Tag Archives: summer

One week down, how many more to go?

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Week one of school is finished, and I survived. Unbelievable. Because, let’s be honest here, getting the kids back on a school schedule after the summer is much harder work for Mom than for anyone else in the family. I’m not a morning person, and quite probably neither are my kids, whether it’s survival instinct (who knows what I would have done with one of those children who wakes up every morning at 6.30 all chirpy and talkative?) or their natural inclination I have no idea, either way, I tried to bring their wake up time up (and consequently all the related sleep times up) for the two weeks prior to this and I clearly failed, if the amount of tantrums, hysterical, over-tired crying fits, middle of the night wake up calls, and generalized grumpiness are any indication. I’m hoping this week will be better.

Although, as I started planning their weekly activities I already wanted to pull out all my hair… I don’t know how mothers with more than two kids do it (and I quite envy mothers of singletons right now, for organizational purposes, at least). The Boy wants to play soccer this year, they start them at 6 here, but as he’s tall they’ll take him anyway, the Girls wants to do a dance class, and I would like them to do a swimming course before the start of the skiing season. It shouldn’t be that complicated, I thought, I don’t want to over book them, but an activity each and a joint one shouldn’t overextend us. I am so naïve.

Oh, and I need to keep one afternoon for their American babysitter because I’ve realized that when they have someone (other than me) who speaks English to them they’re more prone to speak it in general. Easy peasy. Right.

So, this is what I found out after a round of calls and a couple of hours of scheduling: soccer is Tuesday and Friday, because apparently 5-6 year olds who aren’t allowed to play in the tournaments and who are basically going to chase a ball around a field for an hour and a half need to “train” at least twice a week. Every single dance school but one in this god forsaken town, in an evil conspiracy to drive mom’s insane (I presume), decided that Tuesday was the only logical day for the 3-4 year old dance class, and the one that went against the mold already has a waiting list. Oh, and by the way, our lovely American babysitter only has one afternoon off from her primary job. Guess which day. Tuesday. And after a half hour of route planning and head banging (not the heavy metal kind) I resigned myself to the fact that without the aid of cloning or a teleporter there is no way I can get them both to their activities on Tuesday. Seriously, how does everyone else do it?

Anyway, before letting myself get sucked into the insanity of a new school year, I’d like to wrap up our summer. We got back from our extremely long vacation to a garden that looked like this:

my tomato plants

my tomato plants

 

cherry tomatoes

cherry tomatoes

Eggplants! I have 3 plants just like this...

Eggplants! I have 3 plants just like this…

Peppers, I have eight plants of lovely green, yellow, and red peppers. Not as pretty as the supermarket ones, but yummy all the same.

Peppers, I have eight plants of lovely green, yellow, and red peppers. Not as pretty as the supermarket ones, but yummy all the same.

So we had a LOT of this:

Caprese salad - the tomatoes and basil are from the garden, as is the basil in the pesto.

Caprese salad – the tomatoes and basil are from the garden, as is the basil in the pesto.

Tuna salad bruschetta

Tuna salad bruschetta

And since this was overflowing:

large lavender plant

large lavender plant

so I made sachets for my closet and drawers… but when that wasn’t enough I figured I could use it to experiment…

Sausage risotto with rosemary, lavender and saffron.

Sausage risotto with rosemary, lavender and saffron.

so creamy makes me hungry again...

so creamy makes me hungry again…

Have I made you hungry yet?

I’m slowly getting my act together again with the start of a new school year. I’ve got several posts I think you’ll like in the works, and I’m pretty confident I’ll even manage to finish them and post them, so yay for school, despite the scheduling headaches.

Two cutie pies on their first day of school. Sweet brother carrying his sister's backpack. A little southern gentleman in the making.

Two cutie pies on their first day of school. Sweet brother carrying his sister’s backpack. A little southern gentleman in the making.

An elephant in an apartment is going too far

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I haven’t posted anything in a month, seriously A MONTH! How did that happen? How did the end of July sneak up on me? Maybe it’s because summer days tend to kind of run into each other. Also, we’re so busy with all the going to the beach, and playing in the sand, and eating ice cream, time just kind of flies by. (I know, poor me…)

Summer often feels like unchartered territory. A friend of mine asked on facebook what “good mothers” feed their children every day for three months at lunch, and that got me thinking how summertime is yet another thing that serves to mess with insecure mothers’ lives. My friend isn’t the main cook in her house, her husband is, but he’s at work during the day so lunchtime is in her hands now and she hates cooking… and lunchtime is never a problem during the school year for Italian moms because all kids eat in the cafeteria, and cafeteria food in Italy is a long shot from what it is in the US. But now that the kids are home she feels the pressure of presenting her children with a meal they are willing to eat every day that is just as nutritious as the fare offered in school, not an easy feat.

My problem isn’t so much the feeding as the entertaining. I don’t know what to do with them all day for three months. I tend to always try to settle into a routine, cause that’s how I function, but I can tell that after a couple of weeks of the same, or very similar, days, day in and day out, my kids get bored and I have to shake it up. Shaking it up is hard for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to be one of those pinterest mothers with the summer bucket lists that actually get done (and also get presented on pinterest with great graphics and interesting fonts) but I’ve never been able to so much as come up with a bucket list, much less put one in action. And yet I sit here thinking the summer is almost half over, (schools start mid September here) and it’s the only time of year where my kids are a hundred percent mine, and I am a hundred percent theirs. I don’t go to the gym, I don’t run errands without them, I don’t have coffee mornings with the girls, and they don’t have all the activities that require me carting them around all day. It’s just the three of us, all day, day in and day out.

We’re leaving the beach on Thursday to go home (finally, I know, right? How could I possibly be complaining about being at the beach?), the Husband is beyond thrilled as he’s tired of seeing us only on the weekends, and I have to come up with stuff to do for another six weeks. Oy Vey!

Anyone have any suggestions? Simple stuff, stuff that doesn’t require four different outfit changes, stuff that even the laziest of mothers can do in the sweltering heat. ( basically nothing from pinterest). The possibilities are endless…

Also, and this is completely unrelated, I have got the world’s noisiest upstairs neighbors in the beach apartment. They assemble Ikea furniture in the middle of the night (believe me, I’ve assembled enough Ikea furniture myself that I recognize the sounds), they come home at four a.m. and walk around in heels for half an hour, and these are just to of a whole host of other random and incessant noises. Tonight, for example, it really sounds like they went out and got themselves a pet elephant.

Speaking of Ikea, last week I went to get some cabinets for my laundry room here (more like laundry cubby, but anyways…), I had a few boxes, unloaded them and carted the to the apartment building. As I was loading them in the elevator one of my neighbors arrives, a sprightly gentleman in his late fifties, early sixties. He tries to bypass my boxes (half of which were already loaded in the elevator) so I politely ask him if he wanted to go ahead of me, (me, the lone woman, sweating and grunting, trying to maneuver boxes of furniture into an elevator) and he nimbly jumps over the boxes saying “I’m only going to the second floor” and takes off in the elevator with half my boxes. Two days later and I’m still getting over the shock. Seriously, how rude can one possibly be? At the very least he could’ve taken the stairs. I mean really, two floors!

I believe I’m starting to get sick of the beach, hating thy neighbors is probably the first sign I need to stop with all the “vacationing” (only mothers will understand the quotation marks) and get home!!

Seagulls, idleness, and the meaning of life

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It’s the end of our first full week at the beach. The Husband was supposed to be joining us today for a week vacation, but he’s developed a temperature and is home sleeping it off. The kids and I have settled into a routine, we go to the beach in the morning, we have lunch, they nap, we go to the playground in the afternoon, then dinner, some tv or a show in the town square, and bedtime. It’s simple and quite sweet. I thought I’d be ready to strangle them by now, but I’m not, I’m actually getting used to spending all this time with them.

Of course all this leisure time has its consequences, mostly in that I have lots of time to think and observe the world around me and be amazed by all the things I normally don’t notice. For example, I always knew, but had never really realized how terrified of the weather Italians are. For example, kids here always wear undershirts, all year, so they “don’t get a chill”, despite widespread modern conveniences like, for example, indoor heating. Italians bundle up, they’re always wearing a couple more layers of clothing than I or my children are, in fact, my mother in law constantly tells me I’m irresponsible as she follows me around with a hat. I thought this behavior was mostly autumn, winter, and spring related, in reality it’s just ingrained in the culture. As I sit on the beach surrounded by children with their mothers, fathers, or grandparents all I hear around me are repeated admonishments not to go in the water, it’s too cold, get out of the water and warm up in the sun, stay out of the sun, it’s too hot, not to roll around in the sand, it’s too abrasive, not to get their hair wet (it’s too wet?), it’s annoying, and headache inducing.

Granted, the weather this year has not been fab. It’s colder than normal for the end of June, and the rain and chilly wind are plentiful, but we’re not in Siberia nor are we swimming in the English Channel (the British do this, and they seem to be in excellent health). I spend my days wishing I could just tell everyone around me to chill out a minute, relax, and enjoy the fact that it’s summer, and hey, we’re at the beach. A few days ago it was cloudy, this town is tiny and I didn’t really know what to do, so we went to the beach anyway thinking that if it was too cold to go swimming we could at least built a sandcastle. The beach was pretty empty. After a while it started raining, the beach emptied completely. I was under the relative dryness of the beach umbrella and my kids stripped into just their suits and started running like two crazies on the beach and in the surf. They reminded me of two dogs chasing each other on the sand running in the water, running away from the waves faces held high and tongues out to catch the rain. Of course they were frozen by the time an hour had past, the rain intensified, and they calmed down enough to actually leave, but they had probably never had so much fun at the beach. I mean, seriously, when else would I just let them run around half naked in the rain? We were the only ones on the entire beach, I’m sure grandmothers were looking out their windows at us and tsk, tsking at my irresponsibility.

Another thing I’ve just recently realized, is how completely and utterly weird being at the beach actually is. Think about it, everyone around you is someone you could run into on the street, in the grocery store, your doctor, your dentist, the delivery guy, the electrician, the teacher, the business man, people you see, you say good morning to in line for coffee, people we talk to, cross, run into, all day, every day, of our daily lives, but they are all, for all intents and purposes, naked.

Seriously, is it not weird?

You have a conversation with the mom standing watch next to you, but she’s in a bikini, which is not all that different from a bra and panties. And so are you. All year we hide our imperfections, camouflage our bellies, or our saddle bags, or our droopy behinds, or our flabby arms…. And then summer rolls around and we’re all there walking around, chasing our kids, playing catch on the beach, essentially naked. How is this normal? I ran into one of the check out girls at the grocery store the other day, she was laying there talking to a friend, she’s skinny but has really bad cellulite on her thighs, her stomach isn’t as flat as it seems in her clothes and I’m pretty sure she’s had a boob job. I’m not judging her, she’s flawed like all the rest of us, but don’t you think, suddenly, I have way too much information on the check out girl I see several times a week at the grocery store?

This is what being at the beach does to me, makes me think strange things, makes me notice stuff that I’m usually too busy and self involved to notice, completely useless things. For example, I’ve also noticed how insanely loud seagulls are. Have you ever stopped to think about it? Seagulls. They’re always cawing at each other (do seagulls caw, or is that just crows?). And there are so many of them, like cuter, whiter, sea vultures, just flying in circles overhead, cawing, and pooping on bewildered passers by, landing on light posts and looking down on us all tilted head and evil eyed. I’m not sure I’m a big fan of seagulls, though they’ve never done anything to me directly.  Although, quite possibly, all this attention to seagulls and their behavioral patterns is a clear indication that I’ve got way too much time on my hands.

So summer is officially here, it’s started, whether the weather agrees with me or not, so for now, for the next few weeks, I’ll be pondering completely useless things, as I stroll half naked on the beach, and who knows maybe I’ll alight on some hidden truth on life, or the universe, or human behavior, something meaningful to take back with me or at the very least to keep me occupied in this season of idleness.

The bee’s knees

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I’m not a huge fan of the summer. Surprising considering how much I complain of the seemingly endless winters and soggy springs here. But summer just rubs me the wrong way. I was probably traumatized by the insanity inducing heat and humidity of Houston summers, having to get up at dawn to go play tennis or horseback riding cause being outside whilst not immersed in a swimming pool of tepid water after eight a.m. could only result in heat stroke. Also, during the summer my schedule goes all to hell.

So, the minute June rolls around, and all the extra-curricular activities start petering off I move the kids to the beach apartment. I know, I bet you’re all feeling really sorry for me right now.

But the God honest truth is that the main reason I move down to the beach is that we just renovated last year and there’s blessed air conditioning in every room, unlike our house in town. (Also, the beach and sea).

So what’s the summer like at our house? Well, I’m alone with the kids, which is equal parts wonderful, exhausting, and infuriating, as the Husband works so he only comes down on weekends (and usually on Sunday nights when he leaves he’s all YAY, I get to go relax at the office tomorrow! Woohoo! – I’m not kidding), the apartment is smallish so the upkeep is easy, and I don’t have a lot of stuff in it, so it’s mentally very relaxing. We get up, spend the morning at the beach, eat lunch at the beach café or at home, the kids nap, then we go to the playground in the afternoon and walk around all the little shops, the baker, the butcher, the greengrocer (yes, an actual greengrocer), the fishmonger… for our evening meal, we go back out after dinner if there’s a show in the church square, and then we rinse and repeat. We do this until the end of July. I spend a lot of my time yelling. It turns out, that a three and a five-year old don’t have an awful lot of common sense, and this fact hits home especially hard when you’re with them 24/7. Who’d a thought. And yet…

Despite the fact that I’m a bit off during the summer, that the heat gets me down, and that I’m annoyed by my body image more than at any other time of the year, basically despite the fact that I’m somewhat of a sourpuss during the summer, I love all the time I spend with the kids. I’m their main source of entertainment, so I learn to be more patient, more fun, more flexible, I even manage to not adhere to our strict meal and nap times without going off the deep end (in case you haven’t noticed I’m a bit of a control freak). And the children learn to be more helpful, more articulate, their English miraculously improves, they’re better at cleaning up, at helping me do the menial daily chores that they usually aren’t privy to, and they love it. They don’t, much to my surprise, get bored just hanging out with me. Apparently, hanging out with me is the bee’s knees. Sure, I have to come up with new stuff to do every once in a while, and there are many kids for them to play with at the beach or at the playground, but they’re just as happy sitting on the couch watching tv with me. And that feels nice. During the school year, we’re usually too busy doing what one does all year, nobody really notices how quickly time slips away, but during the summer we get to all just be for a minute, together. I guess it’s not such an awful season after all. And, when the heat really gets me down, I try to remember that soon enough I’ll hit the finish line, and the next season is my absolute favorite, of fresh starts and of new beginnings, Fall. But for now, I’ll just try to enjoy the silly things they say and do, because, I suspect, soon enough they won’t want to hang out with me all summer.

linking up today with Mamakat for her prompt: 2) describe what summer is like at your house.

Mama’s Losin’ It

Monday Listicles – Shut up, just shut that shit up already!

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It’s Monday once again and time for listicling. Amazingly last week I managed to post more than just the listicle, despite all the busy vacationing that I’m doing, but I’ve got to admit that Stasha’s lists are my favorite posting “assignments” of the week.  This week she asked us to list 10 sounds that drive us bonkers, this was pretty easy for me tonight, as we had a really annoying dinner experience and I’m still rankled from it. The restaurant was hot, as in Dante’s inferno, as in I ordered a soda just so I could rub the cold can on my neck, face, and cleavage in what could have been a very seductive move had I not had sweat running down my temples, as in invest in some fucking fans already. I’m sure you get the picture. Plus the service was abysmal, the restaurant was crowded, and when I say crowded I don’t mean like American restaurants get crowded I mean the waiters kept jostling our chairs as they passed, I could have easily reached over and picked food from my neighbors plate, I could have actively participated in their conversation, and at one point the person closest to me was almost sitting in my lap. Italian – we have no sense of personal space – crowded. This is why I don’t spend time at the beach in Italy in August, because from here on out it can only get worse. The cities on the other hand are wonderfully empty, there’s hardly any traffic, parking is plentiful and unlike the days of yore when one couldn’t even buy milk in cities in August, all services are available and all the people who are still around and working are surprisingly polite and unstressed. Which is why I’m going home on Tuesday. Anywaaaay, I should probably get off this tangent and back to my list of:

10 sounds that make me want to stab someone, then choke them, then throw their limp lifeless body down a ravine

1. clocks ticking

2. hands, fingers, feet, tapping

3. teeth grinding

4. or air being sucked through teeth

5. snoring

6. heavy breathing that almost qualifies as snoring

7. cuticle or nail picking

8. nose sniffling

9. tongue clucking

10. oh, and did I mention clocks ticking

Also, any noise at all when I’m trying to sleep.

I’m not sure, but I may, possibly, be a little high-strung. Just a thought.

p.s. also, yappy dogs, yappy dogs yapping away, make me want to kill myself.

The end.

Set in my ways, like a cranky old codger

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As I’ve mentioned I’m at the beach with the kids, and this time away from home has helped me realize a few things about myself and my life. Our day-to-day here is much simpler, we get up, we have breakfast, we get ready and we go to the beach (with a couple of fights, a crying fit or two, the beds getting made, and me yelling a bit in between). We spend a few hour at the beach, we have lunch, we come home, bathe and nap. I clean and look at blogs, we go out, to the greengrocer, the baker, the butcher, and the candlestick maker. (I’m actually kidding about that last one.) Then we have dinner, go back down to the square for the dancing or kiddie show or whatever entertainment is on offer that night and then we go to bed, get up the next morning and wash, rinse, repeat. If friends come to stay our routine remains pretty much the same, even whilst the chaos level rises exponentially, but it’s all good.

When the husband or the nanny come though… well, I’ve noticed I start getting a little tense, a little more upset, a little… completely pissed off all the time. Why? Because the truth is I’m 36 going on 89. I’m set in my ways, I like things just so, when I settle into a routine I don’t like to have it disrupted. Well, more like I positively despise having it disrupted. The nanny, she puts the dishes away wrong, she puts too much detergent in the washer, she sneaks bleach in the house when I’m trying to green my cleaning products… at home I don’t mind, I’ve got too much to do, and as long as the house is clean I don’t really care how it gets that way. But here, I’m in control of my life, the house is small enough to be manageable and it’s new, everything is where I want it, it’s mine, more than the house we live in every day is. And I want things just so.

The husband, he comes and he wants to go to the beach earlier, or later, he wants to have breakfast at the cafè, he wants to go swimming, or he doesn’t, he hogs the shade, he talks on the phone with the office or his colleagues or his mother. He invites his mother over without asking me, when he isn’t here. He wants to eat dinner out, or in, he wants pizza or sushi or pasta. All legitimate requests, but annoying nonetheless cause he screws with my routine. I can’t just decide and do, when he’s here, I have to suggest, listen, negotiate. Many of these are the same reasons why I wanted to separate a few months back, because life on my own is just easier most of the time. I’ve come to terms with it in my regular life, I realize that with every negotiation I don’t have to face, with every concession I don’t have to make I’m paying the price in sole responsibility, snow shoveling, and spider elimination. So you compromise, in marriage. But I’m on vacation and when he’s around I’m not on vacation anymore. Sure, I’m on an extended version of the mother vacation which means I still cook and clean and run after children, referee fights and all that, but my mind’s on vacation and then he shows up and effectively rains on my parade.

The truth is though, that I should just be thankful that I have a nanny who takes the kids off my hands so I can get some work done, or cleans the house, or irons our clothes, I should be happy to see the Husband on the weekends, to talk to another adult, to go out to eat or have an extra ice cream or a cocktail. I’m just a cranky, old lady, despite my relatively young age. And all I can think of is God help us all when I actually reach my old age cause I’m going to be completely intractable, like a codgery old fool.

Chit Chat and Virtual Coffee

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I haven’t done a virtual coffee post in so long, I’m not even sure I remember how to do one! Of course, I’ve never done one on this here blog, so most of you are probably going, huh?? I did almost forty on my other blog so this feels like going back to an old friend, but from a new place. Maybe I should stop blabbing and just get on with it…

Hello dear friends, and welcome to coffee!

Today I’m feeling chatty, but haven’t got an awful lot to say, so it’s just going to be one of those posts….

We’re finally in full on summer mode here, I know that seems weird to most Americans whose summer vacations are almost over but in Italy it goes from mid June to mid September. Entirely too long in my opinion, but no one’s asking me.

I’ve officially moved to the beach for the month, yes, the month. I’m doing the Italian housewife thing and taking the kids to the beach for the summer. Of course, most housewives here who are lucky enough to have a beach house spend the entire summer at the seaside but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, one month is more than enough, I’ve got a vegetable garden to tend to at home after all!

The husband inherited/bought an apartment on the Italian Riviera Ligure last year from his mother and we spent all of last summer renovating it, so this year we get to enjoy it, and let me tell you, it’s perfect. I’m not bragging, it’s perfectly perfect for us. It’s small enough to clean and keep orderly without me wanting to kill myself but large enough so we can have friends visit with minimal inconvenience to all. It’s a 30 second (literally) walk from the beach and has everything you could possibly need within a 2 minute walk range. It’s not a glamorous, nor trendy town, there are few really good restaurants and to say most locals are rude is an understatement, but it’s comfortable, there are shows and various entertainment for kids almost every night, the beach is sandy and the water is shallow for miles, so it’s perfect for young children.

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Our BFFs came to visit last week for a few days. There were six (and a half) of us, my pregnant friend, her two kids, myself and my two kids. Let me just say that, contrary to what I had previously thought two kids plus two kids does not equal four kids; two kids plus two kids equals a herd of elephants. On speed. We survived, however, and hopefully they’ll come back and visit next week too.

I’ve discovered both my children are incredible homebodies (trait that they did NOT inherit from me), who have a low tolerance for being far from their familiar surroundings. After a week here they started asking when we’re going home, I’m having a hard time explaining to them that this is their home too.

I’m in the process of co-writing a children’s book with a friend, the process is driving me crazy. I don’t get how real writers do it… It’s a book about a tractor and his capers, it goes with an educational dvd series my friend is producing (filming, editing, and any other ing you can think of), so it’s her idea… but boy, co-writing is hard. Or maybe it’s just hard for me, I need to work on my team playing skills, or something.

On a related (but also not) note, I’ve started taking Bach Flowers for my moods. I went through a mild depression a few months ago, at which point I had decided to ditch my husband and my nanny and run off with the kids, though I hadn’t actually figured out where to… Instead (thank God!) I started following the Mood Cure (not going to get into it, but you can click on the link for more info), ditched only my old blog and miraculously started feeling better. Right now I just have sporadic moments of craziness that I’ve decided to temper with Bach Flowers. I’m focusing mostly on trying to be more patient, so I’m taking a flower called Impatiens (har, har) and, though not miraculous, I am feeling some improvement, I’ve stopped yelling at my kids full-time and am now mean mama only some of the time. We’re all quite relieved. I’m hoping on a reappearance of fun mama soon, as I, and the kids, quite liked her.

Unfortunately, my blogging respite has ended as naptime’s almost over (what do moms of older kids do for free time during the summer I wonder?). Thanks for stopping by to chat, please tell me what’s going on with you, I really want to know!

Toodles, M