Florida - Monday May 1st

Today we went swimming in the morning and got some really cute shots of the kids. The stairs on the pool is great as Micah doesn’t really want to swim (surprising as he goes all the time with Gammie at home). We did get the life jacket on him and get him to swim a little bit on his own. Kendra was enjoying getting in and out of the lip around the edge of the pool and sometimes standing on the top step. She was trying to drink the water too. Not sure why she would want to do that as it’s partly salt water.

Today is Jamie’s 33rd Birthday. We had Chris and Patti’s family over for lunch and Jamie got his birthday gift from them. It was a game that Jamie and Chris like to play. They wrapped it in tin foil (quite creative I’d say).

Later in the afternoon we took a boat cruise with Captiva Cruises at McCarthy Dock in Captiva (this is the next island with only a small bridge that links the two). We were a bit early and were hoping to do some fishing but we weren’t allowed to fish on the dock so we had ice cream instead to pass the time. The boat cruise was about 1 ½ hours long and took us up the water between Captiva Island and Pine Island for dolphin watching. We had one pod come over on the way there and stay for quite a while. They were jumping a lot and we got a lot of good pictures. There were two other times there were dolphins with us but only for a short time and only one or two dolphins. The guide was telling us that the females stay in pods but the males go off on there own or with a buddy so it was likely that the two single dolphins were males. Apparently there are approximately 350 bottle nosed dolphins in this part of the water. We also saw some Osprey birds with their young (apparently only a month old) on the posts. We also saw brown pelicans and frigates along with a fisherman who had a large catch on his line. The guide said that this time of year is for Tarpons to migrate so he likely had a Tarpon on his line (which average 80-100 lbs). He had the fish about 20 ft away from his boat but then he lost the fish. The boat was about 75 ft away but you could just see the body language that he was upset.

After the boat tour, we went out for dinner at the Key Lime Bistro across the street from the boat tours. It was fairly expensive but good. I had tried to give Kendra some of Micah’s chicken fingers but I think she is now hooked on seafood. She had about ¼ of the seafood on my plate. She loved the shrimp, the calamari and the scallops even though I tried to give her some shrimp from the Lazy Flamingo the other night (may be it was the sauce on it then). There was live entertainment on the outdoor patio. Micah was hiliarous with his dancing while watching his shadow. We ended up getting a key lime pie to take home with us as it would have been cheaper than getting individual pieces for all of us and the kids were getting tired. So when we got back to the condo I got my 3 candles and we had key lime pie for Jamie’s birthday. We brought the kids over for the singing and a quick piece of pie before going to bed around 7:30 pm.