[Laker14]

Originally Posted by Freeda

I agree with what others have said about kids/grandkids moving away, etc; they have their own lives to live. One of our biggest factors in moving to Florida was the climate, and the ability to have a more active, healthy, livestyle, and the healthy factor of frequent sunshine (though we wear hats when outside!!), here as we age. A tradeoff we made is that we feel we increase the chances of living long and healthy lives because of that, so we have that positive thought in our lives, with less stress of worrying about our health. Our kids live in less favorable climates, as we did before moving here, and also, they mostly got a late start with having babies, so some of ours are still toddlers, and some are still unborn; so we'd like to be around for all of them as long as possible. Yes, we sometimes think it would be fun to live where family lives, but our kids live in different places. We visit each other several times a year; and we use facetime and Facebook portal to videochat with them. Further, since our visits with each other are usually only a few days at a time, we do usually stay in each other's homes when we visit, so we have a lot of quality time with the grands and the kids when we're together. After our first year here, this psychologically became home to us, so we get homesick for our lifestyle in TV and for our friends (some are like family to us) here when we are gone. Whenever we leave them at the end of a visit, there is always that 'pang' of separation; but I have learned to remind myself "for every goodbye, there will be another hello"; and we have learned to expect that it will take us about 24 hours after a visit ends to get past that melancholy period; then we are back in the swing of things here, while still keeping in touch with them.

My experience exactly.