At Work and At Play in the USA

That's right! We did do some work while on our sublime September vacation to visit the family:

Zeno painted the windows...

And some of the window sills too!

Those synthetic paint fumes really get to you after a while...

Emily, very talented young lady, drank tea while duct-taping...

Em, Sarah, Lydle and I all took turns painting the old chest we wanted to recover and decoupage... it turned out really nice!

Lydle is quite the artist!

Zeno helped blow the grass and leaves from the neighbor's driveway. Actually, he really wanted to see how the blower backpack worked...






"Hey, Amore, we need to get one of these for Italy!!!"

Then there were times when we worked to prepare the food:

Sometime is was a LOT of work!!! Roasting...charcoaling...
Setting the table...


Frying...

Baking and making ice-cream... YUMMY! Of course, after the preparation there's always the clean up:

Washing the dishes...



And washing the dishes some more...

But then, there was more than enough time for PLAY!!!!

Even Grandma jumped on the swings!

And Jesse, Kylin and Kirra can get some pretty good air!

Play also involves RELAX:

Reading...

and some more reading...

And you can never quite get enough reading in for everyone ( =

Oh, the playground is the absolute BEST:

How many kids can go down the slide at once!?!?!

Emily hiding under the playground equipment...

Emily, Lydia and Amanda spinning...

Ride Em ride!!!!
Oh yea! Go Mom! Cool sunglasses... you can run with the fashion crazy in Milano with those ( =

Em, that's not such a good place for hide and seek... Not to forget the sea-saw...

Ooh la! Those are some beautiful eyes ( = Nothing like the playground for bringing out the smiles...

And we played with stickers...

I bet you don't know how fun Lillianna's stickers can be!

Then Mom wanted to play telephone...

And Jared packed up for a sleep over at Grandma's ( =

A little B-Ball?

And Lydle is quite the incredible Volley-Ball player. Go Lyd!!!

Partying!!! Tea Partying that is ( =

Hole in one!!!

Em, in mini golf you can only hit the ball a maximum of 9 times...Amanda, you're supposed to watch the ball when you putt...

Look at that form! Nice shot Lydle!

Lillianna, can you explain the rules again to Zio Zeno?

Of course how can you put sister together and not expect them to play dress up!?Kirra is the magnet queen!

And then we pretended that we were part of the zoo.

And there are times when you're just silly. For example, Zeno was so used to waiting in lines that he found the place where you're supposed to wait in line and waiting even though there was no one else in line! Amore, if you really loved me you wouldn't feed me to the dinosaurs...

As you can see, we had a GREAT, UNFORGETABLE, FANTABULOUS, MAGNIFICENT, INDEMENTICABILE, MERAVIGLIOSO, INCREDIBILE time working and playing in the USA.