Somehow Silas did not have a toy truck until today. Funny how little boys like them so much.

Bath time tonight.

Some recent pics of Silas I had in my phone…opening Christmas presents, in the bath & at the Burger King (a new addition here)!

This past weekend I was in charge of a conference called Nuovo Inizio (New Beginnings) for our new staff and interns. The conference was at a farm (fattoria) outside Siena in a very hilly, very beautiful part of Tuscany. Here are some photos of our weekend.

We just flew back to Italy from the States on what I realized was my seventh flight from Dallas to Florence.  Also a first - flying back to an already established home, without having to “move” in somewhere.  Until this trip back I had always prided myself by not really feeling the effects of jetlag.  Not this time.  I’m officially blaming it on Silas, but really I think it was the nap that I took on the first day back, breaking my “always stay up until 9:00 pm rule”.  Still, it is allowing me some free time to finally post something on the blog.  It’s been too long.

Our trip to the States was a lot of fun, but I think I’ve realized that no matter the length of the time back in Texas, it will never be relaxing.  Fun, yes.  Relaxing, no.  There are just too many people that we want to see and never enough time to do it.  This trip though was family priority and Silas had a blast meeting everyone.  We kicked off our time with a week in Colorado with my family and then a week in Kaufman with Mel’s parents, sister & brother-in-law.  Highlights:

Durango
Floating the Comal
Waxing my brother in Settlers
Southwest sending our luggage to Jacksonville istead of Albuquerque, but then delivering it to my parents’ cabin 5 hours away once it finally arrived and reimbursing us the $175 we spent at Wal-Mart (babies are expensive)
The Circus
Seeing my parents’ finished cabin
Silas’s first Rangers game (even though he was worn out by the bottom of the 5th)
Picknick in the mountains
Making note of how everyone’s speach changes when they are talking to a baby (you’d be surprise how many people throw grammar rules out the window when an infant is around)
Chipotle & Dr. Pepper
Reconnecting with friends
Introducing Silas to parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts & uncles…good times all around

Here are some pictures from our visit:

My parents had scheduled a week-long trip to the southern coast of spain for vacation and asked us if we wanted to come stay with them for a few days.  A couple cheap Ryanair flights later (thanks, you guys!) and we were on our way.  It was the firs time Silas had flown, so we were curious to see how it would go.  It wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be, so it was a good primer for our long trip home to the States on July 22nd.

We got to see Seville, Malaga, Gibraltar, and a little bit of Granada, but mostly we just relaxed around the hotel where we were staying.  Gram & Granpop were more than willing to watch the little guy so that Mel and I could spend some time at the pool, and as usual, I ended up with a sunburn.

Check out the pictures:

We’ve been on a quest lately to make Silas an American citizen…and at last we’ve finally succeeded.  We pick up his Consular Declaration of Birth and U.S. passport in about a week.  As with most things in Italy, this process took a lot longer and involved many more steps than we initially thought it would.  But what we didn’t expect was how difficult one small step of the process would be…taking his passport photo.  Rather than trying to explain to you how difficult it was, I’ll just show you the evolution of the photos.  And trust me when I tell you that these are only a small sample of the photos that we took…