How I Spent My Summer: Summer School and Italy

Summer School
This summer, I took Marital Property and Legal Drafting.  As a married person, I found Marital Property to be rather eye-opening.  Turns out there were all sorts of rights and responsibilities I had assumed of which I was completely unaware. After all, when I got down on bended knee in the glow of a wintry sunset overlooking the vast Pacific, I imagined my romantic life with my wife and how we would start a family, not the legal implications of community property.  I highly recommend the course, but I’m not sure if it’s better to take it before or after getting married.  In Legal Drafting the professor created a fake case that dealt with a character startlingly close to the soon-to-be former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, who had also made racially reprensible statements.  Researching and writing for that paper was fascinating, because the subject matter was so emotional, and so steeped in the history of race relations in the U.S.

Vacation in Italy
My wife, Stefania, is Italian, and in Italy, vacations are sacrosanct.  So it was without debate (almost) that we would take our three-year-old son, Kyler, to Italy this summer and visit her family and friends.  It was a noble sacrifice on my part, I know.  We stayed with my in-laws and enjoyed amazing Italian meals, courtesy of my father-in-law, who’s a wonderful cook.  Although my wife doesn’t come from a stereotypical big Italian family (in fact, Italy currently has the lowest birthrate in Europe), there was nevertheless a lot of family, because almost no one moves away.   We took day trips to visit friends on Lago Maggiore and Lago Como in the north.  We spent time by the beach in Tuscany.  We stayed with friends at the beach in San Remo, just relaxing (and chasing Kyler).  After the grueling first year of law school, it was a much needed break.

Traveling on an airplane for 15 hours with our three-year-old son, Kyler, is an exercise in patience and distraction.  Thank God for the little TVs on the seatbacks.  Truthfully, it was much easier than last time, and he was pretty well behaved (just don’t ask the man sitting in front of him).