A tale of two sleep sacks

So the first sleep sack arrived from my friend Vanessa by way of New Zealand by way of London by way of Sicily. I had to fight a bit with the woman in the post office when I went to pick it up because the package was addressed to - gasp - Dylan and the woman chewed me out because mail should apparently never be addressed to a child. She wanted photo identification for Dylan and actually my nine-month-old DOES have an Italian I.D. card but I don't keep it on me. Dylan and I don't have the same last name (in Italy if I had Cristiano's last name, that'd make us brother and sister not husband and wife...) so the woman didn't want to give me the package even though I was holding the little slip that was left in my mailbox with the package tracking number on it. I lifted Dylan up out of his stroller to show her who he was but he couldn't confirm his identity. Decades after Mussolini's death, Italy is still pretty Fascist and very ID-happy so even my subway pass has my photo on it. So, anyway, I finally got our sleep sack after making the 30-minute hike on foot to the main post office and fighting and fighting. Typical.

Then Grandma Mimi sent us a very expensive box containting a sleep sack from the U.S. along with a few other toys and essentials but, of course, the box got blocked in customs. The offending item? Walgreen's dental floss that was a buy-one-get-one-free deal that Grandma Mimi decided to throw in the package at the last minute. Everyone likes a little dental floss, right? Well it took ten days, lots of phone calls, faxes back and forth of my passport and various other documents. Not to mention $50 paid to the Italian Health Ministry for "importing" a health product.

In any case, we love our sleep sacks. Dylan sleeps much better and I don't worry about him being cold now.

Customs officials tore into the packaging, creating a fuzz explosion

World's most expensive dental floss

They found the floss but not the Theraflu! What would we have paid for that?

Dylan on his new Kermit rug, which has nothing to do with anything really. Disney is one of Cristiano's clients so this was a gift. I have a soft spot for Kermit singing "The Rainbow Connection!" Cristiano's new Grill Daddy is on the chair - fortunately, Italy has no "BBQ Minister" so we didn't have to pay any duties on that.