This year Max and Katie were off to Italy for some business and pleasure.
Here is how we played!
First Hank and I made the countdown calendar to mark the days until Mom and Dad got home. Where are Mom and Dad? Rome and Venice!
Hank liked wrapping the rice crispie treats in "spidy webs."
We made a number of different Italian foods -- biscotti, fettucine alfredo, spaghetti and meatballs,
and Katie had frozen some cannelloni -- but the favorite night was the pizza night.
I celebrated my birthday while I was there. Monty was in for the weekend and
he and the kids whipped up a fabulous cake!!!!
Who knows what went wrong, but we dubbed it the Roman ruins
and decided that was what he had planned all along to keep with the Italian themed week!
With a cake like that all you can do it dig in, right? Oh yeah!
We painted Sistine benches (remarkably compelling for them)
created a diorama of Rome with St. Peters, the Coliseum, and Trevi Fountain,
then the Thomas train to Venice where we placed St. Marks and the campanile, the Rialto Bridge, a gondola, and Karlie's final touch of a gelato shop!
and analyzed our daVinci Vitruvian proportionality.
We had a lovely bedtime each night reading a couple of chapters from a beautiful edition of
Carlo Collodi's 1883 Pinocchio that GiGi and I picked up in San Diego.
A far cry from the Disney version. Bet you did not know that quite early in the story
Pinocchio gets so mad at the Cricket for advising him to go to school that
-- are you ready? -- he smashes him with a mallet!
You can imagine the girls' surprise!!!
There were preschool graduations, kindergarten performances, a trip for gelato,
a trip to the train park, a carousel ride, plenty of swimming.
Lots of other fun things to do, but, even so,
everyone was so so so happy when Mom and Dad were finally
