Re-invented smoothies..!

I did a major discovery at lunchtime! I was having lunch with mum and Irene at home (or Irene was more just watching), and since we had a busy morning with Irene having her vaccination and me having to go to the doctor because my ears hurt, we were eating late and mum had many things to do..! I had already finished my soup and was drinking a freshly squeezed orange juice and eating a strawberry-yogurt while mum was putting the dishes in the dishwasher, when I got a mega-idea...why not add the yogurt to the orange juice? I managed to pour about half the yogurt into my glass before mum noticed! Mum decided not to become angry (although part of the yogurt missed the glass and hit the flour...ouch) but encouraged me to drink the new product, which I did...and mamma mia, that was good! Mum told me this was called smoothie, which I tought was a suitable name for a fantastic drink...I had to ask for more orange juice to make smoothie from the rest of the yogurt! If this hadn't already been invented by somone else it would probably have made me very very rich...!

Not desperate, but housewife...!

This month it's 2 years since mum left her job to stay at home with her (first one, now 2) treasures. This anniversary passed silently as mum is more of a "background" item at the moment-the two main players being me and Irene! But I thought this milestone (if that's what you can call it) was worth a blog. I'm not going to tell you how much mum enjoyes motherhood, for despite some critical moments once in a while, she thinks it's the best job she ever had -but I'd like to tell you about her other job...being a housewife.
One might think that 2 years of housewifeness would make her master the skill..but far from it. Every day mum watches from her window the lady next door who is a real master-housewife that never takes off her apron, that polishes the windows and windowsills every day, that washes at least one machine of white and one of coloured clothes every day (while mum has yet to fill a washing-machine of white only, and therefore just puts everything together at low temperature!) and moves the laundry all around the balcony to catch the best drying spot at the moment. Mum can't help wondering how one can accumulate so much dirty laundry in such a spot-free house, but has arrived to the conclusion, that maybe other members of the family have to change clothes when they come back from work/school every day so that the environment can stay just that clean! Anyhow, mum considers herself the exact opposite of her neighbour. You might think that mum had at least used this golden opportunity to master the cake-baking-skills (being a sweet tooth and all), but since she would basically be the only one to eat her products, she considers the lack of baking-activity to be a major cm-saver for her waistline! So what has she obtained with 2 years of staying at home?
She has mastered the:

• ..great skill of not seeing dust and disorder around her
  
• ..tecnique to clean the house silently (and relatively superficially) while the babies are sleeping
• ..to cook dinner without her son noticing (he is conditioned to great hunger whenever one of his parents approaches the kitchen (pavlov's dog what...)) and without stopping to play with her little ones
• ..skill to consider clean clothes that have not been ironed as clean clothes that have been ironed and then worn for about 45 minutes (the time necessary for an active person to reduce ironed clothes to a non-ironed state)
• ..tecnhique to check her hair in passing-by-car-windows while walking outside with her little ones early in the morning, and to ignor it if she realizes that she forgot to comb it! Fuzzy hair is cool!

She has also lost the ability to cook for herself and enjoy it. There is probably a whole lot of other things that she has learnt, but without going into further details, the conclusion can be drawn immediately...
Mum was not made to stay at home ...and if the financial (and not) crisis that the world is passing is not too prohibiting, she should start looking for a job soon (to start working maybe in the autmn...)...does anyone know of something?

Big responsability!

As I've mentioned before, I've been making great progress lately in the talking business! Not only am I learning new words every day, but I'm also working in the construction field. The sentences I construct might not all be perfect, there might be important words missing, but the important thing is that I get understood. Here is a recent example of a conversation with mum (this morning at 6.50 am):
me: pabbi? (dad?)
mum: pabbi er ad fara i vinnuna (dad is going to work)
me: pabbi ekki vinnu, pabbi leikskola (dad not work, dad kindergarten)
mum: nei pabbi fer i vinnuna og oscar fer i leikskolann (no dad is going to work and oscar to kindergarten)
me: otta nei leikskola, otta heima mamma (Oscar no kindergarten, Oscar home with mum)
This is the part where mum gave me a big hug...and then of course I did go to the kindergarten. But from this short example you can see that not only can I construct sentences, but there is also logic in what I say. But sometimes I get tired of thinking about the way I should speak -it's not always simple to be struggling to become a bilingual kid, and then I use a much more fluid way of speaking. Basically it means just putting together an endless flow of sounds and syllables and make it sound as if you are saying something really important (at kindergarten I let this pass for an Icelandic monologue!). The trick is to include at least 1-2 comprehensible words and gesticulate a lot with the hands, so that what is missing from the linguistic part of my expression is gained with the visual part. An example of this way of expressing me is saying
balabiditibidasirimamaniIRENEsararedetegaiisemuneretabanare- MAMMAnididarebenosiOTTA while pointing at the baby-gym in the first half of the sentence, and then at my playing corner in the second half. Then mum has no problem understanding that I'm really saying: please put Irene to play in the baby-gym and you come and play with me in the playing corner!
Mum says she feels a lot of responsability in teaching me icelandic, for as we don't have other icelanders in our everyday life, the icelandic I speak is a mirror of the icelandic she speaks. This basically means that if my icelandic sucks I can blame it on mum, and if e.g. I swear in icelandic (a part from no one understanding it but my mum) mum cannot say that I picked it up from TV or from the kids in kindergarten -I must have learnt it from her! There are several remidies:
mum reads a lot of books for me in icelandic, I listen to a lot of icelandic music, we invite icelanders to stay with us (soon e.g. cousin Hakon is coming with his mum to see me) and mum tries to swear only in italian -that way, -porca miseria -at least she can blame it on TV or the kindergarten if I pick up some of her bad words!

How to ruin kitchen utensils when making gnocchi!

Some things need dedications and extreme precision to be made, others the exact opposite...! Today mum was preparing her lunch. She had programmed to eat yesterday's pie-leftovers, but when Oscar had got his fourth (sigh!) helping last night, it became clear that the 35° of a pie that were left would not satisfy the hunger of a breastfeeding mum at lunch the next day. When lunch approached, mum opened the fridge to check how she could supplement her lunch, and when she got her eyes on the leftovers of the 4-cheese-pasta-sauce that dad had made a few days earlier, she got the brilliant idea to use it with some gnocchi that are easy and quick to make, and would be the perfect side-dish to the broccoli-pie-leftovers. So, she put the water to boil, and then she reheated the pasta-sauce on the stove. At that very instance, her ray of sunlight (me), which up to that moment had been sleeping peacefully in her bed, woke up with a scream that would have broken diamonds -if there had been some in our house, so mum ran to her bed to console her little girl thinking that she had woken up from a nightmare (a nightmare for a 4 months old baby is basically a land without milk-tanks), only to find that her little jewel had made a small pooh-bomb which had exploded in her diaper and travelled all the way up her back and through 3 layers of clothing. Somewhere around the moment when the dirty clothes had been removed, the disaster zone had been cleaned, and new diaper had been taped around the tiny waiste, and mum was sharing a giggle or two with her fountain of joy, she smelled something! It was not the pooh-bomped diaper, it was not the pie that had been left in the microwave, it was.... Exactly...the pastasauce! Mum arrived in the kitcen just in time to declare the "death" of the pot that had contained the pasta-sauce.

You wont find the resulting burnt pasta-sauce at the burnt-food museum, for if you've ever questioned the bottomless hunger of a breastfeeding mum, then here's the information that you needed: mum DID scrape what she could of pasta-sauce from the burning ruins, and ate together with the gnocchi ! Buon appetito!

2 years, 4 months -happy new year!

We're back from Tuscany! We had a wonderful christmas time in the "Ottomani" empire -no we did not go to Turkey, I'm just referring to the fact that every time that me and Irene were in need there were four sets of hands (otto mani in italian), mum, dad, nonno and nonna, ready to pick us up and comfort us...which was great. We had a splendid time, playing with i nonni, zia Sara, zio Elio and zio Luciano, the cousins and nipoti and all the adoptive zie and zii -and of course mum and dad. We had an ocean of gifts (thank you all of you for your generosity), and my car park was expanded so much that my parents decided to hide some of my new cars, for they say that otherwise I wont enjoy them so much! One new car at a time is the new rule here!
I also passed a language explosion, both icelandic and italian, and have started to construct sentences of up to 5-6 words (even more, but then my parents loose the thread and don't understand them) and my parents say that I never close my mouth...hehe.
During this period I also celebrated my 2nd birthday. Yes I've become a big boy! I celebrated with a cake and in the evening we went out for a pizza.
L O V E L Y, basically !!!












A few days later Irene filled 4 months. She is becoming really big (ca. 65 cm and around 7 kg) and she becomes sweeter every day!
In between these two important events the new year came, with promises of new adventures and we are curious to know what they will be...
Big hugs to all of you and

HAPPY NEW YEAR