St Patrick's Day 2012

             Happy St. Patrick's Day!

             You know, for years I'd joke that this is another holiday tied into the Italians somehow.  People would say 'What??', and I'd say, surely you know that St. Patrick was not born in Ireland, he was not Irish.  Most people are aware that he was born in Scotland/Britain area, abducted at an early age, sold into slavery in Ireland.  He escaped and went on to teach people about God - using the shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity.  So, then, I'd joke that his parent were actually originally from Italy, making him Italian and therefore, the root of this holiday is Italian. 
             And here it is, right from my friends at Catholic.org, who are kind enough to send me a daily email with the 'Saint of the day'! 

             http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=89#.T2VZ7pIsBGs.email

             St. Patrick's parents WERE Italians!!!

           Anyway, aside from this hilarity, we took time to remember our good pup, Zona, who died this day in 2010 from spleen cancer, beginning the erosion of our family and our version of reality.  Now  it may be safe to read 'The Art of Racing in the Rain' by Garth Stein, if you have not already.  When Zona died, my Dad told me about this book.  But warned me to wait a period of time before trying to read it.  I tried to wait, but after a couple of months of staring at it each day I went to work at Barnes & Noble, I finally picked it up and cried like a baby...
            Zona was  a good girl, part Lab, part Aussie.  Kim loved that girl, once she got through the first 6 years of mayhem.  And, like Kim, Zona was never sick and showed no signs right up until the last three weeks of her life.  She literally allowed the bambini to use her as a pillow while they laid on the floor watching t.v.. She allowed Tonio to ride her like a pony.  She loved their extra strong hugs.  Her passing was quite a shock to us...and, looking back, Kim was starting to slow down, preferring to stay around the house rather than explore our beautiful city and state as we had become accustomed to over the years we lived here.
            Today, we lit candles for Zona and told our favorite 'Zona Stories'  Autumn loved the story that Mama used to tell her about how she was planting flowers, working with her head down and placing the flowers about 3' apart.  When she was finally done, she looked up to appreciate her hard work and admire the flowers...only to see that Zona had followed her down the line, pulling out the flowers and tearing them up!  She also remembered Mama telling her about how, at our old house, when Zona was a pup, we used to sequester her and Cajun in our hallway at night with a baby gate.  One night, we heard noises through our bedroom wall in our living room.  'Burglars!' we thought!  We carefully crept into the hallway, where Cajun greeted us with a 'I tried to contain her.', apologetic look...we entered the living room to find Zona on our couch happily shredding the throw pillows!  Cody said he loved playing tug-o-war with her.

              And this morning, I remembered our first St. Patrick's Day in Tucson, back in March of 1994.  Kim had discovered that there would be a parade downtown and off we went.  It wasn't on the scale to ones we had seen before, but we surely enjoyed ourselves.  We took her Mom and Jim to see this parade when they came out for Kim's 40th birthday - the kids fondly remember that! 
              So they were pretty excited when I woke them up to go see it (except for Cody and Brendon, who we took to see the University of Arizona NIT basketball game on Wednesday and ended up staying with us until Saturday!  We dropped those guys at the skate park!).

              Autumn took the pictures today....

She loved to see the Italian flag flying from Super Mario's hand!

And the camel...we paid $75 to fill up the Expedition on our way to the parade, speaking of camels.

My two little leprechauns (thank God for spell check!).

The British want to take St. Patrick back...

Autumn was scared of the clowns, relieved that they stayed on the other side of the street!

Tonio's little classmate, Bailey was on the other side of this float.

Autumn loved the Beagle rescue group

Tonio's favorite was the pirate ship...

And the intersection of Stone and Pennington had a great big shamrock painted on it!!  The little ones thought the parade was great and then wanted to celebrate St Patrick's Day by going to McDonald's for a shamrock shake!