Sha's a BIG cousin

We are very excited to announce that my brother Billy and his wife Alicia welcomed an absolute beautiful baby boy on Sept 16th. Aaron James Rakocy is the cutest ever.  He was born while we were at our family reunion at the Jersey Shore.  Ironically last year at that same place and time was when we received our "CA date" for Sha. It's becoming a baby producing vacation:)  Anyway we are very excited to show him off.  Congrats Bill and Alicia, he's just perfect. We love you.xoxo

1st day of 4th grade

Well summer is officially over and school is back in session, granted a bit delayed due to Irene but all is good, minus the fact that we lost power AGAIN this morning.  Yes Sha's first day of school started with no power, thank goodness we showered and got all ready last night:) 
We had a great morning, we commuted in with our dear friends Christine and her son Quinn.  Quinn and Sha are in Ms. Schofield's class together which they are both very excited about.  Sha started getting a little nervous with going back to school so Christine and I thought it may help ease the nerves for both of them if we drove them in together.  When we pulled up Sha didn't want us to come in, little miss independent wanted to go in with Quinn alone.  These two cuties are just the best!!!!

Hurricane Irene

By now most have heard about Miss Irene, she came, conquered, left us without power for 6 days (my folks for 8) and boy did she do some damage.  Thank GOD that none of that damage was to our houses.  This was the first time, even for me, ms. east coaster, that I experienced no power for so long.  Paul and I had a tree fall across our road a few houses down and when it fell it literally felt like it was on our roof, very scary. My parents had the worst of it all.  Two trees fell across, blocking their driveway completely.  They also witnessed the water from the Long Island Sound literally roll down their street, luckily it receded as fast as it came in. Probably the saddest part was seeing our favorite parking lot that overlooked the water torn to shreds, it looked like a tornado came through ripping the pavement completely off.  We played a lot of board games, told ghost stories, ate, drank, took a lot of walks and even pulled together a combined garage sale between our house and Grandma R's. Sha got a big kick out of wearing Grandma R's raincoat since it matched Grandpa R's, very cute.  All good but all exhausting.  Below are pics of what Irene did.