First Week of Our Summer in Rome

Last day of school

The first question anyone asks me is "where are you going for the summer?" And my answer - "we're staying in Rome!" And I couldn't be more happy about it. I feel like it took us a whole year to get settled into life here, so, we are finally getting out there and exploring Italy. I very much wanted to stay in Rome this summer, so I can start crossing things off our bucket list.

Charly with her preschool teacher Ms Andrews. JR thinks he is in Charly's class and wanted in on the picture too

The last week of school and the first week of summer is filled with birthday parties. Anyone with a summer birthday has their party at the end of the school year- so we went to lots of parties. 

Clark with Alon and Goni

 We also celebrated Father's Day. In Italy, Father's Day is in March on San Guseppe day. (St. Joseph, father of Jesus) So lucky for Ryan, he gets two Fathers Day.
Thanks to help of my sister Nancy, Ryan got redvines, his favorite pens and a new backpack.

I also managed to get a 12 pack of Dr Pepper

Clark's best friend Alon spent the day at our house.

This week as also been full of swimming! We are lucky enough to have a pool for our apartment building, and even though its freezing, we still swam! We also started swimming lessons two days a week.

It's hard to see, but the sculpture behind them is a turtle

 Saturday we went to the Parco dei Mostri , or The Monster Park. All these sculptures were made in the 1500's. From what I understand, there was a prince who commissioned sculptors to created this 'park' for his wife. It was fun to walk around and see all the different ancient sculptures.

"Fluffy" the 3 headed dog

This is the most famous sculpture - L'Orco. It's a representation of the king of the underworld, symbolizing being swallowed up by death.

Why is it so cute to see a little boy passed out ?!

We Love Sperlonga

The first weekend in June was an Italian holiday weekend. The actual holiday was Thursday, but everyone takes the 'bridge' day, Friday, off too. Last year I had no idea about this holiday, so we didn't plan anything to take advantage of the four day weekend. So this year, I booked a VRBO in January, to make sure that we could go to Sperlonga  for this holiday weekend.
Lucky for us, our friends - the Merx family- decided to rent a house in Sperlonga too, so we spent the whole weekend together.
We left Rome Wednesday afternoon and made the hour and half drive to Sperlonga. We checked into our house, did some grocery shopping, made dinner and settled in for the night. Thursday morning we woke up to rain! It downpour rained until noon. The Merx's drove up Thursday morning and hung out at our house until the rain cleared up. We went down to the beach about 1pm and spent the afternoon at the beach. It was still a bit chilly- but kids do not have thermometers and played in the water anyways.
Fortunately, the rest of the weekend was sunny and beautiful! We were able to enjoy 3 days of sand, sun and friends!

Clark and Owen were very serious about their hole digging and walls of protection.

Ryan did come out of his hiding space a few times to pull the kids on the boogie boards

Charly, Ellika, Kate, Owen, Clark and JR

Pizza is better with friends!

One night we went up in to the 'Old Town" and I tried to get a picture looking out over the beach, but the sun wi

Kate and Ellika were besties all weekend!

This was our home base. You rent the cabana for the day, so you dont have to bring your own chairs and such. Its so worth it! Plus, this is where Ryan hangs out under the shade all day!

We bought some sluhies from a traveling salesman on the beach

Kate, Ellika, Owen and Clark. We are so lucky to have such good friends who live in Rome!

It only took 10 minutes on the road for everyone to fall asleep! Vacation success!