cousins

We had the cousins over during the weekend so that their folks could celebrate their 18th anniversary in peace. Our great idea to get some pictures was comical almost. Not one turned out without someone making a silly face-big surprise:) Anyway, here they are.

Hey. Happy Day all you moms. My heart especially goes out to some special friends of mine who no longer have the possibility to call their mom up and say hey mom, happy day. But exactly THOSE moms who left too early did an excellent job in instilling some great stuff in their kids and would be SO proud to see them as they are, also moms (and dads) of the first order. I love you guys.
Tucking my furious four in tonight, I felt a great happiness and thankfulness for my job, never boring, sometimes frustrating but always challenging and rewarding.

mom and dad left bright and early this morning and so now i am here with a lot of catching up to do! We had a great time and will have a lot of memories to slowly savor. I'll get started on that by posting some catch up pix of our last few weeks. We had a few days after they got here to get used to each other again and then we took off for Corsica for a week. We travelled to the south of France (Toulon), spent the night and caught the ferry down to a town in Corsica called Ajaccio. The ferry ride was about 6.5 hrs and then our little beach side cottage was a half an hour's drive north in a small town called Tiuccia (prounounced tee-ooch). While there would have been a lot of places to drive to, we pretty much hung around close to home as it was a fantastic place. The ocean was very calm and every day was warmer, then a little rain on our last day. We tried all of the bread and croissants around the place and enjoyed corsican fruit and vegatables from the market. We travelled up to Bastia, on the northeast side of the island, and caught the ferry to Livorno, in Itlay. Livorno is very close to Pisa, Siena, Lucca, Florence etc. We spent two nights in a charming B&B and tried to take in the tuscan scenery. We visited Rick Steves' favorite tuscan hill town, Volterra (most recently famous for it's appearance in a certain vampire series....) and were surprised to find several thousand other tourists in this fascinating place:) We saw several places we'd like to revisit and were all impressed in spite of ourselves by the leaning-ness of the tower of Pisa. We returned home on Monday and then got to work on the yard and house. We had a fun potluck on Sunday and then a visit from Kim and Aschi before turning our attention to the suitcases to be packed again. We'll forget the dog doo we stepped in, the loooooong wait for some average pizza, the rude lady at the post office but we'll remember the sweetness of the clementines, the tartness of the balsamic vinegar, the scent of a million flowers trying to bloom at once and the simple pleasure of being together with people you love and only get to enjoy in small doses! Love you lots mom and dad! Thanks for making the trek again.