Family Vacation!

We usually spend our vacation time/money visiting family or friends, but we decided that it's time for us to start creating some memories of vacations with just the 4 of us. We have some great friends that live in Rhode Island that invited us to spend the 4th of July holiday weekend with them, and so we decided to extend our time up there and rent a beach house for the rest of the week.

Our time with our hosts - Seth, Donna, Graham, Sadie, Gracie and Lucia - was great!

I loved being around a newborn again and held Lucia as often as possible - although, I had to fight Sophia for her and she won a lot! She loves babies!!!.

Sophia & Sadie "babysitting"

The day after we arrived, Donna's sister Dionne and her husband Mike and their baby boy Quinn joined us! We all have so much fun together - our bond started on the Italy trip last year and just keeps getting stronger.

So, on to our family time! We rented a little house 1/2 mile from the beach in Charlestown, RI. Our days went something like this - wake up and get to the beach by 8:00, come home for lunch and a break from the heat, head back to the beach until dinner, come home and get ready for dinner and go out, go back to the beach until it closed at 9:00 and then repeat daily! It was so much fun to just be with the kids and really play with them. It was SO hot that week - it got up to 101 two different days and was in the high 90s the rest of the time, so we were in the water A LOT! I would highly recommend a RI beach vacation - a very different pace/feel than the Jersey shore!

We took a day-trip to Block Island - about a 30 minute ferry ride just a few minutes from where we were staying. It was a beautiful island, but the day we went it got up to 101 and for some reason we didn't think to bring our bathing suits. So, it kind of turned out to be our least favorite day but I would definitely go back someday if the weather was not so hot and we brought bathing suits.

Block Island ("main" street)

We spent a lot of our evenings on the beach as well. Since it was such a hot week, evening swimming was great. We'd also spend time playing games and taking pics.

I think Anthony has Jon's same body - just a smaller version :-)

I love these pics of them because they truly love each other so much. They get along so well and we are so thankful that they are such good friends. This has been an exceptionally good summer - they never fight!

First Phillies Game!

We took the kids to their first Phillies game! It was such a blast - perfect weather, perfect game (Phillies won 10-8) - - perfect family memory!

on the way to the game

tailgating (until the cop drove by and told us we weren't allowed...what?!)

on the way home from the game - so typical - he always sacks out and she never does!

Family Photo Shoot

This summer we had a family photo shoot. Our friend Joe Roberts of Joe Roberts Photography did these for us. I decided to make a slide show of all of the "fun" pictures! Joe is so funny and we really had a great time getting this photo shoot done. We also got some great "posed" pics, but these are truly my favorites - I think they more accurately capture the spirit of our family!

You can speed up the slide show by hitting the + sign in the bottom left-hand corner