Fun with Flipper

In the last week of the school summer vacation I took Liam on a little mini vacation down in the Florida Keys. We’ve been to Key West a couple of times before but this time we stayed at a resort on Duck Key – which is only about half way down – 10 miles north of Marathon. The main draw card for us was the chance to interact with dolphins – and as you can see from the photos below we got to do just that.

At first they said they only had room for one more in the program on the last day of our trip – so I booked it for Liam, being a little worried that he wouldn’t trot off without me and follow all the instructions properly if I wasn’t there (typical mom huh?!)  I needn’t have worried because he wasn’t the slightest bit perturbed but just after they got started with the “class room” which is the 10 minutes in which they go over the drill of what to do and what not to do – the lady who had checked us in came out to me and said they had room for me if I wanted to do it. I immediately said “Oh no that’s alright my son seems OK” and then I thought “What am I thinking? Why does he get to have all the fun?” and so I scurried in there as fast as my feet would take me. We were just on the dock giving the dolphins and commands (and lots of fish.) They have a swimming interaction program but Liam is too young for that yet.

It was still great. There is something just magical about those creatures. The trainers were giving us lots of practical information about the dolphins – their life span, their size, their speed, what they eat – but my head was filled with tales of mermaids and shipwrecks and every hour I spent in the water as a kid swimming with my feet together pretending to have a tail after watching reruns of “Flipper.”

Liam was suitably impressed – particularly with the fact that a couple of the dolphins had pink tummies. We may be growing out of a few things but we’re still secretly big on pink. He talked about Twister and Sherman for days and can still remember the names of all the other dolphins we saw long after I’ve forgotten them. I have a feeling that those few moments of touching that slippery, smooth skin will stand out in his mind long after everything else in his ten week summer vacation has faded. I can’t wait till he is old enough for us to go swimming with them!