The concept of time

I have worked out a very simple and clear defination of the concept of time. For me, everything is either immediate or never!
My parents have tried to teach me other variations to the theme, such as soon, later, tomorrow, in the afternoon, but I ignore them as much as possible, and depending on my own longings, I categorize them either with the immediate or the never group. E.g. when my mum says that my dad will come home soon, I prefer to categorize it to the immediate group and therefore get very excited and continue to ask for my dad, looking for him out of the window and interpret any sound that I hear as a sign of his arrival. If he then doesn't arrive immediately I get very frustrated and angry and insist even more on asking mum where pabbi is. The same things applies when I'm sitting by the kitchentable and to encourage me to eat my food my mum says: Now finish your food Oscar, you know...we are going to the playground later so try and hurry up! For me this a clear invitation to leave the table immediately and go and get my shoes and prepare myself to go out. On the contrary, when my parents tell me that I'll soon have to go to bed, I prefer to interpret it as if I'm not going to bed at all, and so happily play on or do whatever I've been doing as if I had hours of playtime ahead of me. My parents are slowly learning to handle situations like this: my mum announces the arrival of my dad from work only when it is imminent; she doesn't mention what we are doing after we've finished eating until I've actually put the last bite of food in my mouth; and she announces bedtime with the words now you're going to bed Oscar, which I'm sort of forced to categorize in the immediate group.
But there are also some puzzling situation that I don't really know how to handle. How am I for example to interpret my mum when she points at her growing belly day after day and says soon the baby that is in here is going to come out! A part from the really shocking part -that supposedly there is a baby in her belly and that it is trying to come out, then how on earth can it come soon if she repeats this to me every day and nothing really happens? For my own convenience I have decided to categorize this soon in the never group, and just start doing something else when my mum restarts the speach about the arrival of the bellydweller. That way I will always have my parents exclusively to myself and wont have to share my big and nice bedroom with some strange creature that hides for months in mum's belly!

The downsides of having a pregnant mum!

My mum is pregnant, I've started to realize that, although I haven't really grasped completely what it means, a part from the fact that she is getting all round like a balloon and that this has some practical consequences for me! I'll name a few.
Early this spring my mum said one day: Let's go and buy a bicycle seat for you Oscar. I know she wasn't only htinking of me -she also thought it would be a great way for her to get back in shape, biking around with me attached to the front of her bike. I was thrilled by the news and immensely happy when she didn't wait for a second thought but went immediately to the nearest shop to buy one. We brought the seat home, and my mum started mounting it on her bike. I don't know if my mum is just not that skilled in mounting a baby-seat ona bike or if the seat really was as complicated to mount -as she stated to my dad after having tried and retried for a whole afternoon to mount it. But by the end of the day, the seat was not yet mounted and the bike was brought back to the garage. The next few weeks were characterized by rather wet weather, but whenever there was a spell of sun, my mum would go back to the mounting business -but without sucess. My dad told her to give the seat back to the store, but my mum had stupidly thrown the bill and the box that had contained the seat, so she couldn't bring it back, and had to continue trying to mount it. Finally she could convince my dad to help her, and that day, the joint effort resulted in a correctly mounted baby-seat on her bike (not without some sweating though). That same day we went on our first bicycle ride, me and my dad on one bike, my mum on another one. We rode about 10 km from our home, along the Ticino-river and all the way to the centre of Pavia -and back ofcourse. It was great, fantastic, overwhelming, and that night I fell asleep with a big smile on my face. The next day my mum told me: now Oscar, how would you like going on a bicycle tour in the afternoon? I needed no encouragement, went and got my shoes and got ready to go out. My mum put on my helmet, checked the air in the bicycle tires, put me in the seat on the bike, opened the gate that separates our parking space from the street, led the bicycle towards the street, and there, in front of the curious eyes of all our neighbours that either were watching us directly from their gardens or secretly spying on us from behind the curtains of their houses, the truth dawned upon her. Her belly had become too big to fit behind the baby-seat on the bike!!! So much for bicycle-tours this summer!
When we moved to Ponte San Pietro I went to a new kindergarten. It is a great place and I loved it from the first day. When the kindergarten-teacher started calling me the penguin I thought that geography was just not their strong side -that they dind't know that whereas my genes are from the north pole, the penguins are from the south pole. I didn't mind the nickname at all, thought it was actually rather cute -until one day they mentioned it to my mum that they called me the little penguin and told her why! It was then that I learnt that one has to use a bit of common sense when he decides to imitate his parents. They might be a good role model in many things, but when your mum walks like a penguin with a huge water-melon attached to her belly, it might not be such a good idea to imitate her walking...!
Well, there are several other negative sides to having a pregnant mum, but now my mum who like always is lending me her fingers to blog has decided that it's her bedtime (I call it censuring!!) -she likes to go early to bed so that she can try to fit a decent number of hours of sleep in to a night filled with frequent toilet-visits, battle with gravity while turning in bed, feeling warm despite sleeping almost naked and with a cold alpine current of air passing through our house, well and me waking her up once in a while when I do some vocabulary exercises in my sleep.

Breaking the ice

I've decided to make a silent comeback to my blog. Maybe no-one ever checks this blog anymore, but in case you do...well, this time you've got something to read -and don't forget to leave a comment!
I'll start this ice-breaking blog with a-n-ice story of myself, and tell you about an event that put a smile on my parents face in the middle of the night -quite an accomplishment I'd think!
Well, here goes. I've been working alot on my vocabulary lately, adding words every day and trying to polish the pronounciation of the most difficult words. The double consonants are the trickiest, I still don't dare trying to pronounce things like "sk", "st" or "sm" or other similar sounds, but I've perfectioned e.g. the pronounciation of "blue" both in italian (blu) and in icelandic (blàr) and I say "graenn" (green) and "trè" (tree) with an "rrrr" so long and scrolling that the vibrating airwaves coming from my mouth easily disturb the flight of flies that find themselves in the same room as me. The vocabulary and pronounciation exercises go on all day long with gentle instructions from my parents, but sometimes the day is not long enough for me so I have to continue the exercises also during the night also. A few days ago e.g. I passed the colour-card at 2 o'clock in the night "gulur, blàr, graenn.." just to make sure that I'd got them all right and that I hadn't forgotten anything during my sleep, and last night I made another exercise that is really the centerpiece of this story here.
Now try to put yourself in my mum's shoes last night, sometime before the break of dawn. You wake up and try to overcome gravity to turn yourself around in bed with a record-big water-melon attached to your belly, then you use all your forces to stand up and walk on your water-cushion feet towards the bathroom where you empty the bladder that had seemed so full but was only half full -the rest of the pression on it was caused by the bellydweller and it's constant kicking and dancing. Then you walk back to bed -and don't forget to try (while walking) to imitate a penguin with a huge watermelon attached to the belly, swinging from side to side, risking to crash against doors and walls that are on your way. Once back in bed you lie down, put a supportive pillow between the legs to minimize the pubalgia and backpain and then you try to fall back to sleep. The falling-back-to-sleep business may take a little while and you might have to fight gravity several times again to turn around in bed looking for a position that seems vaguely comfortable. Then suddenly you hear a sound coming from your son's room. A sweet and sincere childish voice that passes throught the darkness of the night and goes straight to the ears and hearts of his parents, repeats at least a ten times:
"ìs...mmmmmm, ìs...mmmmmm!"