A Night to Remember

There are some moments in life that are so sweet, I wish that I could somehow capture them, not just in a picture or a video, but everything about them, the smells, the sounds, the air and of course the sights.

Last night there were several of those moments, the moments we come home for. Moments where I just stopped and gazed at my beautiful family, listened to the children laugh as they danced…

Watched my brothers and sisters engaged with their little ones and their spouses.

These are the people I love and for one night most of us were together in one place. This rarely happens now that I live overseas.

I don’t know what else to say, other than the time that I have been home has been priceless and this has got to be one of my favorite memories so far, so many of the people I love, all together at this joyous event, the marriage of our gorgeous cousin.

A Marriage that brought two families together, below is a picture of her dancing with her beautiful family, her husband, her three sons and her new step-daughter.

These are the moments in life that I just want to freeze and put in a jar and open up when I am feeling blue. Days when I am feeling like I am missing out on something in life, I can always look back and remember times like last night.

Being Home

Being Home has been awesome and overwhelming and fun and now that I am sick, I finally have time to write about it! And after seeing many of the fun things that I have done in the past four weeks you will get why I am not well.

Let’s start at the beginning, I was welcomed home into good ol’ LAX, by lots of hugs. Including my first hug with mom in almost two years!

I also got to meet my niece Scarlett for the very first time and hug these beautiful girls!

Celebrated Father’s Day by making my dad his favorite dessert, Strawberry Shortcake

After a week with my family, Curtis’ family welcomed us back with a pool party

After about two weeks in California, we finally got a good beach day in! We started the day by hiking in the beautiful mountains and then relaxed on the beach all afternoon 

A few days later we headed out to Vegas with my parents.

Don’t get me wrong, we didn’t go there to gamble. We didn’t even touch a slot machine. The idea of sitting at a slot machine doesn’t appeal to either one of us, but we did enjoy our time there at this great hotel.

On our second night we went to the Venetian and relived our days in Venice 

But this time we actually went on a Gondola Ride!

After that we did what we came to Vegas to do! We went to watch “The Phantom of the Opera.” My dad got us VIP tickets with backstage passes because his cousin plays the Phantom. His cousin got sick and wasn’t there that night, but we still had an amazing time and really enjoyed the show in this beautiful theatre!

When we got back we got another beach day in with our wonderful friends Danielle and Nate and their new baby Landon

The fourth of July quickly approached and we spent the day celebrating with family and winning the bake-off at the annual Block Party!

Those were Chocolate Chip Cookie Cupcakes! Delicious! But the winning item was actually No-Bake Black Bottom Pudding Pie. There are no words to describe how amazing it was!

It was a really fun family day!

The next day we headed out to Mammoth to see Angela, Alan and Lucy! We had such a great time there, we did many things, including canoeing

Spending a day at the pool with Angela & Lucy

We even got a little time to ourselves out by Twin Lakes

Just before leaving, we went to “The Stove” with Angela & Lucy

Then this weekend we went out to see Curtis’ sister Theresa! She is doing so well and we are so excited to see the things that G*d is doing in her life! What a blessing this was and a huge answer to many pr*yers!

The whole family was together again for the first time in two years

So, that is most of the things that we have done since we returned and our time has been so wonderful. We are looking forward to more great times as we continue our time here.

On another note, one of the things I love to write about is cooking, and I have gotten to experiment with it a lot more since I got to the states since I can buy so many more things here! So here are some of the things that I have experimented with since I got back. I Made this guacamole the weekend we returned for my family and I Made these amazing Mint S’more Brownies twice!  I also made this Zucchini Pizza last night for my brother’s family.

It has been so much fun to be a little bit more flexible with what I bake since all of the ingredients are at my fingertips. I am just trying to take advantage of it while I have the opportunity.

Anyhow, I hope that you try some of these delicious new recipes and that your summer is going as beautifully as ours is!

Venice

Well, I am finally getting around to writing a post about Venice. Usually at this point I wouldn’t bother writing about things that are so far gone, but this experience was way too great not to post about.

When we got to Venice I was completely depressed. I know, I know, I was in one of the most magical cities in the world and I was crying my eyes out! Sad, but true. I got over it pretty quickly though. How can this be? Right? Well, I had just left one of the best cities I had ever been to, had been staying at a beautiful hotel and sat for six hours on a train to arrive in this eery little harbor city that was drenched in rain and the forecast projected that it would be like that the whole time we were there. So I was a little bit more than disappointed.

 After a ten minute breakdown on the bed of my hostel, being comforted by Curtis of course, I sucked it up, changed my clothes and made my way out into the magical/eery little city of Venice, Italy. I was satisfied to find that even in the rain it was quite an enchanting city and we enjoyed walking around in the daylight that was left that day. It helped that we found an amazing café to eat at which we ended up eating at twice during our three days in Venice.

The second day we woke up to cloudy skies, but no rain. The forecast had changed for the day and it showed showers only in the evening. So we were pumped up as we headed out for what turned out to be a really great day!

We bought a boat pass for the day and headed over to St. Mark’s Square by way of the Grand Canal. The boat ride alone was quite lovely. We were beginning to really understand the appeal of Venice as we rode down the Grand Canal to St. Mark’s.

We got to St. Mark’s and it was an absolutely beautiful Basilica, unfortunately we couldn’t take pictures inside, but the outside itself was incredible.

After the Basilica we headed up the bell tower for an amazing view of the whole city, this is the view of St. Mark’s Square from the tower.

When we finished at the Bell tower we decided to feed the pigeons. These guys were crazy, if you gave them the tiniest crumb they would jump all over you! I love birds, so I actually kind of liked it.

After that we headed over to the island of Murano where they make amazing Murano glass. It was a beautiful island, maybe even more enchanting than Venice in some ways. It was small and quaint and they had a huge variety of beautiful things made of their ever so famous Murano glass.

After Murano, we headed over to Burano, I know, the names rhyme, hahaha, funny funny. I am not sure why they rhymed, but I do know that they were a lot alike, except for the fact that the houses on Burano were all very brightly colored and beautiful. The other thing I am aware of is that my photo of Burano is not very beautiful. That was completely my fault, since I forgot to fully recharge the battery, which almost led to breakdown #2 in Venice, until Curtis found a nice restaurant with some good wine 

We got our full worth of the boat pass that day using it two more times after our return to Venice. We made our way back to St. Mark’s square to search for a restaurant that my sister had been to in Venice.

After a little bit of a lengthy search, we found this beautiful little piece of heaven called Rafaelles, right on the canal where the gondolas pass by. It was nice to be there, at a place where my sister had eaten about a year before. At this point I hadn’t seen my sister Angela for two years, or any of my family for that matter, so it felt good to be connected in this way with her.

The next day in Venice we spent our time exploring the island. We walked around basically all day, we spent about six hours or more exploring the island, we figure that we spent a total of about four hours just walking around and seeing different things. Not a bad work out at all 

We took breaks of course, cappuccino breaks

gelato breaks

We saw some great things while we were walking including this beautiful church

We also got a chance to climb up this great bamboo sculpture, that was kind of like every kids dream.

It even had a cool hangout at the top with pillows and really chill music playing. It was quite interesting. You can read more about it here.

For our last dinner in Venice we actually went back to the same restaurant that we were at the first night. It was really good food, the service was great and so was the location. So we ate there one last time and reminisced about our time in Italy.

Overall we had an amazing time in Italy, the sights were beautiful, the people were friendly, the food was amazing and the company was wonderful! I think that one of my favorite things about Italy was the Gelato though 

Rome

I know it seems ridiculous, but yes, I am posting on my blog from Rome, even though I am terribly tired from three days of running around the city and all I want to do is crawl into my comfortable bed at this great hotel that we are staying at.

I am only doing it because I know that I probably won’t do it when I get home. Why? If you ask, you don’t know me well enough. I will be with my family and I will probably be posting something about how exciting it is to be home. So I need to write about Rome while I am excited about Rome.

Rome is better than anything I ever expected. Just the feeling of being here is difficult to explain. The sites are beautiful, but even more than all the sites, I just like the feel of walking the streets.

This is where we ate the first night. From where I was sitting I could see Trevi Fountain.

The pizza was delicious! My first real Italian Pizza!!

Rome was gorgeous in the evening especially Trevi Fountain. This was one of the three times we saw it!

This square was perfect…

And so was the latte I drank while gazing at it…

Don’t be fooled, although there is not one picture of me eating Gelato, I ate tons of it! It was probably my favorite part of Rome!

We didn’t go inside the coliseum because it was raining and we really didn’t care to, but it was cool to look at!

This is the view from the Spanish Steps on a rainy day

The rain just kept coming down, but we still managed to get a nice photo. A Curtis & Katina Classic for sure!

After climbing down the Spanish steps we took refuge in this restaurant and ate some calzone for our first time in Rome.

Then we finally made it to the Vatican on our second day

Overall, Rome has been an amazing city. There were some hard times, with hurting feet, soggy shoes, runaway buses and many more things. But those things I will forget. I will always remember the good times we had in Rome and I know that I am blessed for being able to go to this wonderful city!