Nick and Jen Lloyd

Ah July. Have I seriously not blogged since June? YEESH! Sorry about that people. Here’s some highlights:

Declan: End of June he starts to roll over. Then beginning of July, sitting up on his own. End of July, crawling…sort of. It’s an army crawl (still is) I think crawling hurts his knees on Italy’s hard floors. He pushes off with his big toes, mostly his right one. Then within two weeks in August he popped out four teeth. The top two are too far apart and the bottom two are too close. Adorable. (Just today, September 17th, I noticed a 5th one coming in too!)

Jonah highlights: Jonah got his own rock climbing harness and went climbing. We failed as parents to teach him how to get down before sending him up and paid the price by waiting over an hour for him to decide to climb back down, ever so slowly.

We had a bike given to us for Jonah that did not have training wheels. Our neighbor told us to take the pedals off so he could practice scooting and balancing. After about a month of that we put the pedals back on and Jonah just took off. He is a bike riding pro now. He really has a talent for it, the kid can even dodge cones and races around like it’s no big deal. It’s hard to believe he’s really only been doing it for a month.

He loves to try to catch all the little lizards outside. He continues to be the best big brother ever, unless their car seats are next to each other in the car, then he tortures his brother on car rides. That’s what brothers do right? He loves his little buddy.

 

 

I love my boys.

We headed down to Camp Darby for 4th of July in hopes of seeing some sunflowers blooming. But due to the massive amounts of rain this spring I think they must have planted late and they weren’t quite blooming yet. We did however enjoy the Camp Darby 4th of July festivities on the beach. Including their creative attempt to save money on fireworks by doing a “lights and water” show…it was actually kind of cool. It was like the Bellagio fountain on a semi-truck trailer.

 

Declan’s first beach experience. Not sure how he felt…

 

The boys went scuba/snorkeling in Portofino while the women and children hung out on the beach. A nice relaxing final day before the Lloyd’s began there LONG journey home.


POrtofi

We blitzed through Cinque Terre. Most of the trails between the villages have been wiped out by landslides last year, including the walk of love. So we hopped on and off the train to see the cute little villages clinging to the cliffs. Jonah found the perfect park with an amazing view and we sat and watched him play.

Florence is always beautiful. The Duomo is one of my favorites. Sadly we were all too exhausted to climb the bell tower and see the beautiful view. We did however make reservations to skip the 2.5 hour line and take a peak in the Uffizi. I was particularly impressed with a number of paintings of mothers adoring their babies. I love the expression painted on both the mothers’ and the babes’ faces of complete adoration for each other…probably because I completely relate. We decided to skip the statue of David as you can see a reproduction of him in the square where he used to stand for free.

We headed for the outskirts of Rome while Nick’s family went to the Vatican. Hadrian’s villa is an impressive, expansive, never ending, large, pile of ruins and rubble. After a few hours of wandering around and imagining the villa in it’s heyday, we were ruined out.

Ah Rome. The beautiful and sometimes awful city. There is so much to see it can really run you down if you’re not careful…and we weren’t. There is never a lack of things to see in Rome. And see we did. After our exhausting day in Rome, the cold that we had all been on the verge of catching finally caught a good hold of all of us.

 

After Jonah’s graduation we headed for Rome. Some exciting things happened on the way. We came WAY too close to running out of gas (we had pulled into a station that was OUT of gas! And the next station was almost too far…I think the “miles to empty” meter just makes things worse.) But then we stopped at an amazingly beautiful hill town called Civita. It is on a cliff and you have to walk over a bridge to get to it. We found a little alley way in the town and heated up soup on a camp stove, super classy like. But hey, ya gotta eat!

Jonah’s school has a little end of the year ceremony for the kiddos. In Italy kids do three years of preschool and then start first grade. (So it’s really only one extra year when you consider we do preschool and kindergarten.) Jonah graduated from the “littles” and next year he’ll be in the “mediums”. AND we even got to have family here for his graduation! Thanks to Grandma and Grandpa Lloyd and Uncle Paul for sitting through a boring ceremony in a foreign language!

A day in Venice (with the whole crew) and a day in Verona (minus Jen and kids)