Here's a short note, just to keep you updated...
close, especially the giraffe meandering down the road checking out all the cars. Ann was not so pleased when she saw the two rhinos by the road. Apparently, she has a slight fear of rhinos (they're enormous!). The park also had a sections that included gory dinosaur statues (some having other dinosaurs for lunch) and a Wild West Town. The western town had a "boot hill" style cemetery and a little indian statue (see the very PC picture). After about 5 hours in the park, Thomas had hit almost every exhibit and ride that he could find. It was a very good trip, and a nice way to break-up a mid-summer week. 
Little Sammy turns seven months old in a few days. We couldn't resist sharing a few photos. He's starting to take a real interest in his dinner spoon. He doesn't quite have the dexterity to feed himself, but it sure doesn't stop him from trying. 
Sammy's also getting up on all fours and making swift progress toward crawling. However, he wants to get up onto his feet, and try to crawl on his toes. He's content to rest on his knees, but tries to do the crawling the hard way. 
We have another little critter installment. We seem to have a lot of these large, metallic green beetles. We left our Peterson's Guides back in Pennsylvania (we didn't know if they'd work in Europe), and we can't seem to identify it on the internet. They're beautiful, though, and we see them nearly every day. It's funny that we don't recall seeing them last year. 
untains were obscured with haze. Otherwize, we think that the sights would have been breathtaking. 
comfortable and inviting feel that we really enjoyed. 
This was an uneventful week (which was welcomed), capped with a lazy weekend. John had a short businesstrip to Dusseldorf and Thomas played outside in his pool. Originally, we had planned to dirve to an old abby to do a little sightseeing this weekend. The weather was not cooperative, though - all weekend we had an endless series of violent thunderstorms roll overhead. So, our plans were cancelled and we just stayed home. 
lpine views. The weather was slightly cool in the mountains, which made it a nice escape from the usual heat. We had a nice lunch and a wonderful time taking walks along the river. A short distant further up is the Gries Pass and Switzerland. You need to do some real hiking, however, and we decided to 'pass' on the pass because of Sammy. It was a great trip, and we might try to do more exploring in the Mountains. 
Little Sam turned six months old on June 24th. For his health check-up, we had to do another full kidney scan, to see if his kidney (Link and Link) was still okay. So, on Friday (the Fourth of July), Ann took Sammy to the clinic to be 'scanned'. The scan found that his kidney is still malformed, but that it is also still functioning properly. The doctor said that the kidney may never grow into a 'normal' form, and that he'll need semi-annual kidney scans until he's about five years old. Since it's functioning properly now, he's healthy. If he doesn't have any problems by the age of five, then he'll be unlikely to develop a problem in the future. He'll simply have one kidney slightly abnormal. So, it wasn't the best news, but we're happy that sammy is still health. He sure is happy...and always HUNGRY!
Being in Italy, we didn't really celebrate American Independence Day. The Italians that we know actually know a lot about the American holiday (fireworks, barbeques, parades, and independence from Britain). It's sometimes embarrassing that everyone knows so much about our traditions and customs, but we knew so little about theirs. 
