Hot Dawg

Despite the flimsiness of the title, I actually am posting on hot dogs. Hot dogs are a greatly underappreciated food. Generally, if I’m going to eat some sort of cooked meat in a bun I tend to go for a hamburger, pretty predictable. Last Saturday, as I opened the fridge, I was feeling a tad whimsical, so I went for the hot dogs. Fanfuckingtastic. That’s all I’m going to say.

First real post

This is my first real Moomser post. All the previous posts come from our private family blog, so if they sound a little weird, that's why. I copied them here cause I wanted to put in a little background. And also the idea of the first lonely posts kind of intimidated me, so I gave myself a little comfort cushion of older words and thoughts that help define me so I wouldn't feel so lonely out here on my own. I'll be posting pictures soon, to liven up the page. So welcome to whomever is interested in my marginally neurotic ramblings, I hope to at least mildly entertain you!

On a wholly unrelated note, I just started watching season 4 of Hell's Kitchen, and I have to say, I honestly didn't think that professional chefs needed to say 'fuck' quite as many times as Gordon Ramsey does. Just saying.

Date Night

Just a quick word to heartily suggest you watch a movie called Date Night (Notte folle a Manhattan) with Tina Fey and Steve Carrell. Too Funny! But, watch it in English cause, apart from the fact that comedy is generally funnier in the original language, whoever dubbed Tina Fey in Italian sounds like a man trying to talk like a woman. It’s very disturbing.

Rebirth and renewal

The past ten days have been dedicated to The Girl’s baptism. Not kidding. It was like organizing a wedding, and the aftermath was like recuperating from the apocalypse, albeit a fun and relaxed one. We are just now barely crawling out of the coma-like state we’ve been in since Saturday, today I am once again finally able to string together complete sentences, which miraculously relate to each other and make a semblance of sense. I’m also doing the rounds of all the suppliers and paying for services rendered. Oy.

Anyway, Saturday was a superbly fantastic day (I’m into hyperboles today). We were surrounded by a crowd of wonderful friends and family, which honestly we did not expect. That’s weird, you may say, how could you not expect it, considering everyone was invited (in writing no less...), but honestly we thought that most people would be busy (last weekend before school started), or not in the mood for a baptism (it’s not like we were inviting people to a wet t-shirt contest), or with sick or otherwise engaged children. Instead the turnout was fantastic! We were missing very few people (and yes, we missed you!). Also, the weather was unbelievable, really, the perfect late summer / early autumn day, sunny, blue cloudless skies, warm and crisp (as opposed to hot and humid, or wet and cold, all viable options this time of year). So basically we totally lucked out!

The Husband was in great health and spirits, thankfully, since I suspect a good number of people came to see him (that’s ok, The Girl doesn’t mind, she knows she was still the cutest one there, anyway!). The past few weeks his general tone has greatly improved he seems to be almost back to normal, for which we are all grateful.

So on this auspicious day our baby girl made her entrance into the catholic church… I’ve always had mixed feelings about this, my parents made the conscious choice not to baptize us, though both of them grew up catholic. My brother decided as an adult to take the sacraments and is, in fact, The Boy’s godfather (or I should actually say “Godfather”, in a Sicilian-American accent). But I’ve never felt the need to become a part of organized religion. I’m not going to start a long discussion on a blog, because I don’t want to raise anyone’s hackles and I don’t want to get into a long, drawn out and completely useless debate. I do, however, want to emphasize the fact that, though I may feel ambiguous towards the church, and I don’t feel the need to become a part of it myself, I am happy that we baptized The Girl, and I feel a huge responsibility to teach her a healthy respect for religion, and for her church as well as for others and to help her nurture her spiritual self in the best way possible for her.

This last little paragraph may sound a little strange to our Italian readers, because here (fortunately or unfortunately, who can say?) religion generally equates Catholic church, so there is a certain sense of inevitability to religious experience that tends to take choice out of the equation as well as the idea of spiritual growth.

Anywho,  moving right along, the day was doubly special for us, as a family, because The Husband and I renewed our marriage vows. Huh? What? Why? The thing is that about a month or two ago I accidently lost my wedding band. Or better, we know exactly where it is but to get it we would have to literally take apart our house and incur expenses in the tens of thousands of euros so it’s as good as lost in the real sense of the word. Basically, I was playing with it and the ring slipped off my finger, and fell to the ground (and as I write this I hear my mother’s voice about a hundred and fifty thousand times: “stop playing with your rings, that’s how you lose them!” and me, eye roll, “mom quit nagging, I’m not going to lose them” – so basically she jinxed it). Now, I heard it fall, and thought, I’ll get it in just a minute (I was holding The Girl and she was playing with something) and then poof, it disappeared. We looked for it for days, gone. And then we figured it fell in the cavity wall of the house where all the plumbing, electric tubes and the such run. Ha, we went looking there too, amidst a slew of insects I’m not even going to describe except to say that if any of those spiders decided to come out and cavort in the light of day I may just have a simultaneous heart attack, stroke, hissy fit and die.

So for all intents and purposes my wedding band was gone. Thus we decided to have another one made using The Husband’s band, melting it, adding some gold and in this manner getting two new bands that both had some of one original band in them (sounds complicated, but it made us feel better, thanks Bears for the idea). So long story short, Father F (priest who married us, and friend) was coming to baptize The Girl so we figured we would ask him to bless the new bands and that would be that. Enter Mother. My Mom is a very superstitious lady. And when I say very superstitious I mean that if she has to get from point A to point B and between points A and B there is a staircase or ladder under which she must go to reach her destination, she will either not go to point B at all or take even the most ridiculously long and circuitous route she needs to take to avoid the staircase or ladder. I’m not kidding. If my Mother asks you to pass the salt, you better damn well put the salt shaker down near her cause you will be holding the salt up in the air till kingdom come before she takes it out of your hand. I could compile a dictionary of superstitions with all of the things she’s taught me. All this to say that my Mom announced that we absolutely could not simply bless the rings we had to renew our vows for it to count, otherwise the bands would be “bad luck” (insert eerie music). Of course The Husband’s mom jumped on the bandwagon and wanted us to do it in front of all the conveniently assembled guests in church. Ha, ha, ha.

Anyway. The Husband and I renewed our vows in private, we’ve been married seven years, and this being a notoriously ominous year for marriage, we’re turning a new leaf and starting afresh. Hopefully the next seven will be happy, healthy and filled with love.

I-pad, oh i-pad, wherefore art thou i-pad

So I finally, finally got sucked into the whole apple world. True, I had dipped my toes in with the i-phone, but honestly, I never took it seriously, plus I have always been conscious of its main flaw: it sucks as a phone. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing toy, I love the apps, I love that I can watch my tv shows on it, I literally play around with it all day, but it has crappy reception and just try dialing a number while driving without taking your eyes off the road. And then I bought the i-pad. I love the i-pad. The i-pad rocks.

The i-pad’s only flaw? It’s a money sucking machine. It somehow ensnares you, bewitches you, convinces you that you can’t live without that app, and gosh let me buy some e-books, and it’s got so much memory let me download that new tv show and oooooh I can’t get parenting magazine in Italy, I’ll just subscribe to the digital version… and on and on and on… and all of a sudden you’re looking at your bank statement and going woah, where’d those 400bucks go??

I’m just hoping it’s the initial excitement or The Husband is going to have to take my credit cards away again….

So to steal my brother’s words on an fb update:

Mr. Jobs you do your voodoo on me soooo good Mr. Jobs.. Can't get enough of da iPad Mr. Jobs.. Congratulations Mr. Jobs.. You yuppify me

Tomatoes and how we inadvertently traumatize our children

My whole house smells like tomato sauce. Literally. It’s like we live in a pizzeria. Why, you ask? Well, these are the joys of having a vegetable garden. Our tomatoes are starting to ripen, this is both a wonderful and a terrifying prospect. Wonderful because when I’m late getting dinner on the table and The Boy’s hungry I just send him outside to pick a couple of tomatoes and he can eat them still warm from the sun, and believe me there is nothing more delicious. Terrifying because I’ve got 8 tomato plants (3 “cuore di bue” – haven’t found a translation for it, it’s typically Italian; 3 San Marzano and 2 Cherry tomatoes) and though the fruits have just recently really started ripening, the plants are FULL of green tomatoes, and this means that I’m going to be eating, cooking and preserving tomatoes till kingdom come. Thank goodness they’re delish so it’s worth all the work!

My vegetable garden

Cuore di bue (Ox heart) tomato, this one was huge!

On another completely unrelated note we are unfortunately now starting  to see the effects of The Husband’s illness on  The Boy. He is going through what looks like a massive attack of separation anxiety. Every time we leave the house he cries, he wants to go with the one that’s leaving or he wants to stay home but doesn’t want you to leave, it’s very frustrating for us cause we can’t go anywhere without a scene and very sad for him cause he’s not relaxed. So we have to find a way to deal with it. I realize that it’s perfectly normal, his dad disappeared from one day to the next and no adequate explanation was provided, so from his point of view when we leave there is the chance that we may not come back.

Before The Boy could talk properly he would sometimes try to get the pictures he liked out of books, like he could pick up the ball in the book with his fingers, and the fact that he couldn’t and that I couldn’t help him would frustrate him to no end. When The Husband was in the hospital sometimes we would have video conferences so The Boy could see him and they could have a “real” conversation, one night at dinner, The Husband was talking to him while he ate and all of a sudden The Boy throws down his fork and starts having the mother of all freak outs because he wants his Daddy to come out of the computer and be near him. I had no idea what to do, but seeing him like that broke my heart. After that little episode we banned video conferences for a while. The point is that in hindsight I realize that we could have and possibly should have handled the whole thing better, given The Boy more information, tried to protect him less from the facts and prepared him better for the reality. Of course, in hindsight it’s easy to see your mistakes, but when you’re actually living them you’re caught up by the craziness of it all and can’t think clearly. So now we are reaping what we sowed, unfortunately. I just hope that we haven’t traumatized him permanently…

Loss

Last Saturday we went to the saddest funeral I had ever been too, bar none, and that includes my own father’s funeral. Funerals are always sad, of course, and though I completely agree with the creole idea of celebrating life once you leave the cemetery, the reality is that the prevailing feelings at a funeral are those of loss, and grief and helplessness.  In this case, the prevailing feeling was probably also disbelief. The Husband’s cousin E was my age, 35, she had a 7 month old baby boy, a loving husband of just a few short years, a doting brother and parents who loved her more than anything. She was born and raised in the same small town as The Husband. To say the church was packed would be an understatement of massive proportions. All the seats were taken, and all the remaining space was standing room only. And everybody was distraught. I had only briefly met her once, and it was still heart wrenching. Her passing was completely unexpected, she had a brain tumor, her symptoms started less than a month ago, and she died a few days after the diagnosis. Enough said. As I was sitting in the church I looked at her parents and thought of their grief and I started praying for protection for my kids, please God don’t let this happen to them…. And then I thought, it’s not like E's mother didn’t have the exact same feelings as me, she must have thought and prayed the same way for her kids a hundred times, in fact all mothers pray that their kids grow old, happy and healthy and loved. So, really, what’s the point? Well, I know it sounds trite and unbelievably simplistic but I realized the following: we can really only count on the present moment, so we HAVE TO enjoy it and savor it, and be thankful for it, we don’t know what the future holds so we can’t put anything important off for later, be it a kiss, a hug, a trip, a conversation… so when The Boy asks me to play ball when I’m cooking dinner, I now decide it’s ok to eat ten minutes later and go play ball.

And then I looked at her husband, he was neither crying nor talking, he may not even really have been there. And I thought of all the plans they had, the hopes and dreams for their future, for their child and how now he has to navigate through it all alone. Alone with his baby. Having kids is hard enough as it is when there are two parents to carry the burden, and he has no one who is as invested as him to discuss things with, to share the good and the bad and the great.

It is unimaginably sad. The saddest part is that, as anyone who has lost someone knows, you never stop missing the person you lost. Grief does get easier to handle, it slowly passes and gives way to sadness and hopefully down the line to nostalgia. But still, for the rest of their lives, her husband, and brother and parents are going to think of her and wish she was there, and they will always be sad for the loss. And her son will always pine for the mother he never knew. And that is heartbreaking.

Here we go again

Thursday morning, we’re still tired from our little day trip, but we’ve decided to go spend the weekend in France so we’re going. The Husband starts the day at the hospital for the usual tests, plus a bone marrow test, and to get the go ahead from his doctors. I start the day by packing, and packing, and packing…. with no end in sight. Since The Husband had a treatment at the hospital at 2pm our plan was to leave at 2.30, so the kids could take their afternoon naps in the car. Ha, ha, ha.

This was our morning: The Husband gets up at seven and goes to the hospital. The kids and I get up at eight and are comatose until 9 anyway so we may as well have slept in. I start organizing stuff. The Husband comes home takes The Boy to daycare and comes back after having stopped at Auchan to buy a luggage rack to mount on the car roof cause there’s no way everything will fit in the car. Amidst much swearing the luggage rack gets mounted and The Husband heads back to Auchan to buy the luggage holder thingy (what is it called??) that goes on the luggage rack. After getting out clothes and other crap for myself and the two kids, piling them on the bed and promptly getting rid of half the stuff cause it won’t fit in the car anyway, I head to Toy Center to get a small travel stroller for The Boy that I had finally accumulated enough points to get for free. The Husband comes home and mounts the luggage thingy. I come home royally pissed because you have to pre-order the free strollers and it takes a month to get it, so I just wasted half an hour.

At this point it’s 2pm (how did that happen??) and The Husband heads back to the hospital, swearing up a storm cause he’s late, and only had a sandwich for lunch. We’ve already fought four times and cancelled the trip twice. The Boy somehow makes it home, but no one remembers how he got there… one of us must have picked him up. At this point I’m running around like a completely psycho dervish cause it’s late, the kids are tired and I have to pack for three people and load the car, and how the f@#k does this luggage thingy work, I can’t get anything in there. Then The Nanny gives me The Girl so she can go pack her stuff, and I promptly loose The Boy. Heart Attack. He was playing in the car, I’m still packing (how is that even possible??!!) I go check on him in the car and he’s gone. So I call, and call, and call…no answer. I freak out. I run upstairs, not there, I run back downstairs, not there, I run back upstairs…. All the while screaming his name. At some point The Nanny comes running and is looking for him too. And I run outside (how would he have gotten out, the gate was locked) and finally we find him… in the car… this whole scene must have taken at most 2 minutes. It felt like two hours, in slow motion. Obviously, I burst into tears… so did The Girl who was in my arms the whole time, experiencing  my meltdown in surround sound. The Boy looked at me like I was a complete moron. So I went back to packing. Finally after what felt like an eon I’m done packing. I load up the car. And I realize two things: I forgot to pack all the electronics, like we could leave for four days with no computers, phone chargers, sky card, internet key etc…. and The Husband hasn’t packed a damn thing. So I start packing again. The Husband comes home and yells at me. I tell him he can go to hell, I’m leaving with the kids and he can stay home. And FINALLY at four (almost two hours late) we’re in the car driving to the beach, all five of us, plus enough crap to survive the apocalypse.

Roadside dining and other news

Out of the blue on Wednesday we decided to take a little road trip and go visit Uncle F and Cousin R in Cap Martin, France. This little plan was hatched Tuesday evening, obviously The Husband and I weren’t thinking clearly… or rather, we were thinking like two adults with no children… which is definitely not the case. So Wednesday morning we get up and get ready to leave. Three hours later we’re all finally in the car, with not a little regret for the old days when we’d decide to go somewhere and in half an hour at most we were on our way.

This little trip was memorable for several reasons. First of all, it was The Girl’s first road trip, it was her first time out of the baby car seat and in a regular car seat (though still rear facing, which we’re not sure she really cares for), it was her first time out of the country, and consequently, her first time in France. On our way to France, we realized The Girl has no documents, though this realization was not enough to compel us to turn back (after all it took us three hours to get out of the damn house, we weren’t about to turn around and go home) we did experience a little trepidation in crossing the border with visions of being arrested for child smuggling. Thankfully, border controls are now a very rare exception. Note to self, go get her id done.

So anyway, at around 12.15 we were on the lookout for an Autogrill (typical Italian bar/restaurant/gas station/rest stop on the highway) so we could feed the kids (primary objective) and ourselves (if we had time) and at one of the little emergency stop areas along the road I see the following: a parked station wagon, between the car and the guard rail a couple is sitting at a little table, I really need to repeat that with emphasis, SITTING AT A TABLE, with two folding chairs and, I kid you not, a table cloth, surrounded by Tupperware, having lunch. They were having lunch, in the emergency lane of the highway. My mouth dropped open. As The Nanny said, they are a prime example of two people who HAVE TO have lunch at noon, wherever they may be. But what really gets me is they had one of those travel folding tables, the ones, I imagine, that contain the folding chairs so that when It’s closed it’s just a little formica square, and then when noon hits, you can brake into the emergency lane, unfold the table, pull out the legs, out pop two chairs, and voila’, roadside dining.

Now, most of you may not know this about me, but I love kits. I seriously love kits. And bags with compartments. If I buy a bag with compartments I compose my own kits. FOR EVERYTHING and anything. Let me explain. In my car, I have several emergency kits. The emergency diapering kit, kids have diarrhea, I finish the diapers in the diaper bag, no problem out comes the car emergency diapering kit. I have the change of clothes kit, with a change of clothes for the kids AND me. I have the medical emergency kit (which is a constant work in progress as I come up with yet another apocalyptic scenario to be prepared for), I have the “we’re stuck on the highway in a snow storm kit” containing among other things, water and crackers (this actually happened to a friend, who was stuck on the highway over night, literally ALL NIGHT). I could probably survive on just my car kits for about a week. So when I saw this middle aged couple fine dining on the highway, my first thought was, oh my gosh I need to buy a table and chairs and make a roadside dining kit. (And you thought I was normal!)

So we get to Cap Martin, with only minor meltdowns and a moderate amount of “are we there, can I get down, get down, get down, get downs”, and The Boy practically dives straight from his carseat into the pool. Needless to say, he had a blast. Obviously, our adult plans of a quick jaunt to the supermarket and a walk around Montecarlo were a pipe dream, our lives are now led by a two year old. So we spent the day in the pool and then we had dinner in Menton. After this fun filled, not at all tiring day, The Husband and I, in our infinite wisdom and good sense decide to return to Cap Martin for the weekend, and at this point why wait for Friday, there’ll be too much traffic, lets come back tomorrow. So what did this little day trip teach us? Well, when travelling with a toddler and a baby the only difference between a day trip and a long weekend is a couple of portable cribs and more diapers, so you might as well take the long weekend, cause a day trip is simply not worth it. So that’s what we did on Thursday. Are we crazy, you may ask. Possibly just a little addled from lack of sleep, would be the answer.

I love Sunday mornings

I love Sunday mornings. I don’t know what it is about Sundays… It’s not like we’re living a traditional lifestyle right now, neither The Husband nor I have a regular work week, so we don’t particularly dread Mondays nor do we spend all week looking forward to Fridays. We’ve got it pretty good every day now. But Sunday, well, it’s 10.30am and I’m still in my pjs with no guilt. We had pancakes for breakfast, technically I could make pancakes any day, but I only crave them on Sunday. But the absolutely best, most fantastic feeling in the world, is Sunday morning, with both kids in our bed crawling all over us and each other and we don’t really mind that it’s 8am and what the hell are we all doing awake at this hour? And they’re sooo happy to see each other, The Boy woke up first, and he spent half an hour asking when The Girl was going to be up, can we wake her up please, is she up yet… you get the picture, and then when she finally did wake up he ran in her room, squealing and they spent ten minutes hugging and smiling at each other. And that’s when you know, with absolute certainty, that having kids is the most wonderful thing in the world.

That’s really all I wanted to say, and a Happy Sunday to all!

(As I’m writing this, The Boy is walking around the house banging himself on the head with his lego box cover and yelling “boing, boing, bang!” over and over again… and my heart sings.)