School days

Dylan is really starting to like school and to go willingly in the mornings - yeah! The first month was about as fun (for mom) as having a root canal every single morning of the week what with his crying, complaining, carrying on and refusal to get dressed and ready. Now he says "Look at me, mom. I'm NOT crying!" and skips out to the car. He is learning a lot (one day he said "Mom, did you know it was autumn?"), and is really making friends. The school is set up Montessori style, so his class has a table of 3-year-olds, a table of 4-year-olds and a table of 5-year-olds. He has a 5-year-old "big brother" who takes him to get a drink of water or into the nap room after lunch. A mom of one of the 5-year-olds told me that the "big kids" had a vote on who the least annoying 3-year-old was, and Dylan won since he is the one who cries the least.

His teacher lives across the street so often when I run into her she will tell me little anecdotes about how he is doing. She said that he is a child who pays a lot of attention to adults and what is going on around him. He is not "in his own world" and he processes everything he sees, hears and overhears. This is very true as lately when he gets frustrated playing with his cars, I sometimes will hear him say "dammit!" There is only one person he could have learned that from, and she will make a bigger effort not to say that word around him! Oops. The school nutritionist is a family friend and lives in the neighborhood. She has promised to put pasta al pesto back on the menu just for Dylan as he was getting tired of pasta al pomodoro and is not a big fan of ravioli, lasagna or baby pasta in broth. He loves risotto, however, and doesn't complain on risotto days.

In other news, we will have a new "addition" to the family come this Thursday!!! After much research, I have finally settled on a clothes dryer. It is not a "big, mega powerful American clothes dryer" but it should get the job done. I've only seen dryers here in the last few years, and they work via condensation (you have to dump out a tub of water after each load) so I'd heard mixed things about them. But the new generation of condensation dryers seems to work pretty well and be very energy efficient. We have limited power in our apartment so I had to find one that would only use about 1 kilowatt per cycle. The funny thing is that the dryer we decided on is the same model we had in our New York rental apartment this summer, so every time I use it, I'll feel like I'm back in the Big Apple, but with no bagels and less Bounce. The only space we have for it is in our entryway where we always meant to put a telephone table or a plant (but never did) so we are going to enclose it in something to make it appear to be an extension of our kitchen. Otherwise, the dryer would be the first thing you'd see upon entering our apartment, which actually would probably be fitting considering how much I've complained about doing laundry these last ten years!

Feeling mellow before school in flannel PJs from Grandma Mimi.

Before school we put our "little people" on the school bus and Dylan tells them "Don't be scared. The teachers are nice." He's making a funny face because he doesn't like his hat.

I have struck a deal with the laundry Gods, and on warm sunny days I will still hang things outside! Promise!

Rainy weekend

It was a miserable, gray, rainy weekend - shades of December in October. Aargh. Fortunately, all of the activities we had planned were indoors. Yesterday the big event was cousin Matteo's fifth birthday party, which was held at the indoor play space where we had Dylan's second birthday party. Fun was had by all (the kids). Dylan got a much needed haircut, though it's a "home cut" so he will be sporting "the Dorothy Hamill" until it grows out a bit. Having him look like a female figure skater from the 1970s was not our intent, but then we aren't hair stylists and he doesn't sit still.

Behind the wheel of the "Ferrari"

Ready for cake with nonna

Getting into the Halloween spirit

After school it seems like most moms show up to pick up their kids with a snack or "treat." The first few days when I showed up empty handed, Dylan asked why all the other kids had a juice box and usually a Kinder chocolate bar or some other pre-packaged (what I'd call a "Little Debbie" in Midwesternese) snack. If left to his own devices, Dylan would be a junk-food junkie and would subsist on candy, Kinder bars and Nutella. He has a massive sweet tooth. He's too young to understand what trick-or-treating is and that he is seriously missing out on that living here (Halloween is fairly "new" here and is not really celebrated at all but happens to coincide with All Saints and the Day of the Dead Catholic holidays so they put up a few random decorations). For his snack, I usually bring a mini pizza from the bakery, but he complains when he looks around and sees all the other kids munching on their Kinder bars. So I was happy when I went into the bakery on Friday and saw they made these Halloween-themed cookies. It was the perfect snack (still sugary but fresh baked and not full of preservatives) especially because he had worn his glow-in-the-dark Halloween shirt to school.

Stupendous

Dylan was sent home from preschool yesterday with a fever (in the end, we think he just has a tooth coming in because the fever went away and he has no other symptoms) so we played around at home making videos. Here he's talking about the red car his zia always says is "stupenda." His hair is super long. He really needs a haircut.

Stupendous from Michelle Marie on Vimeo.