House Guests

It has been a busy couple of weeks--lots of house guests and a little traveling. Two weeks ago I had a really special house guest, actually 2 really special house guests. My mom came to town for a few days which is always a lot of fun and I also had my little sister in town. She is not just any little sister. This is my little sister through Big Brothers Big Sisters that I joined when I lived in Atlanta. She is 10 years old and absolutely precious. When I had to move from Atlanta back in February of this year, Jekera (my little sis) and I decided we would keep our relationship going by communicating on the phone and hopefully get to see each other every once in awhile. When she got off for summer break, I decided to surprise her with a trip to Orlando.

She has never been on an airplane and she has never been to Florida. I was so excited to get to take her to Disney and SeaWorld for her first time. I wasn't sure if she was going to like the roller coasters or not, but she had a BLAST. She was scared to death from start to finish of each ride, but she would get off and want to ride it again and again. Thank goodness my mom loves roller coasters, because one time was enough for me!

After a long day at SeaWorld, we went to Matt's to grill out and she was dying to get into the pool. She spent hours in the pool all by herself as we just watched her jump around and learn to back stroke.

Isn't she adorable?

We spent the next day at Magic Kingdom in Disney World. I found Magic Kingdom to be a bit childish, but we still managed to have fun. I hadn't been in years. They had a couple of pretty good rides. At Disney now, they do this thing called "fast pass". When we got there, we didn't really know how it worked, so we went around trying to get a fast pass for every ride which meant you returned to the ride at a given time and then basically go straight to the front of the ride. Apparently, you can only have one fast pass at a time. Well, we end up getting stuck with a fast pass to some Winnie the Pooh ride which meant we could not get another fast pass to any other ride until we rode Winnie the Pooh which was about 3 hours away. So, my mother had this brilliant idea to go ahead and sneak our way into the fast pass line of Splash Mountain and the other big ride and then lie through our teeth when they asked us for our tickets. We were really setting a great example for this sweet 10 year old.
But, hey, it worked :)









She's a nut!


So, I will leave with this...Big Brothers Big Sisters is an excellent organization. Jekera is the first little sister I have had. It has been such a terrific and rewarding experience. There are so many young kids out there that could use the direction, advice, attention and mentoring from a young adult. I would recommend it to anyone and suggest that you look into it in your area. They only ask for your time twice a month, but of course you can give as much of your time as you can. I was introduced to the program by my friend Kiel who has been an amazing role model to these girls. She started in college when we were in Gainesville and her little sister is now 15 and they still keep in touch. It is really neat to watch them grow up. Kiel is still in the program and has a new little sister in Birmingham where she is going to Law School.