Rome

Our day in Rome was the complete opposite of Naples from the get-go.  We arranged a private tour to make sure we could get around, go at our pace, get all the information we were craving, and be able to hit all the highlights in Rome that we wanted to see in just one day.  It turned out so perfectly  We got off the boat and were met by our private driver for the day who had a huge van for us.  We brought our stroller so that made it a lot easier for us as well.  Our driver, Valentino, was very personable, so kind to the kids and every time we turned around he was making faces at one of the babes or listening with interest to one of our boys stories.  He was awesome.  He drove us about an hour to the Vatican and the conversation along the way was great.  As it turns out this is a theme in Italy.  The conversation was so easy with the Italians we met and it was really refreshing to be met with such warmth by complete strangers.  Quite the opposite of most of our social interactions with Saudis.

Miss Grace met us at the Vatican.  I can't imagine what must have gone through her mind when she discovered that her tour for the day was with a family group of 7 including four young kids.  But I'm glad she came to work that day anyway!  Miss Grace made our day.  Our first stop was the Vatican and after she led us through security and ticket lines she stopped at this bench and told our boys stories about the Sistine Chapel.  She told them about Michelangelo painting for years standing up.  She showed them details and quizzed them on bible stories.  She showed them how he painted some of his contemporaries who he didn't like or who had peeked at the painting before it was finished, into his paintings naked, or headed to hell.  She had so many stories and pictures and told them all with such animation that they were really drawn in.  We fell in love with Miss Grace.  She couldn't have been a more perfect fit for us that day.

We wandered pretty quickly through some of the halls of the Vatican museums on the way to the Sistine Chapel, Miss Grace stopping us occasionally to tell us about a particularly important statue or...

tell us stories about the current pope and point out his modest residence out the window.

Here we are, with Miss Grace peeking around the corner making sure we were following, headed to the Sistine Chapel.

Pictures weren't allowed and I didn't want to get into trouble.  Plus I was holding a baby and whispering to two busy boys.  Glenn and Mallory, however, took the prohibition as a challenged and managed to get a few sneaky pics.

It was breathtaking.  I wasn't sure what to expect.  What I might feel when I saw this room that I'd heard about all my life.  It was more than beautiful.  It was awe-inspiring.  I hope I never forget the feeling of walking through the doorway and looking up.  It felt like a gust of wind hit me and I was stunned.  Completely in disbelief that I was really here.  In the Sistine Chapel.  We were ushered into the chapel and it was very crowded.  We stood in a huddled group surrounded on all sides and whispered I spy games with the boys trying to help them see details of the ceiling that Miss Grace had told them about.  Every once in a while the Vatican guards told people to quiet down.  It was easy to forget that it was a Chapel and not a museum.  I could have stood there staring at it for much longer but the boys were about done so after a few minutes we walked out and headed to our last Vatican stop, St. Peter's Basilica.  The boys needed a break so we found a little spot outside to give them snacks and then headed into St. Peter's.  

The girls did great up until we walked into St. Peter's.  They were all smiles even though they were so tired.  

It's funny.  For months over the summer I'd had a recurring dream that I'm standing, holding Kenna, in front of the Pieta.  THE Pieta, and she starts melting down.  Crying inconsolably because it happens to be nap time and she's exhausted.  I was so worried about being in the most special, reverent place I could think of on our trip, and having a baby meltdown in that spot.  AAAAaaand that's what happened.  She calmed down after a few minutes, but that moment, when my family was admiring the Pieta and Miss Grace was telling stories of the crazy man who tried to break it and showing more pictures on the ipad (seriously, she was so amazing), I was walking around trying to decide if I should just leave because Kenna was crying.  Oh well.  

This is the only picture I got of the Pieta.  It's super blurry but at least I managed one before I had to walk around.  Such a beautiful and powerful piece.

It was another really hot day and the boys were ready for a break so we took a quick stroll around St. Peter's and Miss Grace's commentary was perfect.  Perfect details of information for us.  Just enough but not too much.  And when the boys needed something she knew when to let us handle it and when it would be helpful if she distracted them with, "Hey, do you want to see something gross?!" and she'd take them over to see one of the Pope's bodies, entombed right there in the church.  She was so good.  

After we left St. Peter's Valentino was waiting right outside the walls for us and we decided that it would be best if we took a lunch break for the boys' sake.  They took us to a place they recommended and we had a delicious lunch together.  Everyone perked up a little bit with some delicious pizza, pasta and Caprese salad.  It was amazing.  Everything was amazing.  My favorite part of the lunch discussion was when Miss Grace showed us some of the hand signals that Italians use to communicate without words.  That was really entertaining.  

Then it was off to the Colosseum!  Another dream come true!  It's unreal that I get to see these places at all, let alone on a disney cruise and with my whole family.  What a dream.

No big deal.  Just hanging out on a column at the Colosseum.

It was very hot and we were grateful for all the shade within the walls.  We loved all of Miss Grace's stories about the shows and tournaments held there.  She showed us the bathroom stalls (super gross),

Tons of artifacts and different carvings that advertised the matches.

Unreal.

After the Colosseum the boys were really excited about gladiators...how could they not be?!  And they really wanted to find some gladiator armor.  Miss Grace said she knew a shop that would probably have some so we headed off to our next spot and promised the boys we'd find some before the day was out.  Our last stop with Miss Grace was the Pantheon.

Again, I wasn't really sure what to expect but it was ridiculous.  This enormous, technically perfect structure that was built a hundred years after Christ and somehow it's still standing?!  

Just the sheer size of the place was impressive.  But the way they made the dome so perfectly round, the way the light penetrates the entire room from just one open circle in the roof, it's just so cool.
Finn was at his best in the Pantheon.  He was hamming it up and cracking his sisters up.  He's always had something special with them, but it was even more adorable on this trip when we all got tired and worn down to see him be able to dust himself off and ham it up for his sisters simply because he loves them and loves that he can make them happy.

We only had Miss Grace for 5 hours so the Pantheon was our last stop with her.  She showed us a shop with gladiator armor.  Glenn got an extra sword and they had a battle right there in the side street by the Pantheon.  It was one of the most darling things I've ever seen.  Tate's go-to quote that he kept saying was, "You'll never finish me alive!"  I have no idea where he got it from but it was adorable.

 Our last selfie with Miss Grace.

We got to hang out with Valentino for another few hours before we had to head back to the cruise ship so we did a quick stop at the Trevi Fountain.  We threw some pennies in a tiny puddle they had for the purpose out front but the fountain was under renovation.  Likely for a few years.  It was stunning and we're still so glad we stopped.  

Next we headed over to the Spanish Steps.  The boys had impromptu battles in the road on our way.

So cool.

For the next hour or so we asked Mal to direct us to some of her areas in Rome.  We went to the church and tried to get in but it was locked.  It was kind of surreal to see streets that she lived on, places she grocery shopped, and sights that I'd seen pictures of her in front of from years ago on her mission.  It seemed like such a distant part of her life.  A part I'd never really fully understand and of course, I won't ever FULLY understand it, but it was really cool to be there with her and have her show us places she lived.  And I loved that the boys got to hear her talk about her mission and speak Italian with people all week.  It made my heart smile to hear my beautiful sister speaking her beautiful language.  

Mal really wanted to find this tiny bakery that the missionaries would go to for chocolate filled croissants and as she tried to direct Valentino to it he knew exactly where she was talking about.  He actually lived in that neighborhood and frequented the bakery as well.  It was a TINY little bakery called "wunder" and you had to go around to the back in this sketchy little alley.  It was so cool.  Such a little treasure we never would have stumbled upon on our own but those croissants were incredible.  Here's Mal, so excited that we found it!

Nothing could really top the bakery so after that stop we bid farewell to Rome.  Promising our little pennies in the fountain that we'd come back some day.  The kids all slept on our drive back to the ship as we chatted with Valentino.  It was an absolutely blissful day.  Hot and exhausting, but because we had our own guide we were able to take things at our own pace.  We stopped when we needed to stop.  We hit everything we needed.  We got lots of great information and kept the boys interested as well.  It was perfect.  I loved Rome.  I'm such a history nerd and this city is saturated in so much history I could spend my life there and never know all the layers of history that fill literally every nook and cranny of the city.  What a great day.  

Picture Tuesday, week 49

It's been a very busy week around here and I've been gone for most of it so I don't have a lot of new about the little ladies this week.  I will add these two little anecdotes about them lately:

1. I CANNOT figure out how to get the girls to keep bows in their hair.  Kenna really needs something to clip her long top hair back out of her eyes, and Taryn just looks so cute with something small clipped in her top fluff.  But they are CONSTANTLY either taking their own bows out as soon as I turn my back, or yanking them out of their sister's hair.  Then they usually go straight to their mouths which means they're covered in milk drool.  Which, now that we're starting to taper in real milk, smells so much worse than before.  It's frustrating, but I am seriously out of ideas on how to get them to leave them be.  

2. T and K love to play in the toilet.  It happened for the first time last week.  They got into the entry bathroom and someone had left the toilet opened and I found them both splashing in the toilet which had been peed in.  Awesome.  And now it's bath time!  Then twice before I left last week one of the girls would hear one of their brothers peeing in their bathroom and they'd crawl as fast as they could to the bathroom and start playing in the toilet while they were still peeing.  And Tate or Finn would just yell helplessly, unable to stop peeing but seeing the problem coming from across the room.  It happened once with each brother and sister.  So gross.  So we've got to get better at closing the door before we use the bathroom now because apparently the girls know when they can get in the toilet and when they want to get something they know they shouldn't, they can be very fast!

Kenzie got married on Saturday so I left Wednesday night and spent a few days in Utah before flying back and getting home Tuesday at 4am.  The wedding was beautiful and our new Uncle Trevan is so awesome.  The kiddos are gonna love him.  

Finn was sick while I was gone and got some sort of rash which the doctor thinks is a reaction to his fever.  It's starting to fade a little bit but he's still pretty speckled.  Glenn said the girls have been making noise or crying in their sleep or waking up entirely for the last few nights.  It's exhausting but the poor girls just must not be feeling well either.  Taryn woke up this morning and now she's pretty speckled too.  No idea what's going on but hopefully it's gone soon, poor kiddos.

Here are our little ladies, 49 weeks old!
Kenna, with her new cute little bow.

Aaaand about 10 seconds later when she decided to rip it out of her hair.

shaggy little stinker.

 I finally caught one of Taryn's pirate faces on camera!  She does this goofy little squinty face sometimes when she's happy.  It's so goofy and I love it so much!

 Her little speckles didn't show up very much in these pictures but the poor girl is pretty spotted today.  Hopefully it doesn't last long!

Picture Tuesday, week 48

The baby girls are even more all over the place this week.  They're getting SO fast.  I just turn around and they're in the other room, pouring water all over themselves from the water cooler, playing in an open toilet filled with pee (that was a fun first), or emptying drawers in the bathroom down the hall. They're quick and they seem to like to team up on me.  It's pretty stinkin' hilarious most of the time.  The list of things I can't really do unless they're napping is getting bigger though.  Cleaning bathrooms, cooking, anything on the computer or piano (because they're constantly trying to crawl under the desk and pull on cords and plugs).  But they're still taking two naps most days so we make it work.

Still no teeth for baby K.  She's had a bit of a rough week though, which is still pretty tame in general, but she's more fussy in the evenings so maybe she's working on some.  The last few nights one or both of the girls have been crying for around a half an hour around 3 or 4.  It's hard because just going in and snuggling them doesn't usually calm them down during the night and we're too afraid of propagating the trend to feed them bottles and then have them start waking up at night again to eat so it's just a rough hour or so during the night.  Hopefully it's just growth spurts or something?  I'm clueless.  They both cry and sound like their hearts are breaking so it's really sad to not be able to do anything about it.  And also, it's exhausting.  Good thing they're both so ridiculously adorable!

Here's T and K, 48 weeks old!  We got some silly faces today.  They both make some pretty cute little pucker faces.  I haven't been able to catch Taryn's duck lips one on camera yet, but I'm gonna keep trying because it's just darling.  

Picture Tuesday, week 47

T and K are getting busier by the minute.  It's getting to be nearly impossible to get dinner ready unless someone is entertaining the babies in the other room because if they're at my feet they're crawling up my legs making it difficult to take steps around the kitchen without detaching them first which always leads to crying, or they're opening cupboards and trying to empty the contents, or they're standing up on the water cooler and pushing the lever to dowse themselves in cold water.  It's crazy.  The same goes for having them in the bathroom while I'm getting ready.  It's crazy but it's also really fun.  They're starting to get a little more personality and I'm reminded all the time how much I love this stage.  Taryn loves being snuggled and if you get down on the ground she'll speed crawl over to you, climb up your lap and just squeeze you tight.  Kenna loves being held but hasn't quite got to the hugging stage yet.  She cries when you put her down and is always comforted by a snug when she's been hurt, emotionally or physically.  Both Kenna and Taryn laugh and smile easily these days.  Especially when Finn is trying to crack them up.  They both adore him and Tate.  It's so darling.

No new teeth this week.  Taryn still had four and Kenna has yet to cut any.

Here are our little babes, 47 weeks old this week!  I can't believe they turn 1 this month!  Where has the time gone?!

Naples

Our first day on the cruise ship was a day at sea.  It was lovely to spend a whole day exploring the ship, getting some sun on the deck, swimming and eating and playing.  Finn and the girls got a nap in, we saw the show that night and got plenty of rest before our first shore day.  Our first stop was in Naples.  We woke up to this:

It was so surreal looking off the side of our cruise ship and seeing Italy!  Unreal!  We got some breakfast and made sure we had everything we needed for the day (tons of diapers, wipes, emergency pooplosion outfits, cameras, snacks, formula, water, the list seemed endless) and went to meet our tour group in the theatre of the ship.  This day we signed up for a half-day tour of Pompeii through the Disney excursions.  This was sort of a rough start and I think a lot of it had to do with being a part of a tour group.  It was really hot.  The boys were really tired.  And it was stressful to have to keep up with a tour group.  Our cute Italian tour guide, Guido, was darling and tried to be patient but we were not always quiet and the boys got tired of listening to the ear phone tour really quickly.  I loved having a guide so we could get a lot of cool details, but I really wasn't able to hear much of it because we were trying to keep the kiddos happy.  Still, just being able to be in Pompeii with our kids and see things that we'd only seen pictures of was pretty amazing.  And we wouldn't have known that we don't do well in tour groups at our current stage without having tried it.  So, now we know.

Auntie Mallo brought some cereal from the cruise ship and it was a lifesaver.

Tate, shooting at me from behind a pillar.

It was SO hot with the little ladies strapped to our chest.  Sweat was just dripping down my chest and back.  And even though they were still pretty little, they got heavy after a little while.  

It was incredible to see how much detail was preserved under the ash for all those years.  The fact that columns, entire walls could stay upright during the explosions and waves of ash and gas it pretty amazing.  And then there's so much detail still in the carvings on the capitals and paintings on  walls and mosaics on floors.  It's so cool.

Tate and Finn loved seeing the artifacts in this one area.  They had rooms filled with pottery and a few of these casts that they learned about in Tate's presentation.  People died and as they decomposed they left cavities in the ash that scientists filled with plaster so we have a replica of how they looked when they died.  Crazy.

This was probably my favorite building.  It's a public bath.  The details in statues around the rooms, carvings on the ceilings and walls were so well-preserved and looked amazing.

Here's Tate, pretending to be a dead body.  Obviously.

So many stairways leading to no where.

Again, I was busy taking care of my little ones so I didn't get nearly as much information as I wish I could have.  But we did a lot of research before we left and I think it was cool for Tate and Finn just to be in these places we'd talked about.  To see the way they planned sidewalks so you didn't have to walk in the dirty street, the way they planned all the streets to be straight and had numbers on each building so that addresses were easy to find.  Things we talked about and saw pictures and videos of before we came.  Such an amazing experience.

Poor little Finny probably had the hardest time.  He was tired and hot.  He tried to hold it together and we were able to distract him with snacks and water once in a while but he was pretty worn out.

After our tour was over we got back on the bus and went back to the cruise ship.  Mal had a friend who told us his favorite pizza place in Naples that we had to try so we got in a taxi and asked him to take us there.  Luckily, we ran into Genaro, taxi driver extraodinaire.  He stayed with us for the rest of the day and was the most fun part of our day in Naples.  He told us that both of the pizza places Mal's friend recommended were closed because the owners were on summer vacation.  Most inconsiderate of them!  But he took us to another spot he knew for lunch.  Finny fell asleep in the car and Genaro insisted on carrying him in to the restaurant for us.  He was so kind and generous and friendly all day long.  It was so endearing to be around someone whose enthusiasm for life is almost visibly bubbling out of him constantly.   

We laid Finn down on some chairs and he was completely out during lunch.  Which is a shame because lunch was the bomb.  We saved him some pizza and he ate when he woke up in the car.

It's so fun to travel with Mal for so many reasons, among them is that she loves good food as much as we do so when we make noises as we eat, what about bob style, she's right there with us.  We had the most delicious pizza I've ever tasted and some ridiculous caprese salad with tomatoes and mozzarella that tasted nothing like tomatoes and mozzarella I've ever tasted before in my life.  I can't decide if I'd weigh a thousand pounds if I lived in Italy or if I'd be happier eating less because absolutely everything tastes so wonderful!

After our lunch we went let the boys chase pigeons in the piazza that was right outside our restaurant for a minute.  They were thrilled to be able to run around for a bit and chasing pigeons always seems to be the highlight of their day.  Then we got back in the taxi with Genaro and he showed us the town for about another hour.  He took us up to the top of the hill by Naples and let us take some pictures of the view.  It was so gorgeous.  

Genaro was the best.  Glenn and I could understand enough because Italian is pretty similar to Spanish so we could even speak to him a little and he could understand us.  And he LOVED that Mallory spoke such fluent Italian.  She ended up sitting in the back for some of the ride and he kept checking in the rear-view mirror to make sure she was looking at him and listening.  Every once in a while he would stop and say, "Mallory?  Mallory!" to get her to make eye contact with him before he continued with what he was saying.  He talked non-stop for over an hour about the history of Naples, the Italian philosophy of life, his family, the mafia, it was awesome.  His enthusiasm about everything Italian just made him glow in a way that was darling and absolutely hilarious.  At one point he pulled the car over and turned around in the driver's seat to tell Mallory and I something important.  His eyes got really big, he motioned enthusiastically with his hands and then when he got really enthusiastic he actually started to crawl over the driver's seat.  His upper body was half way over the seat by the time he finished his thought and then he turned around and kept driving.  Oh my gosh we were laughing so hard.  He pulled over at another spot a little later and ran down to a store to get us an ornament from Naples.  When we put it on our tree this year we laughed remembering this kind, friendly man we met who took us on the most entertaining drive of our lives.

He dropped us off at a shopping street that was close to the cruise ship so we could shop for a bit before walking back.  We kicked ourselves as we walked away for not getting a picture with him.  Later, as I was going through our pictures I had to laugh because we actually did get a picture of him...sort of.  He took us to this beautiful piazza outside a cool church, which is where he got married and he took some pictures for us.  In true Italian fashion he used his hands to signal us when to look and to draw our attention.  Aaand he got some pictures of his hands while doing so.

It was a great first outing in Italy!