Silent Sunday

First Day

Yesterday was the Boy’s first day of preschool. This is going to be one of those mundane posts with lots of pictures exactly like everyone else’s pictures, but it’s a pretty monumental step for us so just bear with me and try not to roll your eyes too much!

The first thing he said to me as soon as he woke up was “do I get to go to big school today?” (as opposed to the Baby Parking, which, as indicated by the name is little kids' school). I was both happy and sad at his enthusiasm. We got dressed and had breakfast in record time and I managed to get in a couple of obligatory first pictures, here you go:

Surprisingly, he let me put his smock on for the picture. 

The enthusiasm makes him silly

Sillier and sillier

And then we sneaked out of the house, cause the Girl was none too happy that her big brother was going to school without her and she had to go back to Daycare all on her lonesome.

The Boy was unbelievably excited at being able to ride his bike to school, “like the big kids” and I sniffled all the way (thankfully it’s a two minute ride, so I didn’t have time to really start the water works).

His preschool is right across the street from that bell tower in the background

He parked his bike right at the front entrance

We explored his classroom together, put everything in his cupboard (which he shares with another little girl), he donned his smock and was ready to go, a little sad to see me leave, but excited to meet the other kids. I walked out and thankfully ran into a neighbor so had to maintain a modicum of decorum, cause I had a LOT of pent up angst. I really hope I manage to get myself together and be a little more relaxed about this stuff or I may die from a heart attack (or lack of sleep) before they get to middle school.

Checking out the toys

You can go now, mama

other classroom

shared cupboards

Thankfully, when I got home and looked over the pictures I found something that snapped me out of my melancholic mood pronto. You may recall a recent post about the Boy’s name and our decision to possibly change it, you can read it here, but for the short version his name is Alexandre, pronounced Alexander, and we’ve started finding some difficulty with his having a foreign name (for Italy) with an unconventional spelling. This is the result:

I’m going to talk to his teachers today, cause I’d really like him to at least learn to spell his name correctly and not have any confusion on that point! As far as the legally changing it part, we’re on the fence still, we’ll see how this year goes.

At noon we rode our bikes home and had a nice quiet lunch, just the two of us, before going to get his sister from daycare. Starting today he eats lunch there, so we’ll see, they have a nice lady who cooks lunch as it’s a small parochial school so it should at least be good!

Toodles for now, I hope everyone else’s first days of school are going well!

Virtual Coffee {20}

Hello dear friends, and welcome to coffee!

If we were really having coffee today, I would show you these carrots I bought at the “new” organic store (I’m using quotes because it’s been open over a year already, but is still considered new around here, it’ll stop being new in about ten years or so, that’s when people here consider a business to be “established”).

For some reason dirty, earthy carrots always seem healthier to me now, like they were just picked this morning… Although when I first moved here and saw this I was shocked that they didn’t wash them before presenting them to the public, it’s a wonder how we change over time, isn’t it?!

I would tell you that I’m beyond thrilled that all our furniture for the beach house arrived last Friday and while the husband spent the day supervising the very capable ikea personnel assembling said furniture I spent the day on beach recon. I know, tough job and all that.

Of course there’s the minor glitch that we have no windows and doors, and (of course) that not all the furniture actually got assembled but we’ve decided to just be happy for the good and completely ignore the annoying.

In any case, we’re going down to the beach with the kids tomorrow, to show them the house and take them for their first dip in the sea this year (yeah, I know, what have we been doing all summer?!) and to start taking some stuff down there. I had never realized how much crap one needs in a new house, I’ve got a list, it gets longer everyday… sheets, towels, pots, pans, plates, cutlery, glasses, toilet paper, cleaning products, vacuum cleaner… seriously it never ends. I don’t think we’ll be done lugging stuff down there for a good long while, but I’m soooo not complaining!

I’d also tell you that we managed to organize a little week vacation and are going to Sardinia next Saturday, we’ll be back just in time for preschool to start. I realize that most of you are already firmly back in the school routine, but hopefully you’ll enjoy a little vicarious vacation through me in the next couple of weeks.

I just realized this post is all over the place what with the carrots and all so I figured one more tangent couldn’t hurt… Here’s a picture of my kids that totally captures their personalities: Sassy and Sweet, guess who's who!

So now tell me, how’s the summer winding down for you? Are you excited for the beginning of the school year?

And then go and visit our hostess Amy! Toodles.

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Pillow Fighting

Every Sunday in June, July and part of August our town organizes little shows for kids in one of the main parks. This summer we’ve managed to go a few times, last year we tried but the boy got completely freaked out by the music and the actor wearing a gigantic, fluffy dog suit (who wouldn’t get freaked?). 
So yesterday we went expecting to sit on our picnic blanket in the grass for an hour watching an entertaining little story, what we got instead was this:

A pillow fight. Who’d have thunk it?!

Arming up 

joining the craziness

Stealthy attack from behind

Super (pillow fighting) man

the guy directing this whole thing

No way would something like this have happened in a big city, people would’ve run off with the pillows… 

We had a blast, kids and adults alike, one of the good things of living in a small town I guess.

I'm linking up with Life Made Lovely today, go check her out!

Virtual Coffee {2}

As I quite enjoyed having coffee with you last week, I’ve decided to give it another shot and, who knows, maybe I’ll get it together enough to do it weekly. After all, shouldn’t a girl get to have coffee with friends at least once a week?

Plus, I realized that it’s actually quite nice to have a coffee date where I get to direct the entire conversation. It’s a bit self-centered, sure, but hey, I’m a great conversationalist so, lucky you! Although, I’m not sure I want to delve too deeply into what it says about my mental health that I’m looking forward to having weekly pretend coffee with imaginary friends (or, you know, real friends who are nevertheless not actually here). In any case, here we are in front of our respective screens, me with my coffee, cream and sugar and you with… well, whatever you enjoy. 
So, if we were really having coffee today, I would tell you that it seems as though our schizophrenic weather has finally started taking its medication and it appears to have settled on spring as the season of choice. This makes us all very happy as we hope to be able to put the snow shovels away to be replaced by our lawnmower and fertilizer and new plants. I would admit, as you look at me skeptically, that no, I don’t actually take care of the yard myself, there’s a nice retired gentleman that does not have two plant assassins for hands who actually makes things grow quite beautifully.

I would tell you that we’re all longing to put our heavy down jackets away in their mothballs not to be looked at again for months, but I fear I’m jumping the gun a bit as it often snows in April here. So we’re just enjoying the balmy weather for now and not planning too far into the future. I would also tell you that this is our entire plan for now. Who knows what the future holds, because despite our best intentions life is all about uncertainty.

As I sip my coffee, the sun on my back from the slightly open window, I would tell you that I’m just trying to count my blessings for now, and there are many. In the end, despite all of our doubts and tribulations (I love that word!) life is truly a wonderful thing, at least, mine is, and I have to remind myself of this daily.

Though to be honest, I’m pretty irritated by the smell that’s coming from the open window, here let me shut it. Yes it does smell like cow shit. Why, you ask? Because it’s Spring dammit, and we live out in the country, and for the next month and a half none of us will be able to take a clear breath of fresh air cause everyone and their mother are going to be fertilizing their stupid fields. Poetic isn’t it?

Decisions, decisions

Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who commented and wrote me on the last post. We went to Milan on Thursday for a second opinion on the husband’s treatment and reading your comments totally made our day, and distracted us from the crazy, insane traffic of a big city. Seriously, you can tell you’ve become totally provincial when you can’t stand traffic and honking and no parking. We have lost our edge, we simply aren’t aggressive enough to live in a big city anymore, we have gotten soft. Let’s blame it on the children, shall we, and move on.

Anyway, my intention is not to keep you on pins and needles so here’s a little update, along with a lesson on recurring leukemia, this blog is nothing if not informative. As I mentioned briefly in Tick, Tock, the Husband has to have yet another transplant and there are two kinds of transplant he can have at this point, from cord blood stem cells or from a next of kin. The hospital here in our tiny rural town is apparently quite “avant garde” as it does the so called intra-bone cord blood transfusion which is relatively new (which goes to show that choosing to live out in the country is not all bad), but we went to the renown San Rafaele Hospital in Milan, where they do the allogeneic transplant from a next of kin, to speak to the head of Hematology there just to keep all our bases covered. (just some trivia: apparently the husband can’t have another transplant from a third party donor because the leukemia recurred too soon and the commission that regulates transplant won’t approve it.)

What we’ve consistently been told is that there don’t appear to be any significant advantages of one type of transplant over the other in our case, some hospitals choose to do one type cause they like the odds of that one others choose the other type for the same reason, but there is no scientific data that tips the scale. Great, we thought, cause doctors consistently sitting on the fence really make us feel better. The conundrum of course remains of how to make an informed decision when we have neither the time nor the patience (nor, frankly the inclination) to go out and get ourselves a medical degree and specialization in hematology. So, in the absence of cold hard facts we have decided to follow the totally arbitrary decision making tool of our gut feeling. (We are nothing if not resourceful). 
So we decided to interpret “the signs”. The signs did not bode well for moving to Milan when both the husband and I had a hissy fit at the new exit from the highway that had us do a figure eight (I kid you not) to merge into the city traffic, the negative trend continued when it took us 45 minutes to cover the 500mt that separated us from the hospital, which, along with the barely breathable smoggy air and the complete lack of any sort of road signage to direct us to our destination threatened to send us over the edge. Then, when the doctor said that in his highly qualified medical opinion he saw no reason why we should suffer the stress of a move we interpreted it as a pretty definite sign that moving to the City was not in our futures (yay!), the clincher of course was when he also admitted that his big and mighty department had already set into motion the necessary procedures to start doing the intra bone technique that our little country hospital is already doing. So basically, 1-0 for the small town hospital.

Satire aside, of course we would move in a heartbeat in the hope of a better, longer term, remission for the husband, but the idea of being able to face this already trying period within the confines of all our respective comfort zones is certainly a relief. We are still waiting from feedback from another hematologist oncologist in Houston (we really are covering ALL our bases), but for now it appears that we will be staying here.

For those of you who are interested, the plan is for the husband to go through just one round of chemo that “mimics radiation therapy” (in the words of our doc, I have no clue what it means) and then have the cord blood transplant directly into the bone via a minimally invasive operation. His total hospital time should be no longer than about a month, after which all we can d is hope and pray that the marrow does it’s damn job this time.

As an aside to those of you that knew us when we lived in Milan and loved it, can you believe we’re actually happy we get to stay here rather than moving back? That despite my ever increasing complaints about the snow in the winter, along with the shoveling, the muck, the wet muddy boots in the house, the smell of manure in the spring and summer, the damn tractors and or cyclists taking up the entire one lane country roads and the total and complete lack of refinement, I have indeed learned to love the fact that the longest I’ve had to wait for a parking space is 10 minutes and that’s because parking further than 20mt from my intended destination is simply unacceptable, that traffic means 4 cars and a tractor, or possibly some cows crossing the road, that it takes me 10 minutes to get to the hospital… you get the picture.

I have indeed been countrified.

Horrified?

Why Italy is a third world country.

I just realized tonight that I hadn’t posted in almost a week and was wondering why, as it doesn’t seem like I did an awful lot the last few days, and then I realized that a stupid, almost insignificant little decision I took last week has put me in such a state of high agitation that six days went by with nary a thought to my blog (or twitter or facebook).

I’ve been wanting a break for quite some time, a break from my routine, a break from winter, a break from thinking about the husband’s illness, basically a break from reality. So last Saturday I started fantasizing about taking off for a long weekend by myself, no kids, no husband, no worries, but the truth is I’m too much of a mother hen, and I simply can’t imagine not clucking around my chicks for two or three days, so that little idea flew the coop pretty much right away (and that’s enough with the poultry metaphor). And then… a teeny, nagging thought crept in… and like an unscratched itch it gained momentum, and started to seem feasible, nay, possible, and then a light bulb went off in my head and I was just like, well, why the hell not. So I’m going to Brazil next week y’all! Yep. Because my Grandma is turning 101 years old. One hundred and one. And I missed her 100th birthday last year, for obvious reasons, and the girl has never met her so I done woke up Monday morning and reserved us a flight to Sao Paulo. So there. The husband can’t come with us, and he probably won’t be feeling so hot in the next few weeks, but his mama is moving in to take care of him, better and with infinitely more patience than me, so the kids and I are heading for Brazil. Hee, hee! Where it’s summer. Summer! In the middle of winter for us. Isn’t having two hemispheres just the bee’s knees? I mean you can be right smack in the middle of a blizzard today, but the beach is just a short plane ride away (well, ok, it’s a thirteen hour plane ride away and I’m not going to the beach, but whatever!).

But this is great news, you say, then why the agitation?? Ah, I reply, you forget, dear reader, that I live in Italy. You see, Italy is a fantastic country, the food is marvelous, the scenery to die for, the history, the architecture, the people, it’s a country that makes you dream… but efficient it is not. So, Sunday night as I discuss my plan with the husband, and we iron out kinks, he reminds me that the girl has no passport. We had already had this conversation back in august, and then promptly forgot about it. So Monday I start gathering documents for this apparently simple purpose… I go on the pertinent website, I make a list, I check it twice, I take the girl to have passport pictures taken, in the only shop in Cuneo that does this. And then I go pay the first passport tax, in one office and the second passport tax elsewhere, because paying all the passport taxes in the same place would have been too damn easy and time effective, and we can’t have that here in Italy. Then I went to get her birth certificate and was informed that my ID was no longer valid since Italy is, apparently, a third world country and still issues paper IDs (yes, my ID is paper, not plastic) and it was ripped. I schlep back across town to get my picture taken for the ID (again, because having a place that takes your picture, even a simple photo booth, in the same location where you actually need pictures to get your documents done, is quite simply, too easy) and schlep back to get my new ID. By then the Questura (police headquarters where one gets passports) was closed because it closes at noon. For the day. All this was actually a lucky coincidence because apparently the law just changed and both parents have to be present to request a passport for a minor and I was alone that day. Even if they’re divorced. Or live in different cities. Because if we don’t complicate our own lives, we can rest assured that the State will do it for us.

So, finally, finally (!) today the husband, the girl and I made it to the correct office, with the correct documentation during the tiny window of time in which they were actually working, and waited in line with seemingly a hundred thousand other people and got a glimpse of the hardships of the last Great War, like waiting in line for bread, because the State has our education at heart and tries to impart lessons, in history and sociology through the most mundane activities. I then had to beg, like a peasant in Trotskyist Russia, to have the procedure expedited because my grandma turns 101 on February 5th and apparently even in a town (and in this instance, by town I actually mean village) the size of Cuneo (population 50,000) it takes them a month, A MONTH, to get a freakin’ passport out. Seriously, are they liming the calfskin to make the parchment that a blind scribe must then decorate by hand and inscribe with gothic script using a peacock feather? What on earth could possibly be going on behind the closed doors of the “Passport Office” that would require a month, A MONTH, to get a fucking passport for a one year old out? In this day and age of computers and instant information. It boggles the mind.

I was told that they would do their best to have it by the 4th, the day we leave, the day before my grams’ birthday. This basically means that the insane amount of stress I’ve been living with for the past two days (I get agitated like that) will continue until Friday next week. Will we leave? Won’t we? Who knows. Either way, I’m packing a bathing suit.

This life

Today we went to Milan for a few hours, actually we probably spent more time in the car driving there and back than in the actual city. (240km or about 2 hours each way, though we got stuck in traffic around Torino so it was significantly longer – though that’s neither here nor there). We hadn’t been back for over a year (for obvious reasons) and this time we drove through our old neighborhood to get to our appointment. It was surreal. Things had changed, but they were exactly the same. We spent the whole (ten minute) drive going: oh look, our favorite Japanese, oooh a new store there, look, didn’t we see an apartment in this building, and that one, and that other one? (we saw a lot of apartments in Milan over 3 plus years, but somehow never managed to buy anything). It was sad and familiar and nostalgic and strange, thinking of this other life we lived, in a big bustling metropolis, with no kids, in a tiny apartment, going to the gym at 7am before work, taking the subway, never having allergies cause there’s not enough plant-life to make me allergic. And we looked at each other and wondered, would we go back? Moving to Cuneo was hard, we left friends, a life, a city we loved and moved out in the middle of nowhere. Don’t get me wrong, we made more friends, Cuneo is cute and now that we have kids it’s much, much easier than a big city; but we liked Milan, we liked having options, restaurants, bars, stores, entertainment, loads of things to do. Also, we moved to Cuneo and left family, friends, my Dad died, Alex got sick, so when we think back we imagine ourselves young(er), healthy, safe, with fewer responsibilities.

But then I called home, to check in, and the boy “Mama, where you?” with the girl squealing in the background. And well, we realized our life is perfectly imperfect the way it is. Would I raise my kids in Milan? No. I like that they have a yard to play in, that the air here is clean, that you see middle schoolers walking home from school, alone, safe, that life is relatively uncomplicated; I don’t like that we have fewer options, fewer things to do, there’s no International school (which for me is a big deal), we’re often perceived as strange because we have different customs, we speak a foreign language, we have different views and opinions. But, no place is perfect. You make the best of what you have, right? We still love Milan, and we are happy to go back, occasionally, and be nostalgic for the life that was, but then we get home to big smiles and little arms and “Mama miss you” and we realize that this life, this life that we’re living right now, is perfect for us.

Us in front of one of our old haunts Bar Magenta

Sandwiches at Panino Giusto, Perfection!



Me and the best Tiramisu in the world (though I look like I'm feeling ill, I was actually laughing)



Left, right, left

Yesterday I went to Cuneo to meet some friends for a birthday coffee (yes, I’m still celebrating my birthday, so??) with the Girl, and since it was almost naptime I started the doing the usual song and dance to get her to sleep,  the thousand mile walk with slight bouncing of the stroller and monotonous chanting that works only 50% of the time. So, I’m pacing the streets getting worried glances from passerby’s (since I’m chanting like a Buddhist monk, in the hopes of boring the girl into a stupor) and I see a big commotion at the street corner, and off I go to investigate (anything to alleviate the tedium). And beyond the crowd of onlookers I see a woman sitting in the middle of the street, on the pedestrian crossing, her head bleeding and a man (possibly a doctor) testing her limbs. Ah, I think, another pedestrian got hit by a car on the clearly marked crossing. Now, just in case you don’t know, I feel the need to reiterate that I don’t live in a bustling metropolis, in fact, you’d be hard pressed to call Cuneo a city, more of a town, really, just a smidge above village, in fact. The whole town counts no more than 50,000 souls. And yet, pedestrians get run over at street crossings with alarming frequency; as a matter of fact, in the five years I’ve lived here I’ve already personally seen four. In the ten years I lived in Milan or the twelve I lived in Houston I had seen exactly none. (ok, ok, people don’t actually walk on the street in Houston, but you get my drift). The problem in my opinion is two-fold: people here drive like morons, I’m not exaggerating, they are totally and completely spaced out, non-reactive, like they’re all on drugs, but not the kind of drugs that pump you with adrenaline and make you hyper vigilant and in perpetual motion, no, they drive like they’re all mellow from a killer doobie, and like, dude, let’s stop here I’ve got the munchies, what? my turn signal, dude, chill man, I like, just need to stop for a sec, relax, oh wait, what’s that lady doing walking on the street, oh, right  n e e d   t   o       b    r     a     k      e .  .   .

So my advice to you, if you ever come to Cuneo, do exactly what your Mom taught you as a kid, look before crossing the street, I would actually take it one step further and follow the mantra of all driver’s ed instructors teach: look left, right, left and then go.

Oh, and by the way, just in case you were wondering the birthday coffee was organized so my friends could give me my gift before it “expired” (so they said, leading me to think it was food of some sort) - Sting tickets for November 3^rd in Torino. YAY! THANKS GIRLS!