Orange Blossom

The town of Davie Florida has a Rodeo Grounds. Established back in the 1920s, it’s been around for long time. In fact, in the 1970s, the city of Davie was about to shut it down when about two hundred Davie residents rode to city chambers on horse back, demanding that the Rodeo Grounds remain open. The city obliged and some developers donated the cash for a roof and a parking lot. Now every other weekend there’s an event at the rodeo. From crafting fairs to Halloween hunted houses. The city of Davie is a very cowboy-ish type of town, with farms and homesteads.

This past weekend, it was the Orange Blossom Parade.

For the past year and a half, the kid has been going on a weekly basis to a small but very famous dance school. There’s only one teacher, the owner, and it’s only for half an hour. During this time, she has also met one of her closest friends, Curly Cute. They only get one class together a week, a couple of shows a month, and Curly Cute it’s the only real sleep over my kid has ever had.

When the girls first starting hanging out, and it was clear that they liked each other, my mother in law encouraged me to get to know the parents. Because, as she put it, the girls’ friendship would never last unless we liked the parents and in the event that we didn’t like the parents, did we really want to let the kids become extra close friends? The point being that it’s already a conscious effort to let the girls play, but it would be ridiculous if we also had to do all that effort and have to spend time with people we didn’t like.

Well, as it turns out, Cutie Cute parents and us actually get along very well, and we make an extra effort to spend time together. Like the Orange Blossom Parade. Well, the girls were scheduled to be on the parade float and afterwards they had two more shows. None of this was back to back. So, we would have to spend the entire day on location.

The husband said that he really didn’t want to go to the parade cause it was to early, but that he would go to both shows. Then Curly Cute’s mom, the hot one (for the record, the mom gave me full approval of this nick name!), had to take the older siblings to baseball practice and she wasn’t’ coming to the parade but the dad, old man river, (also, fully approved!) would be coming. Ok, we made a plan: OMR and I would take the girls to the parade. Then the husband and the hot one would meet us there for the first show. The husband was tasked with bringing clandestine wine for the four of us, since between the shows we would just go to the closest dinner for lunch and just hang out until the second show.

After the shows and the parade were over, (were our float won a price, by the way! Go team!) all the kids wanted to go play. The husband and OMR just hung back at a bouncy castle where the girls where in, and I was racing one of the oldest of Curly Cute siblings (by older, I mean still pre-teen!) on a kiddie obstacle course, and he won twice. The hot one went window shopping throughout the little stands everywhere and at the end of the day we went to the petting zoo the show had set up. The husband wanted to “take home” one of the baby goats! By the time we pulled out of the parking lot, the kid was asleep and the husband and I where so tired, that we didn’t even make it to 9pm. It was a very nice Saturday.

I haven’t written anything here for a while, but I have two other post about Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Shooting. The Parkland shooting that killed 17 kids and adults. Since then, it feels as if anything I write will read and sound like foolish nonsense in the aftermath and after getting into some serious online arguments about gun control, I was to angry and sad to make my point clear.

So instead, I wrote about a wonderful day, with great friends, with absolutely no consequences whatsoever.

But it made me happy.