami livin' La Vida Loca, ayy."

I decided that we should fly to Miami instead of going on the cruise. I wanted this trip to last two weeks max and the cruise would take at least 15 days because of the frequent stops in Mexico and the long voyage through the Panama Canal to get to Miami. Today marks a week since we landed.

Tomorrow, we're leaving very early in the morning to take a road trip to Cape Canaveral which is like an hour away from Orlando to visit the Kennedy Space Center. We already have Disney and Universal Studios in Los Angeles, so that's why we're not going to those places. After that, we'll stop in Winter Haven where LEGOLAND is and we'll stay over in a hotel for one night. Our final destination is Tampa and we're going to spend three nights there to go to Busch Gardens. We'll fly home from there with Southwest Airlines with only one stop in San Antonio.

Kyrie has really shown me that he cares by dropping everything he's doing to come with us. A lot of guys wouldn't do that and offer to handle all the expenses on top of all that. He really wanted to have a full blown argument over paying for the flights, hotel stays, restaurant checks, and other things we would have to pay for. We came to a compromise even though Kyrie wasn't happy about it. I agreed to let him pay for me and him, but I would take care of the kids' bills since they are my responsibility.