Daniel's 1st year is done!

In mid August Daniel finished his last exam of his first year! For the next 1.5 years he'll be in 13 different rotations, mostly at the Yale New Haven Hospital. It's an amazing accomplishment and am so proud of him. He took one exam every week, and spent every night in the Library. I keep forgetting Daniel doesn't have to go to the library every night! It's been so nice!

Once Daniel took his last test, we left town immediately and began our summer vacation. First stop was to The Cox Farm in Maryland for the annual summer family reunion. Highlights included camping with the cousins up in the woods, the huge slip 'n slide, and the most wonderful homemade ice cream party ever!

After that we headed up to Maine to go camping in Acadia National Park. We camped 2 nights and filled 3 days with sight seeing, bike riding, and a lobster or two :) It was incredibly beautiful there, but surprisingly crowded! I often felt like we were at Disney World, not a National Park. Despite the crowds, everywhere we went we were able to go off on our own path and enjoy some peace and quite and solitude. Some of my favorite times was when we would go off onto the rocks and read our books for a while. I was so amazing to see all the beautiful elements of nature come together in one place...mountains, ocean, cliffs, big lakes, forests. It was so incredible! Can you see the amazing fog in the picture below? It was blowing in and getting caught on the islands in Bar Harbor.

We came home, cleaned up from camping, and then welcomed our good friends Hoang, Amy and their baby Lydia to Connecticut. They came up from Arizona for a week long vacation. We spent 4 days in NYC, and 4 in CT. Hoang and Amy are die hard food network lovers, and have been making note of good restaurants to eat at in our area as they are featured on different shows. It was a food centered vacation, and attractions and sight-seeing were filler activities :) It was more fun than I could have ever imagined.