The End of Summer

Summer had to come to an end sometime.  We had one last hurrah at a ward youth party in the corn maze

and then it was off to school for these three.

Somewhere in all that summer time, Joseph went to Scout camp and Sam went to Football camp.  Sam won another award this year.  He won the "Ironman" award.  There was one for the upper classmen and one for the lower classmen.  It involved push up, sit ups, pulls ups and a mile run.  It was an optional thing and very few people did it solely because of the mile run part.  Sam had one competitor in his group that sized everyone up and was very confident he could win.  Problem was, he didn't know how stubborn Sam is.  Sam beat him in pull ups and sit ups and the guy beat him in push ups.  Then they ran.  Sam was behind "almost an entire lap."  (which I highly doubt, but maybe 250 or 300 meters).  Sam calculated in his head that the only way to beat the kid was to beat him in race, so he took off.  He caught the kid and they raced like crazy to the finish.  He said he could hear his whole team cheering for him and getting all riled up.  Finally they crossed the finish line together.  Sam was sure he had lost, but had calculated wrong and actually beat the kid by one point.  The team went crazy, because it was the first time ever that our school had won this particular award!  He has been contemplating donating it to the school to put in their trophy case, but I say no way- that is purely his award!

Ramblings of our Busy Life

Busy, busy, busy.  When teachers get tired of school and start counting down the days, they don't realize that we, as parents, are doing the same thing.  Oh, I remember dreading Summertime.  The kids seemed to always be so bored.  But now, Summer is a huge reprieve.  Right now we are doing science fair projects, sign ups for next year, track, track and track, ACT's, AP testing, projects and more projects,

Marshmallow catapult

finals, merit badges, seminary- (oh seminary why do you have to be so early!) and more.  All while dealing with PCS season in full swing.  If you are not military you probably have no idea what that means.  As a member of the RS presidency that means that things are getting busier and busier for me.  I am starting to check things off the list, though- science fair project done (today!),

 AP testing done, down to one last track meet- yeah!  That darn ACT is just hanging out there, though, taunting me.  That won't be done until after school ends.
We have a holiday weekend coming up, but when you live in Europe, you don't relax on a holiday weekend.  Nope, we are planning on quite the whirlwind trip and here is a hint of where we are going.  We are watching "The Longest Day" with John Wayne to get the kids prepped.  It seemed appropriate for Memorial Day Weekend.
Our latest track meet at Schweinfurt took all day.

A very fuzzy picture of me and one of the other coaches timing two relay teams (with splits) simultaneously- because we are awesome like that. 
 We left at 5:30 am and didn't get home until 8:30 pm.  Sam and I both flopped on the couch and didn't move until Dad said, "time for bed!"  Sam had an extra hard meet.

This is actually at the K-town track meet .  I think this is actually a 400, too, but you get the point. 

 He decided to pass the only guy he was competing against in the 800m on the back straight away.  I was there mumbling, "too early, too early" and timing him.  I could tell by the kid's speed that he wasn't going to fall back and I knew Sam was in for it.  Sure enough, the kid just windbreaks off of Sam until the straight away and then it is a full out 100 meter dead sprint.  Sam won by a half of his foot and brought his personal best down to 2:28, but he was hacking up a lung for some time afterwards.  Luckily there was absolutely no one to compete against in the 4x400 and our kids just kind of jogged it and picked up their 1st place ribbon.  Sam said, he couldn't possibly have run it normally, anyway.  He was going as fast as he could - 20 seconds slower than he normally runs it.

Emma is all signed up for the Red Cross and is now President of the official Red Cross club at her school- and yes, there are more than just her as members!  She is also signed up to be an ambassador at the school, but they have to have interviews to "get in!"  She also got her Prom ticket, finally.  Her friends harassed her until she did it.  She had been asked by her stalker (and this stalker is starting to freak me out a little!) and she had told him she was already going with someone, so she didn't want to go at all, but her friends convinced her.  It's going to be 6 or 7 girls and 3 guys.  That should be interesting.  I told her the most fun I ever had at a Prom was the time I went stag, so hopefully it won't be a repeat of Homecoming when she called me to pick her up 4 less than an hour after I dropped her off.
Max had a great track meet this last Friday.  Dad stayed and was a timer for the meet, while I took Emma to a dance at the church.  I did get to watch one race- the 200.

This was from his 1st meet and not the 2nd one, but same thing- someone was in front of him almost the whole way and then he put all his effort in to zooming at the last minute and beat them.

That is Max's best one and he won his heat with a lot of extra effort.  That poor kid was hacking up a lung afterwards, too!  He has allergies so badly, he is never not congested.  I am taking him in again to see if we can't change his medicine.
Joseph was Joseph Smith for his living museum and he gives his friends Book of Mormon's all the time.  He really amazes me, because usually he is the quiet, not really into competing, middle child whom I have to make a concerted effort to give hugs and loves every day so he doesn't feel left out.  He just does his own thing, most of the time.  Unfortunately, he is also the absent-minded professor, so it's been nice to have a teacher that constantly sends out emails about things that are coming up that are due.  It's the only way we would have gotten all those book reports, living museum and science fair projects in!  And he has had a ton of them!  Book reports due every 3 weeks this year- oy vey!
Ya- so that whole summer thing- totally an illusion, but at least there is no getting up early.   We have a cruise this summer, we have girl's camp and scout camps and by August we will have try-outs and conditioning.  Sam is already signed up for conditioning and weight training and Lacrosse camp starting in June.  Joe is going to be signed up for golf and Max swimming.  But at least there is no 5:20 wake up call to go to seminary!!!  And Dad's favorite part- no bedtime and lots of sun and tons of kids running around on the different parks all around our house.  Love it!

The Lame Mother excuse Blog

With our big trip to Rome, the start of track and normal living, it was hard to do everything we usually do for Easter.  The commissary and Bx ran out of Easter candy along time ago and never reordered.  I had grabbed a bunch of little peanut butter eggs when I saw them, but Joseph slowly ate those away, until I only had one bag left.  I re-hid those, but he found them before Easter as well.  Hence, Joseph got zero peanut butter eggs.  The rest of those that were left were split between the rest of us.  They don't do peanut butter in Europe still.  In fact that and Root beer is what you give a German to say thank you.  When they came to the American school as part of an exchange program, they all went out and got American money and insisted on going to Taco Bell and then over to the shoppette to get peanut butter cups.  Emma said it was really funny to see them all showing off their foreign money and getting all excited about Taco bell and peanut butter cups!
In the end we had to drive on Saturday, after the base Easter Egg hunt

(Friday was Good Friday and so everything was closed!) to the Real and picking up a bunch of yummy Germany Easter candy- which all happened to be made by Lindt!  I didn't get anything else, but had enough stuff in my "birthday box" to give the kids a little gift, also- a flying helicopter for all the boys (but we are out of batteries, whoops!) and some light up balloons for Emma (along with a shirt that she found that I liked and so stole from her!)

I didn't have time to make rolls, by the time we got home, so we didn't have our traditional cinnamon rolls for breakfast.  We made do with some good German bread for dinner.  Forgot about a jello salad, too!  We also never colored the eggs, but I needed them to make deviled eggs.  Oh well.  The dinner turned out fine, though and then we had a nice long walk.

 By the time we made it home it was past 8 pm and we needed to get everyone to bed.  No coloring of Easter eggs happened!  There was one bright spot.  We have been watching conference talks for our scripture reading lately and the one we were on, just happened to be about Jesus and the atonement.  It capped the day off nicely.
No one seemed too put out about the lack of Easter traditions happening, except the coloring of eggs.  We have the missionaries over tonight, so maybe we will do that with them.  Max said, "but it's after Easter, now."  Hey, we are making our own rules here, so we can color eggs whenever we want!

Roma

I booked us a place in Rome for a week over Spring break.

Because of our experience in London, I thought we would need a week to see everything we wanted to.  I really learned some great lessons on that London trip, however, and planned this trip much better.  We were actually done with all the major sites in 2 days and took the third day to travel out to Ostia Antica (which was amazing!) and so that left us with 4 days to visit all the lesser sites- um wayyyyy too long for the little ones and the husband who hates hordes of people.  I have to admit  that it was too long for me, as well!  I would have loved to have split it up with a  different kind of activity, like a beach day, but it wasn't quite warm enough nor close enough. 

I had originally planned to go down to Pompeii for a day, but hadn't reserved any rooms in Naples, so it was going to be a down and back kind of thing.  After researching it some more, we found that it was going to be around 6-7 hours of train riding round trip, plus the cost (close to 30 euros a person just to get to Naples and then whatever the train tickets were from Naples to Pompeii- this is when our internet stopped working! and then the tickets to get into Pompeii)  Then there would be all day long, walking around in the sun (no shade in Pompeii) to see a bigger version of Ostia.  We decided to not do that!  Instead we found some fun churches, an Italian Spring Festival, the USO on pizza day, and some beautiful parks!  We kicked the Vatican- because that's our thing.  We like to kick a few major sites in all our travels- we have kicked the Washington monument and the St. Louis Arch as well.  We went back to the Trevi fountain, when we could actually get close to the water!  We got ourselves in the middle of a huge protest with armed policemen everywhere!!  We even found the Hard Rock Cafe in Rome completely by accident and enjoyed an American style lunch, complete with free water with ice and with free refills!!  I know!  We were super excited, too!

The Metro was cheap and so I thought we would use that a few times, but we only used it twice- once to get up to the Vatican, so that we were on time for sure, and then one other time.  The rest of the time we walked everywhere.

One of the things we saw on our walks- a Roman arch on top of a house, or a house built around a Roman Arch- crazy!

Our children are amazing travelers- always have been.  We just don't put up with whining on trips and so they have all gotten used to it.  We also try to bring or buy plenty of food for snacks.  We let them play electronics when we get back to the places we are staying, so they can relax.  Even 8 year old Max kept up the whole time.  A couple of days we walked from our place that was 15 minutes south of the Colosseum all the way up to the Vatican or Villa Borghese park and back.  No one complained or lagged.  They really are awesome children!  Of course we don't force road march them.  We stopped on the way to take breaks in parks

 Sam made me daisy chains, because I asked him to

 The first time he did this, he fell and broke his back on that Roman cinderblock!

 we carried two backpacks full of food and became Hobbits.  We had elevensies, and lunch and tea and noonies.

and have snack breaks and see some sites along the way.

Day 1

Colosseum, Palentine Hill, and the Forum

You come upon the Colosseum first from the place we rented,

but we knew that wasn't the place to get tickets.  One of the people selling tours confirmed this.  The line didn't look so long, but she said it was, because it winds around on the inside of the Colosseum.  It was about a 2 hour wait at that time for tickets.  Instead she directed us up behind some trees to the newer Palentine Hill ticket office.

Sam getting stabbed by Rob on the steps on the Senate building

Casa della vestal virgins

We had to wait for about 6 people in front of us to get tickets there- that's it!  We could have taken our tickets and gone straight over to the Colosseum (they are combo tickets), but we decided to see the Forum and Palentine Hill first.

A Temple to Vulcan and the belly button of Rome

Those are the original doors and the lock still works

That took most of the day, but was really enjoyable, except for the fact that they are both hills and we could only find 2 of the 3 bathrooms in the area- one down at the bottom of one hill and one at the top.  I think we walked up and down hills at least 6 times.  We were so done by the end of the day!  We had downloaded all of Rick Steve's audio tours, so we listened to those as we went along.  

We forgot the splitters the first day, so we each had to just use an earbud and be attached to someone all day.

Afterwards, we went to the Colosseum and enjoyed getting straight in!

The whole day was amazing!  When you see these huge things that were built BC, medieval castles don't seem so amazing any more!

Day 2

The Vatican Museums and St. Paul's

We took advice and booked tickets on line ahead of time to get into the Vatican Museums.  Tour guide selling people (they were selling tours, not people) along the way kept bugging us, telling us that we would still have to wait in a 3 hours line to get into St. Paul's after going through the museum.  I was a little worried about that, but we are just too cheap to pay for a tour for all of us.  We got straight into the museums with our tour tickets- the line was huge!!!  I was so glad we had booked ahead of time.  The museum was wonderful. 

We loved their courtyard. 

Laocoon

 The Sistine Chapel was so crowded with people and they just kept packing them in.  We stood our ground though and listened to our Rick Steve's audio tour.  We had them downloaded on our iPhones, so at one point, I switch to camera mode, flipped the camera angle and took a picture of the ceiling without the guard throwing a huge fit.

You can see God creating the earth in these scenes

They were actually throwing people out for taking pictures.  When we were done, we used Rick Steve's tip of blending in with a tour group to go the short cut route to St. Paul's.  We figured the worst that could happen was a security guard would make us go back and through the other exit.  There were two tour groups leaving at the same time, so I think we blending in easy enough.  We by-passed a long walk and a long line through security and got straight into St. Paul's.  It is huge!!

 The holy door only opened ever 25 years

 Pieta

After St. Paul's and a nice lunch outside on the steps,

Swiss guard with Michaelangelo designed outfits- Sweet!

we made our way down to take a quick peak at Castle St. Angelo, 

over the Angel Bridge

and down Via Dei Coronari where we got exotic gelato flavors.  I had grapefruit and pineapple with mint.  I really liked it after the initial shock of, these things don't go together!

We checked out Piazza Navona, then hopped over to the Pantheon.

We kept on walking, hoping to find a bathroom somewhere, towards the Trevi Fountain.  We found a Lindt chocolate store, instead!

So yummy! And they had a bathroom, as well.  We met our neighbors, the Fary's, at the Trevi Fountain.  We had just bumped into an old friend of Max's, from Ohio, at St. Paul's.  Small world!  We went to a recommended restaurant for dinner, but won't recommend it ourselves.  The pizza was good, but the pasta tasted mushy and warmed over.  We ended the night at the Spanish steps,

where Emma and I were forced to take flowers and then made to pay for them.  I almost put mine down and walked away, when Rob came up and payed way too much for them.  He said, he needed change for the metro, anyway.  I tried to find a way to get them home, but they would have never made it.

Day 3

Ostia Antica

Ostia is about 20 minutes away from Rome- towards the ocean.  It used to be at the mouth (Ostia) of the Tiber river .  The Tiber river changed course and so the town was abandoned.  It is cheap to get out there, because it is considered part of the metro line, even though you go another place and get on a train- so you only pay the metro fair for one trip (1.5 euros.)  It was a little crowded with school field trips, but once you got inside, the city is big enough that you don't see much of those people. 

 These mosaics are outside of shops to tell what they are- fish merchant?

 Ivory or exotic pets?

We got stopped once by the kids, to ask us if we had seen any of the pictures on their scavenger hunt and we helped them out.  The audio tours really helped things come alive.  We loved running around the cemetery (the sepulchers were amazing!), 

seeing the baths of Neptune, 

the bakery

and the theater.

Joe, Max and Sam even put on a play for us.

As we came out of Ostia, we suddenly realized a) we really didn't need to use the restroom and b) somebody was getting fired from a tour bus company when they got home, tonight!  Emma's little bit of Spanish got her to understand the Italian man that decided to tell us all about it.  Apparently there were people in the bathrooms and on the tour bus at the time!  I guess they were in the right place for getting things scared out of you!

Day 4

Terme di Caracalla,  Circus Maximus, Bocca de Verita

We had seen these old ruins down by our place, but weren't sure what they were.  We decided this day, that we were going to go check them out.  They ended up being a huge public bath house for all free Roman's.

Look how huge they were!

We went and ran around the Circus Maximus

and then waited in line to see if the Bocca would snap our hands off!

 Sam was getting his snapped off, that's why he was moving so fast!  Luckily, he got his arm out in time!

The church was pretty inside, but had this little gem on leaving. 

Nice!

We also saw the Piazza Venezia with their big statues of Castor and Pollux (we had to learn who they were, afterwards.)  I told them that the stairs going up to the Santa Maria in Aracoeli were supposed to make you win the lottery if you went up on your knees.  Sam really wanted to try, but Rob was having none of it.  There were a lot of people there!

The temple of Hercules

We went around the Jewish ghetto and across the bridge onto the Isola Tiverina island, but the kids were kind of beat, so we didn't finish our Jewish Ghetto audio tour before we went home and ate grocery store pasta and canned sauce, 

because the restaurants not in tourist areas don't open for dinner hours until 7:30 pm.  

Day 5

Trevi fountain, again, USO, Trajan Markets, Trajan Column, Time Elevator

You can get a lot closer to the fountain in the morning times.

Sam and Max both found coins that didn't quite make it into the fountain that they used for their own coin toss.  Poor Joe- we couldn't find another one for him.

Afterward, we walked to the USO and made it in time for Pizza Friday's.  Some one also brought chocolate chip cookies and of course we got our free soda.  We enjoyed hanging out and talking with all kinds of people who had stopped by as well.  It wasn't easy to find.  I had the exact address and that's the only way we found it.  It almost looks abandoned, but it has a little tiny sticker on the door with USO on it.  You have to ring the door bell and show them your ID card to get in.

On our way home, I pouted until I got my way of going to see the show in the Time elevator.  It is actually a horrible flight simulator that shakes you up like crazy while they show you the history of Rome and how it all looked then.  It was interesting, but made me sick.  

We also saw the Trajan Markets, the Trajan Column.

First shopping mall

Day 6 

Villa Borghese park, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Hard Rock Cafe, Fests and Protest

We walked up to Villa Borghese this day, stopping to visit San Giovanni in Laterano church (which ended up being Rob's favorite for all the statues of the apostles)

 St. John- Notice he is writing

and San Clemente (which we didn't tour).  We tried to see Santa Maria della Vittoria, also, but it was closed for Siesta.  We also found a Spring fest going on.  The little boys participated with some other children in learning to fight, gladiator style.

They said they were promoting their big festival on April 21st.  As far as we could understand, that is their day of Nationalization.  "Big day in Italy!"  That is about all we could understand.  But we bought a couple of their buttons and they said something that looked like National on them. The gladiators had a lot of fun with the kids, so we enjoyed taking a break and watching.

We found the Hard Rock Cafe on our way up to the Villa Borghese and determined to have dinner there.  

After a nice walk around the park

 The Temple of Sam

 The Temple of Max

The Temple of Joseph

Emma didn't want a temple

to find a potty- they really don't have enough of those in Rome, although there are free public fountains with drinkable water everywhere-

we went back to the Hard Rock Cafe for an early dinner,

 then made our way back to see Santa Maria della Vittoria.  Rob really wanted to see it, because it was one of the churches in the book, Angels and Demons.

 We had noticed a large police presence when we came up in the morning with yellow tape everywhere.  Just before we made it to the church, we found out why.  There was a huge protest going on.

The police were all in their riot gear with their helmets on and shields up and ready.  The first wave of protestors seemed to be carrying signs that had x's over what looked like a metro and the word casa everywhere.  I knew the metro was still building, so I figured they were protesting it coming through their housing areas.  The next wave, though had pictures of a satellite x'ed out and Russian flags and Russian flags along side of Italian flags.  We decided that it was a good time to not look too American.  This is about the time that the police let us go around them to the church.  I think they just didn't want anyone behind them any more.  We were out in the open with the protestors for about 100 yards.  I wasn't feeling real comfortable about that.  We made it to the church steps and then I felt a little better.  When more men with ski masks came waving colored smoke and linked arms with lots of chanting and waving Russian flags, we headed into the church to take a look.  This one had a Bernini statue of the ecstasy of St. Teresa 

- which was weird and the overcoming of Mary of the heretics that changed the bible into the common language.  

The fountain outside of the church

It was a wonderful vacation, but we are officially done with Rome!  Check!  I got on the plane the next day and sighed, relieved. 

We made it a whole week in Rome and no one got pick pocketed! 

Some of the street performers 

My camera started acting up, but that just convinced Rob that I needed a new camera- score!  We walked an average of 1400 calories off a day and saw some of the coolest stuff in the world!  Next time, though, we need a beach vacation!