Difficulties, technical and non

If you haven't heard from me in a while, it's because my computer is slowly dying and we are trying to hold out until after we get back from the U.S. to buy me a new one. If you've sent me an email, Skype-ed me or otherwise contacted me in some technological manner, please be patient. I want to get in touch. I just can't. Or will be slow in responding. I can barely keep one program open at a time, which is a real problem as I've begun to work again in earnest and am slammed.

Cristiano's aunt and nonna (Dylan's great-grandma) keep Dylan while I work but they just brought him back an hour earlier than usual because he was flipping out and then didn't know what to do. Collectively these women have five children. If they don't know what to do, how should I? He was going so crazy that nonna (mother of three children herself) was driven to take a blood pressure pill and was said to be "in a bad way" because she had never seen a baby go so nutso. He's been really fussy the last few days, and I don't know why. And I've chosen this week as the week to really begin introducing solids. And pulling the plug on breastmilk at night. For various reasons, I've decided to stop breastfeeding at six months, and that means I've got to slowly phase it out over the next ten days. Heaven help us.

Cinque

Month five, how do I love thee. Let me count the ways. Month five is the new month three (at least for Baby Cugini). Everyone told me to wait until month three and I'd see all of these major developments and a lot more sleep. Didn't happen. Here's what's happening in month five:

1) We are sleeping more and better. YEAH! I'm almost afraid to put it out there but I can't contain my joy. Grumpy mamma is no longer. Last Thursday night (the night before we had our appointment at the U.S. Consulate), Dylan slept from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m. straight. We haven't had any repeats of that but we see it as a good sign. Let's hope that major traveling next month does not throw us off too, too much. Any volunteers to take the night shift so mom and dad can at least get over their jet lag? C'mon, pay it forward! I've already decided that I'm going to do S.O.S. colic duty for anyone (call me day or night and I will be the most sympathetic listener because, girl, I've been there) who ever needs it and let some poor exhausted mom go take a breather around the block while I walk her screaming, red-faced kid around the house for an hour or two. The colic era gave me a few gray hairs.

2) Houston, we've got contact. A (very cute, however) crying, pooping blob we are no longer. We still cry, we still poop but we also laugh hysterically, talk, babble, play and wave "ciao ciao." Yes, he's begun to maneuver his hand into an unmistakable first wave type gesture. It's a little weak and palsied but it's most definitely a wave. Dylan babbles the day away with "ta ta ta ta" or "da da da da da." It used to be that it was me holding a one-sided conversation with him as I yammered away about God knows what. Sometimes I was so hard up for conversation starters, I'd pull out the box of Pampers and name all of the animals printed on the diapers. In English AND Italian just to kill some time (incidentally, we still don't know how to say "chipmunk" in Italian so I would just say "cheeeeepmooonk." Cristiano says he's never seen one and would call it a "small bear" but the box of Pampers already contains a big brown bear and this was so obviously a chipmunk. Somebody needs to get Procter & Gamble to add more Italian animals to the Italian Pampers - maybe the wild boar could replace the chipmunk over here.). But now I can't get a word in edgewise because if you try to talk back, he talks louder. Hey, it's not always all about YOU, Dylan. Oh, wait, yeah it is!

3) Mangia! This kid eats. Everything. Sweet. Savory. Plastic. He is not at all finicky. Whatever you put in front of him, he gobbles up. I'm still doing my whole "tasting menu" thing as I'm not going to fully introduce solids until next month but so far everything he's tasted, he's liked. I give him a few bites and then I quickly have to hide whatever it is I'm feeding him and distract him with a toy or else he will scream for more food.

Signs you've been away from home far too long...

You are willing to accept bad, preservative-filled substitutes. I saw that this German discount chain here was advertising "America Week" complete with bagels, peanut butter and something called a "Rib Burger" sold in the freezer section. I bypassed the freezer section and the Rib Burger and headed straight for the bagels and peanut butter, which are actually imported from Germany. The brand-name is some funky fictitious creation meant to sound American - "McEnnedy" (I can just see the German marketing gurus sitting around the conference room table deciding on that one "McDonald's is popular in America and that Kennedy family seems to be pretty famous..."). The peanut butter looks a little greenish in color. My real American peanut butter ran out during the long, final wintery days of pregnancy. I haven't tasted my loot yet but I'll report back on the authenticity factor. I'll be tasting the originals in a month. Yeah!

Schizzino

schizzino
Originally uploaded by michellanea

My weekend was splashing. How about yours?

Dual citizen?

Today we go to the U.S. consulate to register Dylan as a U.S. citizen, get his Social Security number and apply for his U.S. passport. People keep asking me if he will be a "dual citizen." From everything I've read, dual citizenship doesn't really exist. Yes, he is both an Italian citizen and a U.S. citizen. But there's no Italian-American authority that doles out "dual citizenship." Whatever that is. Italy and the U.S. don't really care what other citizenship Dylan has and don't communicate on the matter. For each country, he is "theirs" and that's that. More than anything, it's just a convenience. If he wants to go on vacation to Cuba or travel somewhere where there's particular anti-American sentiment, he'd use the Italian passport. If he wants to get through customs faster going to the U.S., he'll use the American passport. And, obviously, he's legal to live in both places. One strange rule is that in order for him to pass American citizenship on to his children, he will have to live in the U.S. for at least five years and four of those years after the age of 14. That's kind of random. I'm eligible for Italian citizenship but have yet to apply. Again, it'd be a convenience for certain things. It'd mean I could zip through the line for "EU citizens" faster in the airport when traveling to Europe. It would also mean I'd be legal to live and work in all of Europe as opposed to just Italy (though where am I moving?). And I'd also be able to vote in Italy. Mom's up early to finish work because the whole morning will be taken up at the consulate. Tonight I have a work-related dinner and will leave Dylan alone (OK, with papà) at night for the first time. I've already made up strict instructions as to how and when he should get to bed, but why do I have this feeling that I'll come home to find him still up and in front of the TV watching the European soccer semifinals?

The emails are flooding in...

...but I don't have a lot of time to respond because I'm suddenly swamped with work. Why don't we have a dryer here? Well, that's a long story but there is a two-pronged answer. For one thing, Italians don't trust appliances (see this reprint of a Wall Street Journal article here) to get the job done. Why machine dry your undies when you can see them flapping in the breeze before your eyes and then iron each individual pair with amore? And they don't look for conveniece but the "right way" (I am not kidding when I say the simple mop has not made any inroads here - they use a cloth and this big scrub brush thingie with a long handle) to do things around the house.

More importantly, an American clothes dryer uses between 4,000 and 6,000 watts and we are only allotted 3,000 watts total for energy use in our whole apartment. The government decides how much energy you can have and how many appliances you can use. It's not a free-for-all here. If you decide you want to open a machine shop in your basement, you have to petition town hall to get more energy (well after you jump through all of the bureaucratic hoops to open a business - good luck!). So, for instance, I currently can't dry my hair while the oven is on. Cristiano's parents almost fell over when they saw a real American washer (which compared to the petite Italian washer is downright industrial in look and feel; Italian washers are also slow and plodding as the "fast" cycle on mine takes 90 minutes!) and clothes dryer on their first trip to the U.S. Clothes dryers are energy hogs any way you look at it and EnergyStar won't even rate them because there is no making a dryer that much more efficient. We won't even talk what the energy costs would be to run a dryer over here (just for point of reference, gas costs over $9 a gallon...).

In recent years, I've begun to see small clothes dryers here, but the only people I know who've bought one are American expats and they tell me they suck. First of all, they work with some kind of lame condensation technology and don't get your clothes fully dry and wrinkle-free. And capacity is, like, two pairs of jeans. So days of waiting and cardboard clothes are my cross to bear. Oh the good old days when I had no idea how "evil" the clothes dryer was and I'd just throw in one pair of jeans and a sheet of Bounce. Lights were probably flickering in some Third-World village somewhere just so I could have perfect fitting Calvins, but I was none the wiser. OK, I'm just being a smartass now. I do wish I had a dryer. I'd just use it intelligently. I mean, the iron isn't exactly energy efficient either but irons here run about 1,000 watts, so I guess that's an improvement. Too bad I hate ironing. Back to talking about baby.

P.S. The sun came out today!

Basta!

I'm getting the hang of this sleeping thing. At a certain hour, if you don't put me in bed, I just pass out where I am! See how my legs are bent because my pajamas are too small...

If you go look at this Milano webcam, you can see it is STILL raining here. Apparently we haven't had this much bad summer weather in two centuries. It was so cold here last night that if we could have, we would have turned the heat on (legally, we aren't allowed to use the heat after March 15th or so) and I had to get pajamas Dylan used this past winter out of a box. Being for a 3-month-old, they were too small, of course. I'm also facing a laundry crisis as nothing is getting dry and I can't go ahead with more laundry until I free up my overloaded drying rack, which is currently sporting damp, musty smelling clothing and other articles. Not to get too personal into Dylan's business, but I am changing his sheets and mattress pad every other day. I've done what they say to do - move up to a new diaper size or use two diapers. But we still have some major leakage issues and every morning I go to pick up my smiling and kicking bundle of joy only to find that my welcoming arms are met with moistness. Yes, a baby who eats in the middle of the night also goes to the bathroom in the middle of the night but I still feel like maybe we are doing something wrong. Is there something amiss with our diapering technique? Are we stupid? This morning I flipped out about the bad weather and huge piles of laundry and Cristiano - who was not amused - began saying to Dylan "Now apologize to your mother for peeing the bed again." It's not your fault, pumpkin. Mom and dad apparently can't put on a diaper properly and Mother Nature is not cooperating with sunny weather conducive to drying laundry. Before I had a kid, I was feeling all eco-friendly and fine with not having a dryer. Now I feel like I'm constantly drowning in dirty laundry. That comes out wrinkly on the line. The other day my mother-in-law was here while I was desperately bringing in dry clothes off the line before a storm came in and as she saw me folding bibs and other tiny Dylan essentials, she said "Wow, you fold them before you iron them. You do double the work." I didn't have the heart to tell her that, uh, no, I don't iron anything of Dylan's. Or mine, for that matter. Cristiano takes his stuff to the dry cleaner's.

Little to the imagination

The pediatrician told me I can start weaning Dylan any time I want. She told me to make my own vegetable broth with one carrot, one potato and one zucchini for use in the "prima pappa" (first meal). The first meal consists of rice cereal with a spoonful of vegetable broth, parmesan cheese and extra-virgin olive oil. Molto italiano, no? After five days, I'm to add meat to that. Being vegan myself (and NO I'm not raising Dylan vegan - are you happy, carnivores?), I really don't see myself throwing animal carcasses into my fantastic baby food maker. Especially because I was told to start Dylan on either horse, rabbit or turkey. Horse? Rabbit? Gross. I've been shopping around for some nice healthy (and meaty) baby foods, and I've noticed they let it "all hang out" on the packaging. The horse and rabbit baby food packages make you want to ride a pony or cuddle a bunny - not eat either one. Check them out:

Five months old today

At this time five months ago, I was so out of it after being in labor all night that I didn't even protest when the midwife told me she had sent Cristiano out of the room for a cappuccino and brioche because "he looked like he needed a break." I wonder what I looked like then? Probably like I needed to be shot and put out of my misery! I was so delirious, I couldn't even tell who was or wasn't in the room anymore (though I did overhear two visiting doctors from India who had no idea I understood English look at the ultrasound machine that had been wheeled in to determine how exactly Dylan's head was turned and say "That baby'll never come out vaginally..." at the same time my midwife was perkily encouraging me on in Italian; this is the same chick who turned my epidural off four hours too early because "it's almost over now" - LIAR!!!). A cappuccino and a brioche would have done nothing for me unless they had been spiked with some extra-potent horse tranquilizers. But who remembers childbirth? I've had some sleepless nights that rank up there with childbirth in terms of discomfort, stamina required and physical exertion. Seriously. Really it's all a blip on the motherhood radar screen. Look at our little piglet. For him I'd do it all over again.

Cugini

"Cugini" means "cousins" in Italian. This weekend Dylan got lots of face time with his Italian cugini at his cousin Federico's baptism. If the pictures seem dark, it's because it's been raining and dreary here for literally six weeks. These were taken in between big rain showers. Next week we get Dylan's U.S. passport and in six-and-a-half weeks we leave for the U.S. where we can't wait to see our American cousins!

Dylan and his cousin Luana

Cousin Federico with his nonna and Dylan with his nonna

Own room

Today we moved Dylan's bed out of our room and into his. He just fell asleep in there (for how long is anybody's guess...), and I'm feeling kind of traumatized over it. But I know it's the best thing for him - and for all of us if we actually start getting more sleep. After a few promising signs this week, last night we regressed and he was up all night AND got up for the day at 6 a.m. Today I'm a wild-eyed zombie. Cristiano was in one of the local shops this morning and was told by the butcher that our upstairs neighbors have been mentioning around town how Dylan's crying keeps them up nights. Ironically, their three-year-old is a hellion who has made my working from home somewhat of a nightmare as he runs back and forth, back and forth constantly chased by two sets of retired grandparents who sit up there all day (how many adults does it take to babysit one kid?). It sounds like a daycare center meets coffee klatch up there. I hear the door slamming all day and a million "ciao ciaos" as people rumble noisily up and down the stairs. I've also heard plenty of late-night screaming coming from up there as the kid has gone from teething to ear infection after ear infection. I guess karma's a bitch.

All alone in the new room...

Beach weekend

It was the Festa della Repubblica yesterday so we had another long weekend at the beach in Tuscany. It was Dylan's first time playing in the sand and the first time putting his toes in the sea. He's becoming such a pumpkin! He definitely knows his mommy and is beginning to show early signs of separation anxiety (yikes!) when she comes and goes. He's fine when mom is not around but as soon as she comes back (even from taking a shower), he gets fussy because he suddenly realizes she wasn't there all along.