Finding home, wherever you are.

Tampa. I love it. I do. But if I was to be 100% honest with you, I'd have to also admit that a part of my heart is still 1,128 miles north of here (according to Google, not my own calculations, I would've guessed it to be over 3,000, "salute, Bonjour, ay Canada) in NYC. I miss the people up there, the strangers that I talked to on the daily, the coffee shops and pastry shops and never ending sidewalks filled with some of humanities finest and funniest (and drunkest if you're walking on the sidewalks of the East Village). Whenever I start missing this, I drive downtown.  Our skyscrapers are growing in numbers down here as more and more restaurants, museums, etc are opening up their doors to the community. I priced a few, because really, why not. I could give up a backyard, easily, if it meant being in the middle of people and things to do all day. Which is weird, because when we first left NYC, all I wanted was a backyard for my kid(s)...now....meh. We'll see. I took my boy out to the Glazer Museum this weekend, but we only played around inside of it for about an hour because it was such a beautiful day outside.  We walked over to Curtis Hixon Park, which is right next to the museum, where we had a picnic on the Hillsborough River, watched the boats pass by, and chased some dirty birds, which thankfully, were never caught.

Found this little gem of a coffee shop too and was approached by 7 (yes, I really counted, I'm kind of like Rain Man sometimes with numbers) different people within the shop and on the streets about my curly haired son. "He's so cute!" "I LOVE his hair!" "Those eyes, beautiful, just like his mom!" and my personal favorite, "Need a daddy for that boy?" And just like that, it was like I was back in NYC, where inappropriateness isn't an issue, it's the norm. I laughed. It felt....like home. Whenever NYC and Tampa collide like that, it makes me happy.

I'm hoping that our downtown area only continues to attract more and more young families to it and that it'll continue to grow. And that one day, we can live within walking distance to it all, and I can have the best of all worlds: the people and pace of a downtown area, my family, and driving distance to the beach. It's been a struggle finding my sense of home, when my heart is stuck in the battle of up north vs here, but really, my heart is wherever my family is, and as long as I have them, I'm home.