Last Days of Summer

How can school be starting already next week? I am so not ready to send my boys back to school. We have had such a great summer and we have such fun together. I am really sad to see these carefree summer days end. Jonah starts preschool MWF and I am already trying hard not to tear up just thinking about it. I think I need to take a "mommy's little helper" (aka xanax...the milliniums version of Valium. All the fun without the addiction!) before leaving him at the school's gates. Dante's preK teacher, Ms. Mary is going to be his teacher. All the faces and the facilities will be familiar, yet because another chapter is turning in our lives and the reminder that someday my kids will leave for good makes me want to go to bed with a pillow over my head and cry my eyes out. But no time for that! My kids are growing up and I need to squeeze every moment that they still think I hung the moon out of them. Soon enough they will think I am an idiot and during those years I want to cherish the memories of these. Here are some of the Summer of 2008's parting shots...




Hunting for letterboxes: Helping mommy with the clues. We were in San Diego here at Presidio Park overlooking the bay. The Old Mission and Museum is closed now for renovation but the grounds are still open and beautiful. I haven't been here since I was in my friend's wedding on the lawn here almost ten years ago.



Father Junipero Serra. All of the California Missions from San Diego to San Fransisco are here because of Father Serra. He was a Fransciscan and legend has it that he walked from each Mission to oversee their completion barefoot. That is over 1000 miles one way. Barefoot and in his brown Friar's robe. If you are ever in Southern California you will find many landmarks named after this holy man.


Serra's blessing of the site of Mission San Diego de Alcala on July 16, 1769, marked the beginning of the European settlement of California. To read more about Fr. Serra click here: http://www.catholic-church.org/serra-beth/serra-4.htm

I have no pictures as of yet of the Mission SD de Alcala because it is currently surrounded in scaffolding. It will reopen as a museum run by the San Diego Historical society on October, 1 2008.






Mommy's group Pool Party at Suzanne P.'s house. Our mommy group has been together 6 years. When we started Dante was just a baby and half the kids in that picture weren't even born yet. We still meet once a week-they are my sanity break! (the mommy's, not the kids!) It was a fun day-Suzanne grilled us hot dogs and hamburgers and Suzanne C. brought her Amish friendship bread. When's the next party, ladies?










Well the tourists are gone and we have our beaches back, hooray! We love our little cove in Oceanside. We call it Dante's beach, but it is really Buccaneer Beach. We love it here. And all the more now that we aren't rubbing sunscreen sticky elbows with the tourists from Arizona....







We hope you all enjoyed your summer as much as we did! May your days trasitioning back to school be smooth...and not too teary!