the summer and Italy

Very busy summer. It creeped by and then before I knew it, it was over. It involved a lot of traveling. Those kids are destined to be truckers of some sort because they have already covered a lot of miles. We went to Asheville for the 4th of July. The boys paraded in the Biltmore Forest parade from town hall to the park. Sam decorated his tricycle. I unfortunately managed to get a lot of sunscreen in his eyes and he couldn't really see for the journey (he's not squinting at the sun in the picture, he can barely have his eyes open =(. Poor thing. But in the end it all worked out and he ran around in the fire truck spray for the most of the time.

We went down to the beach for 2 weeks. It took a while for Sam to get used to playing in the waves again, but before we knew it, he was a surfer again. Oliver never really got comfortable with the ocean. There's always next time...

In August we went to Italy. Joel's family rented a sort of villa compound about 5 miles outside of Assisi. It was wonderful. Joel flew the boys over to England on his own (pretty impressive I thought) I made an emergency trip down to Asheville. We both flew out of Dulles and were able to get through security together, which is probably the hardest part. My flight was uneventful, but on his flight, Oliver cried so much that another passenger offered Joel a baby sedative. It didn't last long though and Ollie slept most of the way after that.

I joined them 2 days later and we spent our lovely week doing day trips to Sienna, Spoleto, Ovieto and Assisi. The boys were real troopers. When you take into accoun the fact that they couldn't care less about a beautiful duomo or walled city, the were fantastic. We're just really lucky that there is gelato around every corner. I think that it was the only food Oliver ate. Sam nearly turned into a spaghetti noodle.

After we left Umbria we spent 2 days in Rome. This was hard. I have no idea how people live in cities with children. It felt like everywhere we went was some sort of hazzard - cars, breakable things, too many people, child snatchers (that last one was really only in my head). At the end of each day they looked like street urchins (sort of like the original Oliver), they were filthy.
On our first day we thought it would be a smashing idea to do a Rome bus tour - disastrous. Don't recommend it. It's best to adjust your expectations and try not to do so much. The bus was fun for the first stop or so, but we had to pick and choose carefully about what we wanted to see. We were on the top of the bus taking pictures of things as we drove by so that we would look them up later when we got back home. Clearly, this was not the plan to have. The boys fell asleep and we decided to get out at the colosseum, not the brightest move. The colloseum is in the middle of nowhere in the Rome sense and unwalkable to our hotel and we struggled to squeeze onto the bus so that we could get back to where we were staying. Good thing is that people take pity on 2 dirty, exhausted and obscenely irritable tourists pushing a double stroller of sleeping kids and they let us squeeze on. That was something - there were a lot of kids in Italy, but you never saw someone with 2 of them. They always had 1 kid or the kids were a lot older. I will remember that in the future, no kids in the city (or 1 nanny per child).

After we left Rome we went back to sunny England, which was actually 65 and rainy). I went straight to London to meet up with my dear friend Roz and spend a lot of money on Kensington High Street. Joel got to meet up with some friends and we all got to unwind before heading home. We flew (delayed) safely home and waited for fall. It was a great summer!