May-June, 2011/Florida, Mexico & Shanghai

As the end of the school year approached, we celebrated Jay’s 15th birthday with a few friends by going to the 5th game of the Bruins-Lightning Conference Final.  It was a great win with the Lightning coming back from a 3 goal deficit, but eventually they lost the series in 7 games to the  ultimate Stanley Cup Champions.    Jay also had a solo performance in a special drama night (ANGST-JAY.MOV).  It was quite an entertaining short performance.

For Mother’s Day, the kids decided on their own (mostly Rowan and Jay’s prompting) to buy Mom the perfect Mother’s Day gift, a fondue set, so that she could prepare great chocolate and cheese fondues for them.   Somehow, it doesn’t quite work as well, when Dad buys this kind of stuff for Mom…..

Once the school year ended, Papi and Michael went to Mexico to visit our partners the Mares Brothers and their wonderful families.  We have committed to visit more often and will go with Rajjina and Soledad there next year.

In June, Shaun went to Shanghai where he visited some old friends and worked for half of the Summer at AEG as an intern. Our friends the Cappos added a surprise addition to their family, Jaden.   At AEG, Shaun helped in doing some marketing research and learned a lot about the set up and organization of major events like the Lang Lang Concert on Ice at the Mercedes Benz Center in Shanghai  (main performance center from the Expo there last year).  It was a very good experience for him to work further on his Mandarin and see China from a very different perspective than he had, when he was a middle school student there.   He continues to maintain blogs in Mandarin at You Tube (just type in “mashan7” for his video blogs).