Irene Bella

A couple of days ago me and my mum were watching my sister Irene as she was playing in the baby-gym. Here is the conversation I had with my mum while watching:
-Irene bella, I said and looked at my mum
-Jà Irene er falleg stelpa (yes, Irene is a beautiful girl) said my mum and smiled at me
-Irene bella, I repeated and looked again at my mum.
-Si, Irene è bella, Irene er falleg, said my mum and smiled, finding my comments rather cute
-Irene BELLA, I said once again and this time I stared at Irene
-Si, Irene bella, said my mum and started to be tired of the repetitive nature of the conversation
-Irene BELLA, I said for one last time -and if it wasn't for the fact that my mum was a goal-keeper in her youth and still preserves the good reflex necessary to keep the goal clean, then my hand would have hit Irene straight on her head. Instead my mum grabbed my hand and so prevented a small disaster happening. My mum was about to scold me, but right then it dawned on her that she had actually given me the permission to hit Irene. I had not been talking to my mum in italian, as she thought, but had repeatedly said Irene berja (hit irene) -and that was just what I intended to do!

Time

Last Sunday somebody moved one hour of daylight from the evening to the morning here in Italy. I don't know who is responsible for this magic trick, but this way the people of Italy save 99 millions of Euros (646 milions kwh of electricity), the newspapers say. I doubt that this is true, for I've checked the pocket of my pants, and they are just as empty as usually!
For me, this trick with the light has one immediate consequence: it gets dark long before I've exhausted my energy at the playground in the afternoon. How can I be happy with a few cents extra in my pocket when I'm forced to either play in the dark or go right home after kindergarten?
Mum says things are going to get worse. Soon it will still be dark when I go to kindergarten, and it will be dark already when I go back home in the afternoon. This makes absoloutely no sense to me! What does the government think about the fact that there will be no daylight left for me to enjoy a walk in the city or a visit to the playground when I've finished kindergarten in the afternoon? The millions of euros saved now will have to be used for depressive medicine later, when a whole generation of daylight-prived children become adults.
Therefore I suggest an immediate change. Instead of bothering with moving one hour of daylight from the evening to the morning, why don't we move several hours of daylight from the morning to the afternoon. It would be as if the whole nation had taken an intercontinental flight during the night, and woken up in a different time zone! The effect would be that during winter it would be dark, lets say until lunch (italian lunch, around 1-2), and then we can let daylight come and stay with us until it's time to go to bed. That way the sun will shine on us during the hours in which we can actually enjoy a few rays of sun!
When I become a prime minister....

liberal or conservative or just opportunist!

No, I'm not going to blog about politics....I was just wondering, as sometimes happens, about things. Well, when Oscar was a newborn baby, ages ago -it seems, people that saw him outside with my mum used to say: what a beautiful little girl you have! And every time, my mum had to correct them and say: well actually it is a boy! Sometimes my mum made a point of dressing him all blue (quite difficult, for his wardrobe contained very few blue clothes), and STILL people of the street would compliment my mum on her beautiful little girl and then just excuse themselves when they found out Oscar was a boy, saying: nowadays people dress their babies in any colour so it's impossible to guess their sex by the colour they are wearing!
So, when I was born and my parents were faced with either buying a whole new wardrobe of clothes for me, or just re-use Oscar's clothes, even if they were "boy-clothes", they had no difficulty making the choice. We are liberal, people (it seems) are liberal, and whatif our little girl is dressed once in a while in something very boyish, they thought! And what is the result? Now that we walk the streets of PsP, me wearing the same clothes that gained Oscar the girlish comments: people compliment my mum continuously on her beautiful little boy! And when my mum correct them and tell them that I'm actually a girl, they excuse themselves and say: well, dressed in blue I just thought it was a boy!
Either the people of the Bergamo province are much more conservative when it comes to infant-dress-colour-code, than the people of Pavia (where Oscar passed his infant months) or people in general are opportunist that excuse themselves with liberal or conservative slogans depending on what comes in handy for them!
Maybe my mum should knit me a hat that says: My name is Irene and I'm a girl!

The third language

I'm very busy these days learning to talk. This is no minor task, as I have to learn two languages with relatively complicated grammar and a pronounciation that goes beyond everything I could imagine coming out of my throat!

My main study-strategy is to listen and repeat! First I started by repeating the last word (or a fraction of a word) that my parents said:
Buon appetito
-tito
Hvað ertu að borða?
-borða
-Skamm Oscar, ekki berja Irene, þù àtt að vera gòður
-gòður
You get my point. My parents make a point of varying the last word so that I can learn as much as possible. It would of course be disastrous for my learning technique if they always said "Oscar" in the end of every sentence:
-You have to show Irene your love, Oscar.
-Did you see the moon, Oscar?
-Life is wonderful, Oscar
In this case, I would have learnt only to say Oscar 3 times, but would have had great difficulty to express my love for the wonderful moon!
Little by little I'm adding to the length of the repeated part, and yesterday e.g. I managed to repeat: það mà ekki klessa à hurðina.
I've also started to separate the two languages. For example I wouldn't dream of saying the colour of things to my dad in Icelandic or to my mum in Italian, and there are more and more words that I know in both languages, such as the name of differnt pieces of clothes, bodyparts, food items and so on. My vocabulary is growing every day, and I love to talk to my parents about various things. Yesterday over dinner e.g. we discussed who had poo'ed already and who hadn't, that was funny! But I also like to give a speech about various things and to talk on the telephone. And before going to sleep I catch up on things with my good friends Badda (bjalla) and Santi (bangsi) and sometimes I tell them also a go to bed story. I know how to change my voice so as to represent various persons, e.g. a troll and a goat and I invent stories as I go along. Sometimes the storytelling can go out of hand and my parents have to come and hush on me so that I don't wake up the whole neighbourhood with my monologues.

Actually my mum says that rather than me learning 2 languages she's struggling to learn the 3rd language of the house...my language! This is because my pronounciation is not very accurate. I follow the rule that as long as I get understood I don't polish the pronounciation part. Therefore, BANGSI becomes santi, and DANSA becomes santa, even if I have no problems pronouncing neither BA nor DA. This is ok as long as I keep the context clear, but as soon as I start to talk about DOS outside of the kitchen, or LALLO when we're in the car my mum has difficulty to understand that I'd like to have some cheese (ost) or that I'd just seen a horse (cavallo). But as long as our town is not full of cows or balloons, and that no one except me and her understand icelandic, she's happy. For imagine my mum's face if I went around town saying tussa (=kusa=cow) or bloddy (=loftbelgur=balloon) all the time!

A thought

Why does nature provide us with arms that can reach our buttocks before we are old enough to wipe our butts ourselves after pooing? Maybe it was meant as a joke, but my parents don't find it even slightly funny! They would also like to add that this thoughtless speed of arm-length-growth that nature has programmed in the human being creates a major challange during diaper change. But then again, nature probably didn't take diaper change into account when it was designing us!!

How to become the owner of a tricycle

There are several ways to become a happy owner of a tricycle. Some of them are simple, others are more complicated and risky. I will list some of these possibilities here, and guarantee that if you try them all, you will be able to get your parents to buy you one!

1. If you're lucky, you have parents that think that learning to ride a tricycle is an important developmental milestone, and so in due time, they will, without any outside stimulation, go and buy you a tricycle. I thought I was that lucky, but somehow my parents never got around to buying me one, despite several declaration in that sense, and so that tricycle never showed up.

2. You can ask your parents directly to have a tricycle. But if your vocabulary is limited as is often the case for children of the tricycle-age, it may be difficult to get them to understand what you want. In my case, BrrrNaNa Odda (in a simple translation: Could you please be so kind to give a bike to Oscar), did not work on my mentally retarded parents. Despite me repeating this a million times, they never seemed to understand what I meant!

3. You can become a big bike and motorbike fan and hope that your parents indulge you and buy a tricycle to further stimulate your passion for moving objects. In my case my parents indulged my passion by buying me cheap, tiny, bad-quality motorbike replica that have had to be replaced 2 times already because they fall a part when the demon on my shoulder has encouraged me to throw it on the floor!

4. Every time you go to the playground and there are children there that bring their tricycle and bicycles, you should get to try them. Once you're on the bike you should go straight home with it. In my case, every time I sat on some other kid's tricycle and said to my mum heim, heim (home), she lacked the courage to help me bringing it home, instead she just helped me going around the playground on it. Coward!

5. You can make your own tricycle, using any moving object in your possession, hoping to send a signal to your parents that it's time to buy that much desired tricycle. In my case I used a train that has the function of toddler walker (you know, the thing that helps you learn to walk), and sat on it, as if it was a tricycle (as you can see on this picture). But my parents just thought, why buy a tricycle when Oscar found a way to make his own using his fantasy!

6. This adivece is the same as above, but with a little modification to help in case your parents are as mentally retarded, and as slow to understand things as mine are. You make your own tricycle, using any moving object in your possession, and then you have a minor accident (and here lies the difficulty, you wouldn't want to have a major accident would you?) with it, and so send the signal to your parents that despite the great fantasy of your child, that can make a tricycle out of almost anything, it's now time that they buy you one! In my case it took a graceful front-fall right on the spot where the picture above was taken (and only a few minutes later actually), a broken tooth and a lot of blood coming from wounded lips, to open my parents eyes. THEN, finally, they went to buy me that much desired tricycle (and the train disappeared misteriously at the same time). Now I'm the happiest boy under the sun.


Next I'll give you some advice on how to get your parents to buy you a horse...this is a project that I'm still working on!

Wife and cattle from your own village

Moglie e buoi dei paesi tuoi!
This is an old italian proverb, or maybe more an advice to the italian man: that he should, for his own best, choose his wife and cattle from his own village. Why on earth should he, you may ask, and so did my mum when she first heard this proverb (and wondered why my dad had ignored this simple advice and chosen a wife from a icy volcanoe island far far away). But recently it dawned on my mum that whichever the original meaning was, there is now a new interpretation.

In Italy, only SIX % of babies aged 0-3 years have access to kindergartens run by the city or town administrations (compared to 64% in Denmark!). There are, of course, also private kindergartens, but what they all have in common is that they are quite expensive, and since salary in Italy is not very high, not everyone can afford sending their children to a kindergarten. Therefore, if you cannot afford the kindergarten you have three possibilities: you opt not to have children; one of the parents stays at home with the baby the first 3 years (if you can afford to live on one income only); or you chose your wife from your own village. It goes on to say that it would be useless to chose the wife from your own village if you then chose to abandon the village for greener fields somewhere else -at least if you want to follow the old proverb in its new interpretation! This is because the biggest treasure for italian parents is i nonni -the grandparents, that step in when the state and local administrations fail to fulfill their educational role. The nonni have become the prime childcare-giver in Italy! This is obvious to you if you go to a playground or walk the streets of a town during the day, e.g. here in Ponte San Pietro, as I do almost daily with my parents. One hardly ever sees parents with their kids!! The only babies that one sees are accompanied by their grandparents (another possibility is that parents in italy are THAT old...but I don't think so). Luckily in Italy, the grandparents retire relatively early and are also relatively healthy (thanks to the mediterranean diet???). And luckily they're also kind enough to set aside their plans to enjoy old age with travelling, attending their hobbies or whatever they've set their mind to, to become almost parents for the second time. This is also one reason for why it has been difficult for us to get to know other parents here in our new hometown. We know a lot of grandparents, basically there isn't a person over 60 years in this town that doesn't greet us, or start chatting with us, on the street, but the younger generation is almost completely missing from our circle of aquaintence.

To sum up: if you chose your wife from your own village, and then don't move away from that village, chances are that you have two sets of grandparents to take care of your little ones. But what then about the cattle?

A future rascal

Mum says I'm a future rascal!
This morning my mum had an appointment with the gynecologist to check if her uterus and all was ok after the birth. My mum is pathologically punctual and arrived at 10 o'clock, although the appointment was only at 10.15, but the doctor was nowhere to be seen so she just sat down in the waiting room and started staring at the walls...or something. The midwife that is normally also at these appointments passed occasionally (and with increasingly obvious embarassment) in the waiting room to let the growing number of pregnant women, new-mums, fathers and other accompanying persons know that the doctor was late, but that he would soon be with us. And so the time passed, and me, little Irene, who had been happily sleeping in the pram the first 45 minutes of this wait, soon got enough and started complaining so my mum had to pick me up and walk me around the waiting room and the hall to keep me good. At 11.30 the doctor was still not there, and my mum considered going home, but then the midwife passed one more time in the waiting room to say that the doctor had called to let know that he would be with us in 10 minutes, so she decided to stay on. But the two of us made an agreement! I was to be quiet and good as long as we would stay in the waiting room (so that the people, that were getting just as frustrated and angry as my mum was, would not be irritated to have a crying newborn baby there with them) but as soon as I would enter the doctor's room, I was to show how good I was at high-pitch, insistent, irritating, nerve-wracking screaming. My mum said it was a much better message to the lack-of-respect-to-his-patients doctor, than if she would have complained with him directly. And so, when the doctor finally showed up, and it was finally my mum's turn (she was the 2nd patient in line) I cleared my throat and as we entered the doctor's office I started a constant 85 decibel chorus, with a numerous dangerous-for-your-ears 115 decibel pitches at critical moments. My mum smiled through it all, as if I was sleeping through the appointment (the estivill-training has not been for nothing!), but the doctor (who did not even excuse how late he was) was not so amused.
-The baby is, eh, well signora?
-Yes, doctor, healthy as a horse, just tired of staying almost 2 hours in the waiting room!
Boom, smack, slap in the face...don't you dare being late again dottore if my mum has an appointment!

When we left the doctor's office I stopped the crying and me and my mum smiled to each other in a mutual satisfaction with a mission well accomplished. Then we walked together into the beautiful autumn day!

Angels and demons

On my right shoulder, there is a little angel. He whispers to me advices on how to be a good boy. He tells me to kiss Irene or touch her gently when she is crying, he tells me to obey my parents, to treat well my toys, to eat my food and so on. This is a nice angel, and when I listen to him, my parents are very happy and say that I'm a little angel myself! The only problem is that sometimes I can't hear him, for on my left shoulder there is a little demon that shouts louder than the angel, and jumps up and down until I do like he says I should do. He tells me to hit Irene (best of all if it's on the head, he says), he tells me not to listen to my parents, never to mind if my toys get broken by my bad treatment, only to eat my food if they're among my top five favourites (the rest is best thrown on the floor) and so on. When I do like the demon tells me to do, the little angel sits down on my shoulder and cries unhappily. Then my parents tell me that they think there is a destructive force in me (especially when I feel forced to hit my little sister repeatedly on the head). Sometimes I have to physically remove the demon. I pick him up by the tail and throw him into the darkest corner of our house -just as he has told me to do with my toys. Then he stays away for some days, but he always finds his way back eventually, skinny and weak, as if he is driven by hunger which he can only calm by feeding on my bad behaviour! Luckily the angel never gives up on me, and continues to whisper his good advice in my ears even when I can't hear him at all. And luckily my parents don't give up on me either, for they know that parent's love is like a poison for little demons, so slowly we are killing the demon with my good behaviour and the love of my parents.

Giant overnight

Size is relative. Mount Everest and a mosquito can e.g. both be big and small depending on what the point of reference is. So when I became a giant over night, it was not because my growth hormones were playing a trick on me and made an oversize me in few hours, but because the point of reference for my size changed very suddenly. I'm actually not sure what thereference point for my size was until the first of september this year. Maybe it was just my own size the weeks before, or the size of my clothes that I am slowly outgrowing one by one. But when Irene was born SHE became the new reference point, at least in my parent's eyes. My mum got the first shock when she took me inher arms for the first time after she came back from the hospital. She had to check if she was really embracing the right child...I was so much bigger to her than I had seemed just 3 days earlier. The second shock came when she changed my diaper later that day. Compared to Irene, I am a giant and as strange as it feels for my parents to hold a newborn baby in their arms agaiN (they had really forgotten how small they are), it is even stranger to realize that i'm no longer that little baby but have grown to become a big boy -relatively big, ofcourse!

1 month

Yesterday I passed the one-month line. It was a good feeling :) This first month has been busy time -for me to grow and get used to the life outside the womb, and for my family to get adjusted to the new routine.
I'm becoming bigger every day, 10 days ago I had reached 55cm and I've already outgrown the first set of clothes, and lately I've participated in a very exciting race between my growing and the finishing of our stock of diapers size 1. In practice this means that I've been very busy poohing and peeing to make sure that the number 1 diapers (2-5kg) that my parents had bought in huge number, finish before I become too big for them. At last count I was 4.85 kg and there were around 60 size-1 diapers left...! We've already bought a considerable number of size 2 diapers.
We have been a bit silent lately on the blog, but we have a lot to tell you, and soon we will update you more on the life of the family in Ponte San Pietro.