james masters the pull and drag

This was a week or two ago. He has progressed a little since then, but still hasn't caught on to the concept of the crawl. He keeps trying to stand up on his feet and walk himself forward with his hands on the ground. It would probably work too, except that at seven and a half months he lacks the upper body strength for it.

a very good day

Last year Jack and I made friends with a little boy at his school and the boy's mom. She and I were both pregnant, each with another boy, and both still trying to recover from the shellshock of parenthood while running small businesses. We are also the same age, making us a few years younger than the other preschool mothers. (It's fairly rare in northern Italy to already have two children at 30.) The boys got along the way three- and four-year-olds do - just barely - but we kept throwing them together so we could spend forty-five minutes at the playground near their school talking in the afternoon.

Yesterday, Jack, James and I were invited to her family's summer place about half an hour from where we live. From the way she talked about it, shyly, but not without some pride, I had a feeling that the place was going to be pretty amazing. There were also the vague details, which made me suspicious. Like when I asked her for the address for my GPS, she wasn't sure what the street number was, although she'd grown up there. So I figured it had to be big enough (and historic enough) that she could receive mail without giving a specific address.

And it turned out to be pretty amazing all right.

The vegetable garden alone had me drooling. It was gorgeous! There must have been one hundred tomato plants! There were melons and eggplants and a huge long row of zucchini. She said they fried the flowers almost every night for a special treat. Roses lined the drive and there was lavender growing everywhere. Next to the house there was a small vineyard running up a hill (they make their own wine: red, white and prosecco) and on top of the hill, a small olive grove (they make their own oil). A gentle breeze rolled down the nearby hills and kept us nice and cool all day long.

The villa dates back to the 1300's, but was renovated in the nineteenth century. The portion that my friend and her husband recently renovated for their family, in great big wide-open spaces above the stables, had gorgeous Gothic windows off the back, offset by giant neo-classical windows in front, where the light flooded in.

Jack was most intrigued by the sandbox his friend's father (also an architect) had built and the kiddie pool they had set up next to it in the garden. We hadn't been there ten minutes when both boys stripped and jumped into the water. They were completely naked almost the entire time we were there. Although we did ask them to at least put on their underpants for lunch.

Which reminds me: LUNCH! We ate outside in their garden. My friend made eggplant parmesan with eggplants from the garden! In a fresh tomato sauce with tomatoes, again, from the garden. With tons and tons of their fresh basil. She made a special mini dish of it for me without any cheese, and she artfully laid a few fresh capers (say it with me: from the garden!) on top.

We sat around and talked and talked and talked while the boys ran wild (and naked) around the yard and stable, playing on an antique carriage, getting along (!!!) and the babies slept soundly in their strollers.

Then we walked around the gardens and ate some delicious fresh figs from their trees. I didn't want to freak her out with any undesired American touristness, so I only snapped a very few pictures of the villa and gardens, and only under the thinly veiled guise of taking pictures of the boys. (With their clothes on!)

introducing the italian baby biscuit

Jack used to love these. The Italians put them directly into their babies' bottles, where they dissolve. I just let them gnaw on the things. They sort of melt in your mouth, so it's a good first finger food.





I hadn't bought them in years, and Jack had long forgotten them. But he asked to try one and announced "Hey! These are good!" Then he asked for a glass of milk.

someone get this kid a dermatologist

James has spent most of his life with some sort of skin disorder. The day after he was born, his cheeks turned bright red and bumpy, and the following day the rash spread to his back and chest. "It's nothing to worry about," they said at the hospital. Easy for you to say, I thought. My newborn is ugly!

Then he was jaundiced. And his skin was incredibly dry until I discovered a magical cream at the pharmacy that works if I use abundant amounts, meaning I have to buy the tiny [pricey] containers of it about once a week.

He was always breaking out in red bumps all over his body and I couldn't figure out what that was about until I cut dairy out of my diet. But it could also be whenever he has formula. I'm not sure about the formula, because it always coincides with times when I am away from him for a few hours and I give in to temptation and drink that cappuccino or eat that one measely ice cream. So it could be either. We'll never know, unless I miraculously recover from my lactose addiction. (Shut up, I quit smoking years ago, so it could happen.) In any case, the bumps take forever to clear up and in the meantime he looks awful.

Last time it happened he was also attacked by a swarm of mosquitoes and his skin is so sensitive that the little red bites took forever to fade. The kid was a mess for about a week. I didn't take too many pictures.

Lately, however, I have been good about the dairy and he is looking pretty decent once again. So here's a picture of him in the swing he has finally discovered isn't so awful after all, now that he is just about too big for it.

any tennis fans in the crowd?

Is that Gavin Rossdale at all of Federer's big games or his look-alike?

we don't like to waste time

Last night at dinner, after Jack told us a story about the play his teachers put on at summer camp, Skinny G said he had a story to tell. It started out like this, "One day, many years ago, on July 2nd, 1998, I was going to a wedding with Nonno..."

It had completely slipped my mind. That was the first time we met.

Skinny G likes to say we met on July 2nd, had our first date on July 4th, and were married on July 7th.

james

I have been trying for weeks to write a post worthy of him, but I can never get it out. I've found that it's next to impossible to write about James without writing about Jack, and that hardly seems fair, so I quit before I get anywhere.

I started this blog when Jack was about the age James is now. It was November 2005 and I was on maternity leave in a small town in the mountains. My husband worked an hour and a half away, and was rarely home. If it seems from the circa winter 2005 posts that all I did back then was sit around and stare at my firstborn son in adoration, that's because that's pretty much all I did. It was just the two of us and we were almost always snowed in. What else was I going to do with my time?

Then came James and the comparative dearth of posts alluding to my adoration of him. It's not that I love him any less, it's that I no longer have the luxury of paid maternity leave, I no longer live in a sleepy mountain town with only one baby to care for, and my husband is around regularly now. Poor James, whose mother's life did not stand still for him.

Luckily, he doesn't seem to mind having come second, since it means he has Jack to love. His brother is his undisputed favorite. "Jack" was the first word he recognized. His favorite time of day is his bath with Jack, followed by playtime on the bed. They laugh and squirm and rough each other up. James steals his toys, grabs at his face, watches him constantly. No one makes him laugh like Jack does.

James has just started figuring out how to crawl. Until last week, he'd roll wherever he wanted to be, then he started propelling himself forward in bursts with his knees, and now he can crawl a couple of feet before he gets tired and whiny. It's still a little shocking to leave him in one place and find him someplace else.

He had just that one lonely tooth for the longest time. It appeared when he was about four and half months old, grew in and waited it out in solitude until recently, when he cut the one next to it and then a few days later four teeth on top and another on the bottom, all at the same time. His gummy smile fades a little every day and pretty soon he'll have a mouth full of teeth and won't look so much like a baby anymore.

Jack has given up calling him Indiana Jones, and James has outgrown that crooked smile that made me want to call him "Indie" (or "Jonesie" as Jack suggested). He could still turn out to be an adventurer though. Whereas Jack asks to stay at home all day, James gets a little bored at home sometimes. He likes to be out and about, watching people, seeing things.

Although sometimes I wish I could stop everything and just sit around in quiet adoration, I doubt it would work much for either James or me. He'd much rather be out around town, with his big brother, babbling away. Our life seems to suit him. So well in fact, that it seems impossible that he hasn't been a part of it forever.

the bold and the berlusconi

I wasn't going to write about the latest Berlusconi scandal because I haven't had the time to follow it well enough and it's so over the top that I'm not quite sure where to start. As the whole world now knows, Berlusconi is Italy's favorite womanizer. That shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone who lives here or has followed his business and political careers, but still, the extent to which he takes the womanizing is so obscene, you almost have to admire the guy. He knows no shame. And really, why should he? So much of Italy has embraced his vision of the prime time television "show girls" ubiquitous on his networks (the half naked young women who don't say much, but look good) that they appear more than willing to overlook his blatant favoritism of attractive young women holding important government positions and his degrading comments.

As far as I can tell, the latest uproar began when his wife, Veronica Lario, made public statements concerning his alleged indiscretions with young, very young women. Actually, girls might be the more appropriate term. It turns out that Berlusconi had showed up at a pretty blond's 18th birthday party bearing a very expensive necklace as a birthday gift. Hmmm.

Then pictures surfaced of parties Berlusconi had thrown at his villa in Sardegna, in which young women had been photographed clad in skimpy swimsuits and, in some cases, nothing at all. And then there was the most famous shot of all, revealing the fully naked and aroused former Prime Minister of the Czech Republic whose name, let's be honest, no one knew until then.

It all seemed a little too construed for me. Elections were coming up and Berlusconi always manages to make his way to the front page of all the papers every single day for at least week before elections, whether through merit or through scandal. How convenient for him that his wife's outrage reached the tipping point exactly when it did. I suspected he had either pushed her there or she was in on it. And the poor former Prime Minister of the Czech Republic got sold out for a headline.

For days everyone talked about Noemi, the lucky 18-year-old who publicly declared that when she grew up, she'd like to either be a show girl or a representative in parliament, underscoring her view that there was not much of a difference between the two. Fortunately, "Daddy" Berlusconi could give her a hand with either. Or, better yet, both!

She had been to at least one or two of his weekend-long private parties, but they both deny that their relationship was "piccante" (steamy). Of course, Berlusconi went on television to deny this the night before the elections, flashing his big white smile, with a gigantic banner of his face and party behind him.

In the meantime, everyone was up in arms over whether the pictures of the parties should be published. Various old, white-haired men came to his defense. It's his private residence! How dare anyone infringe upon his right to privacy! Skinny G was an advocate of the privacy protection, while I thought it was a little more ambiguous. Hadn't Berlusconi just appointed himself Interim Foreign Minister when the pictures were taken? Wasn't he using his villa to entertain foreign dignataries? Couldn't that be considered part of his office?

Then suddenly, it was all about the fact that Berlusconi used Italian air force aircraft to fly the young women to his parties. There was public outrage for half a second, until everyone remembered that Berlusconi had recently passed a law making it perfectly legal for him to bring friends on board.

But wait, soon after that, another issue resurfaced: whether the courts can hear taped telephone conversations of politicians. This comes up in Italy fairly often, and usually when anyone important is caught talking about doing anything they shouldn't on their cell phones, generally bribery and using prostitutes.

Wait a second, you might be thinking. Isn't Berlusconi already being tried for bribing judges? Nope! Not after he passed that law protecting the top four government officials in the country from being tried for crimes while they hold office.

So that leaves prostitution. One woman was questioned by authorities earlier this week and has spoken to the press about her transactions with the Prime Minister. Allegedly, not only was she paid for her services, but, after exacting promises from Berlusconi to build some real estate in exchange for a night together, he did not come through on his part of the deal. Already Berlusconi is trashing her in the press.

Investigations continue into whether there were prostitutes at his parties, although the answer to that was in the papers weeks ago, when interviews with young women in attendance were published. "In the morning, we went on €2,000 shopping sprees!" one said enthusiastically when asked about the benefits of being "invited".

Meanwhile, Berlusconi doesn't seem to mind all this speculation. It's not like he can be tried for anything anyway. And the best part is that it keeps us all distracted from the economic nose dive, exploding unemployment and disfunctional schools. Viva l'Italia!