San Francisco

Stephen and I had a wonderful time in San Francisco!  Here are some photos:

You Actually Have to Visit the Website

to see my Italy photos!  A shameless ploy to get you to go to the site instead of just reading your e-mail!

Italy! Finally!

We're off to San Francisco tomorrow morning and because I hate to leave on another trip without posting about Italy, here are our photos from our big Italy trip.  Laura and I are behind the camera so much that it almost looks like Jay and Stephen went by themselves but I promise we were there, too!  I'll do a more detailed post later but wanted to get these pictures out since so many of you have been asking for them.  They are in chronological order, starting in the Jacksonville Airport, then Atlanta, then in the Venice airport.  From Venice, we drove east to Aquilea and then to Trieste on the Adriatic Sea.  We spent our first night in Aquilea with Laura's friend Glenda and her family. From there, we went back to Venice, where we spent one night at a hotel.  We had rooms looking out over the Grand Canal.  From Venice, we traveled by train to Florence.  We were in Florence at the Torre Guelfa (with fabulous roof-top views of the city) for one night.  We rented a car (a Volvo wagon, how European!) in Florence and drove to Tuscany.  We stayed at the Villa Rosa for two nights.  We enjoyed our tour of the beautiful Tuscan countryside.  Then we drove back to Florence, dropped off the car, and took the train from Florence to Rome.  We spent our last two nights in Rome (my favorite part of the trip) and flew home from there.

Columbus Day

The girls and I enjoyed a welcome break from work and school today.  After talking about Columbus Day and learning (with help from Grandma's Scholastic poster) why we celebrate Mr. Columbus, we went over to Mary Grace's school to play on the new playground and take some photos since the weather was so beautiful and the grass (really, sod) so green at the new school.  After playing, we met Stephen for lunch at Papa Luigi's, our favorite pizza place.  Then we went home to rest.  This afternoon, we made a trip to WalMart to stock up on things that Momo might need while she's here.  The girls got some Bendarooz at the store.  What a neat toy!  They spent a good part of the afternoon playing with those.

They've finally put in signs at the new school.  Can you believe how big?  And there are two of them, one on each corner.  I just hope they're planning to add a period after "St".  They know that.  There's one on the sign attached to the school.  I'm giving them a couple of weeks before I say something.

Soccer

Both Mary Grace and Elsie have been doing great in soccer this season.  Mary Grace scored her first goal last week.  It was off of a corner kick from her teammate, Jilly.  She put herself right in front of the goal in perfect position to kick the ball in.  And Jilly made a perfect kick to her.  It was great!
This past weekend, Elsie finally started playing.  Up until then, she had wanted us to be on the field with her.  She's one of the littlest ones out there.  But she really came out of her shell this past weekend.  The video is of her team (in white).  She's the little one with the white bow.  She takes the ball from the person who fell to the ground, dribbles the ball to the other side of the field, turns it to go toward her opponent's goal, and is on her way to score when her teammate takes the ball from her (that's just part of U4 soccer) and scores.  Please excuse her momma's yelling in the background, I was pretty excited!

CCHS on ESPNU Tonight

We are pretty proud of our local high school football team. They are ranked 10th in the US and tonight's game is being televised on ESPNU. So, even if our Dawgs don't give us much to cheer about this year, at least we still have a winning team to cheer for!
This game also got us a welcome "teacher work day" so folks could travel down to Ft Lauderdale for the game.
Go Cats!