First Paris Then Rome

The New and Improved...

2008-03-07T16:23:00.001+01:00

Hi there!

Please visit my new blog at The Globetrotter Parent.

Why won't my child answer me in English?

2008-03-04T10:31:00.009+01:00

Over the years, I have had the opportunity to meet many "transplanted" moms. Unlike "expat" moms who are just in a foreign country for a defined term, transplanted moms have effectively immigrated to the country and adopted it as their new home. Often, a transplanted mom's husband is a "local".

Of all the challenges that transplanted moms face, getting their kids to speak English often is the most difficult one to surmount.

Take Andrea. She is from the United Kingdom, married to a French guy and lives in France. They have two school-aged daughters.

"I thought raising my kids in English would be automatic," Andrea says. "It never occurred to me when they were born that they might not be bilingual."

But at age 12 and 10, Andrea's girls are nowhere near bilingual. While Andrea has consistently spoken to her daughters in English from the day they were born, her daughters, from their first word, have always spoken to their mom in French. Attempting to read an English book is too much of a chore to even bother and watching movies in anything but the dubbed "version française" is a challenge for them.

"Friends said that I should refuse to answer my girls when they asked me a question in French," Andrea says. "I called that 'language blackmail' and I refused to engage in it. Now I regret not having taken that approach."

Andrea is one of many transplanted moms who just can't get her kids to bother with English. They understand when their mom talks to them and that's about the extent of their fluency.

Here are my tips for avoiding this situation.

1. Recognize that your child needs a minimum amount of time per week exposed to English if she is going to learn to understand and speak the language fluently.

Your child is not going absorb the English language by osmosis just because one of her parents happens to be an English speaker. Most experts in multilingualism say that a child needs about 20 to 24 hours per week of exposure to English to gain true fluency. Exposure, for this purpose, includes listening to a person talk to the child in that language, listening to people talk to each other in English, hearing it on television or radio, and the child herself speaking English.

Lots of moms complain that their child does not speak English but when you get the details of the exposure the child gets, it looks something like this: the minority language parent works full time and the child is in the local school or daycare where he hears the local language all day. He only sees the minority parent a couple of hours per weekday. Part of the time at home, the minority parent is talking to his or her spouse, in the local language of course. Then on the weekend, the family is with friends and relatives and of course the local parent has to speak the local language with the friends and relatives. Then there is the TV, which broadcasts in the local language... You get the picture.

If you want your child to learn your language, you are going to have to make an effort to make it happen. This may mean ensuring that you talk to your child as much as possible when you are home (more than you normally talk), getting a English-mother-tongue babysitter to pick your child up from daycare early and spend a couple of hours with her, and/or avoiding the relatives on weekends and getting together with other English-speaking families. Bilingualism is not going to happen if you are not ensuring adequate exposure in some way.

2. Always speak to your child in English. This piece of advice sounds self-evident, yet how often I heard my Anglo-saxon mommy friends in France tell their little one to "get into the poussette" (the stroller) or that it was "time for their afternoon gouter" (snack).

It is easy to fall into the trap of using local language words for certain items but whenever you do that, you 1) send the message that using the local language with you is acceptable and 2) deny your child an important piece of vocabulary in English. Imagine your child showing up in your home country when he is older and not knowing the English word for "snack"!

3. Original version only! In our home, we have a rule that when we watch a film or television show, it has to be in original version. We watch French films in French, English films in English and Italian films in Italian. Dubbing is something you have to get used to as a child to like. Adults who watch dubbed movies do so because they grew up with dubbed movies. If your child does not grow up watching dubbed versions, there is a good chance that he or she will always prefer watching the original English version of movies and shows when he is older, even if another language is his dominant language.

4. Books, radio, DVDs...in English! Spend at least half an hour reading to your small child in English. And make it a rule that all animated DVDs are to be watched in the English version (all non-animated stuff in the original version, of course!). You don't need to iterate this rule to your child. Just make it so. He wants a DVD? It gets put on in English. If you have access to an English radio station, tune into it! And don't forget to watch the news on CNN or BBC in addition to the local news that your partner insists on watching at 20h00 every evening!

5. If your spouse understands English, consider speaking to him in English if you do not already (at least when your child is with you). It might feel artificial at first but switching to English when talking to your spouse can ramp up the English exposure for your child significantly. Remember, your spouse can still talk to you in his language. This tactic also reinforces that association your child draws between you and your mother tongue.

Les vacances scolaires

2008-02-27T14:00:00.009+01:00

It is les vacances scolaires in the French school system (16 February to 2 March!!). The Frenchman and I spent one week skiing in the Dolomites. While we were skiing, between falling down and sobbing to the poor ski instructor, "I want my mommy!", the Bambina was learning how to ski. Having clung to the Tirolian, Germanophone ski instructor for the entire five days of ski lessons, she finally decided to venture down the ski piste alone, in snow plough position, during the last fifteen minutes of the last lesson. For that, the Bambina earned a medal, which she has hung proundly on her bedroom wall.

And now, we are back home and have one more week to keep the Bambina occupied before she returns to her école maternelle. Unfortunately, most of her classmates are still on vacation and her buddies in the Italian school system are - in school. They don't get a two-week break in February.

Which leads me to ask myself: what is with the French and their two weeks' vacation from school every seven weeks? And why didn't we take this factor into account when choosing a school? I think the Italians have the right idea having school all year long with no breaks except at Christmas, Easter and the summer. Finding something for your children to do during a two-week period every seven weeks of the school year is a big pain in the behind.

Of course, were we in the socialist paradise of France, we could send the Bambina to the local centre de loisirs every day during school vacation, 0830 to 1630. It is 100 percent subsized, free, and public. God bless their socialist souls. Being stuck in the French education system in Italy definitely has its drawbacks.

Then again, being in the French school system in Italy has its advantages - the ski pistes were practically empty in the Dolomites last week...

A week in Austria

2008-02-25T14:38:00.005+01:00

Well, not really. In fact, we were in that very northern, mountainous part of Italy called the Sudtirol. But it might as well have been Austria. The people speak German (their mother tongue - they only learn Italian at school), the landscape and architecture look like a scene right out of the Sound of Music, the food is Austrian and the people are, well, not Italian.
"Do you prefer to speak German or Italian?" I asked the hotel owner.

"Lieber Deutsch", was his reply.

The Frenchman, in his oh so French "everything must be centralized" understanding of the world, was aghast. How can the Italians stand having people in their country for whom Italian is not their mother tongue, who prefer speck to parma ham and who seem not to care at all for the idea of, well, fitting in (or, dare we use the term, assimilating).

After all, what did the French do once they (unjustly, some would say) reacquired Alsace after World War I? Forced the German-speaking Alsacians to become French, of course! Out of the question to let the Alsacian culture survive! Now, when you meet person from Alsace, even if his last name is Steinbock or Schmidt or Apfelbaum, he is French. Alsace is awash with a kind of cultural Stockholm Syndrome - they adore their French captors to the point of denying any other possible origin of their sauerkraut and spaetzle dishes, their black forest architecture that speckles the Vosges and their "eastern" (read German) accent when they speak. So you had better not even suggest that he has anything other than French blood in his veins, because as far as he is concerned, he is the most French of all the French.

But I digress. Back to sudtirol. Sudtirol is definitely not Alsace and the Frenchman recognized this fact as soon as our tires hit the regional border. The signs are bilingual but, well, the German comes first and the Italian is often (gasp) written in smaller print. The man at the ski rental shop could speak Italian - that was clear. But he had to really think about it when he did and his first instinct was always to respond in German. I am told that the mountains a bit further to the south in the region (we were in Luson - about 100 km from the border with Austria) are more truly bilingual but you still notice the distinct Austrian flavour.

So when we returned to Rome, we had a chat with a few people here in Rome about how they feel about having non-immigrant citizens whose first language is not Italian.

The universal response went something like this: "They hate the Italians. They would rather be in Austria. And they are really ungrateful because they get more money in the form of subsidies than the entire south of Italy put together. And they collect their own taxes because of their 'special status' that they have by law". In short, they are annoying.

To which I responded: "Okay. Er, so why doesn't Italy just give the sudtirol back to Austria?"

To which they answered: "Are you kidding me? We fought wars to get that land!"

accents

2008-02-08T15:29:00.001+01:00

Just a couple of days ago, the Bambina and I had the pleasure of meeting Everyday Yogini and her little bambina, Clara, who happens to be just three months younger than the Bambina.

Now, apart from listening to me, the Bambina doesn't get much other exposure to English(everyone else around her speaks either French or Italian). So I have always been curious as to how developed her speech and language was for her age (in English, that is). Little Clara has spent most of the three years of her life in the United States, so I was eager to listen carefully to how Clara's speech had developed.

Conclusion: I didn't notice much difference in vocabulary but BOY, do their accents ever differ. Clara's accent is all-American. Her r's are fully rounded. Her vowels are long. She says "girl" "geeerrrrelll". A real American.

The Bambina, on the other hand, has an accent that is somewhere between New Jersey and East London. I have no idea how she ended up that way given that the person she hears speak English (that would be me) has a fairly boring run-of-the-mill English-speaking Canadian accent. Maybe from her (British English) nana, who visits periodically. The Bambina says "guhl" for "girl" and "duh-ty" for "dirty" and even "no-ooo" for "no". It's all very cute - but I hope she grows out of it. She needs to speak her native language like a normal person. I don't mind if her accent ends up being British-English, but let it be something native, not some wild concocted accent based on hearing three languages a day.

Maybe I'll send her to English summer day camp.

carnevale vs halloween

2008-02-05T10:26:00.000+01:00

One of the things that thrills me about living in Europe is that they don't do Halloween here. Now, most of my American and Canadian friends looooove Halloween. You just mention the word and they sink into the abyss of nostalgia, relaying to you a year by year account of their favourite childhood pasttime while your eyes glaze over.

Not I. Call me a party pooper by I can't get into a festival that encourages children to knock on complete stranger's doors at night, beg for candy, and then stuff themselves full of junk for the next month or two, rotting their teeth and stacking on pounds.

The one positive aspect of Halloween is the dressing up, which is why I think that carnevale is a great idea. Less sugar, less pigging out, more focus on the costumes.

Today is mardi gras and there is a festa at the Bambina's school. In preparation for this big day, I suggested to the Bambina last week that she dress up as a ballerina. Great costume for her and easy for me - she would just wear what she wears to dance class every week, with a little bit of make-up to boot! And as all of the Bambina's girlfriends planned to go as princesses, at least as a ballerina, she would distinguish herself somewhat. Perfect.

And then yesterday, when I reminded the Bambina that tomorrow was the big day and she would go to school as a ballarina, she popped the big news.

"I don't want to go as a ballarina!" she yelled.

Uh oh, I thought to myself. She wants to go as a princess. I will have to go buy a princess costume.

"I want to go as a LION!" she said.

A lion? She wants to go as a lion?

And then she roared! She really did want to go as a lion.

So I spent yesterday procuring a lion costume (borrowed from a friend) and some face paint. She refused the face paint in the end.

And today we arrived at school. Would you believe, every single other little girl in her class was dressed up as a princess? But not my Bambina. She was a lion!

bye bye wi-fi

2008-01-28T16:21:00.000+01:00

For the past year and a half, we have been using the internet for free. You see, we are fortunate enough to live near enough to someone, somewhere in our building or close to it, who is using wi-fi and has not bothered to do whatever has to be done in the Options menu to ensure that the nearby leeches cannot benefit from what he or she has paid for.

This all ended two weeks ago. Whoever it was has either uped and left or has figured out that others were getting something for free and has cut the connection. Waaaah! So now, we have to (gulp) pay for our internet connection. Heaven help us. It's so unfair.

Okay, it's not unfair but it sure sucks.

This stinks! in English, French and Italian

2008-01-26T16:15:00.000+01:00

Back in May, I posted that I was worried that the Bambina would never really succeed in speaking English, French and Italian. Three languages just seemed like it was too much for her to absorb.

Well, now she goes to a French preschool (whereas back then she was attending an Italian nido) AND we have a French au pair. As could be expected, her French has picked right up and she is speaking it almost as well as English (English is still dominant, though, and I would like to keep it that way;-)) So I can definitely confirm that the Bambina is bilingual.

But the real surprise is that she is also speaking lots of Italian now. Well, three-year old Italian anyway. She won't speak it much with me but I hear her with other children (all the children in her French preschool class are Italian, for starters) and she is definitely speaking Italian with them. She doesn't really distinguish much between questa and questo or il mio and la mia but she gets her point across!

She does save some choice phrases for her parents, such as:

Puzza! (I had to look this up in the dictionary. It seems to mean "this stinks".)
Butta questa, non mi piace! (meaning "throw this away, I don't like it!" or something to that effect, although I wonder whether she should not be saying "Butta questa via).
Tu sei cattiva! (meaning "You are naughty!", usually directed at me).

I guess I won't hold my breath while I wait for her to tell me in Italian that I am her wonderful, beautiful, smart mommy. :-)

Binge

2008-01-21T14:55:00.000+01:00

There was a classic study carried out a number of years ago on the eating habits of three- and four- year olds. In the study, children were given the choice of a whole range of food at each meal every day for a period of six months.

Within the six-month period, the children tended to “binge” on one food or another, be it bread, rice, meat or sweets, for periods of a few days or a week or two. However, when the scientists reviewed all the food that each child had consumed over the entire six-month period, they found that most children had a fairly balanced diet overall.

Back in France, the Bambina’s pediatrician used to refer to this study periodically to remind us that our job as parents was simply to offer the Bambina a range of healthy choices of food to eat at each meal. We should then leave it to her to decide what and how much to eat.

With this advice in mind, was I wrong not to stop her from finishing off a whole jar of (organic, no-sugar added) strawberry jam (without bread) in one sitting?

Whoever said that Italian administration was bad ...

2008-01-17T15:50:00.000+01:00

has never had to deal with Canadian administration.

When the Bambina was 22 months, I figured that I might as well start looking into applying for her Canadian citizenship card and passport.

The French carte de nationalité and passport had taken something like one week altogether and was so simple. The Frenchman just went to our local mairie (city hall) in Paris, showed his carte de nationalité, presented the Bambina's acte de naissance and some photos of her and presto, we got the documents within a few days time.

So why does the Canadian process have to be such a nightmare??

Take the photos: it is not enough to just go to the little cabin in the subway station to get the photos taken. No, no. You have to find a photographer who will take the photo and then fiddle around on the computer for half an hour to make sure the head is no bigger than 36 mm and no smaller than 30 mm (and that is just the passport photo. The citizenship card photo has to have altogether different dimensions) and the picture itself is X size.

20 euro later, you finally have your photos, which the photographer had to stamp and date. Now you have to find a lawyer or doctor who has known you for two years and use their precious time (like they don't have better things to do with their day...) to act as guarantor and sign the photos.

Then you have to go to the passport office with everything filled out and wait in line for what, three hours I think it was the last time in Paris, when the construction works at the consulate in Paris were going on?

And once you get to the wicket, the exhausted officer tells you that it will take, now get this, ONE YEAR, to get the citizenship card.

Have they lost their minds??? What on earth could possibly be going on that it takes a year to get a plastic card with a photo on it??

In the meantime, you get an interim passport that is valid for one year. But wait, you have to wait three months to get that passport.

So when we finally got the temporary one-year passport and then the citizenship card, I didn't bother extending the temporary passport for the additional two years. Instead, I let the passport expire and set out to apply for a brand new five-year passport for the Bambina. I go through the whole rigamaroll: the application, the photos to the exact dimensions, the guarantor, and I trudge over the Canadian Consulate by bus yesterday.

And what does the lady at the passport office tell me when I arrive:

"I'm sorry, madame, but we cannot issue your daughter a new passport. This recently expired temporary passport must be extended for the time remaining of the three year period from when it was issued."

Arghhhhhh!

So now, I have to go through the whole passport application process AGAIN (oh yes, the application, the photos, the guarantor...) next year when this passport expires.

My conclusions from this whole experience:

Italian administration: inefficient but at least flexible (they would have given me the five-year passport)

French administration: not always flexible but at least somewhat efficient and when not efficient, at least flexible.

Canadian administration: Neither efficient, nor flexible.

Fa freddo!

2008-01-14T17:27:00.000+01:00

I am starting to discover just how obsessed the Italian nation is with being cold, or should I say, not being cold. They are so obsessed with temperature regulation that they even wear additional layers of clothing for indoor sports.

Allow me to elaborate. Every Wednesday afternoon, the Bambina takes ballet lessons. Not real ballet lessons but what Maestra Simona calls giocho-danza or "play dance". The Bambina loves it. All the little girls, aged three and four, get dressed up in their matching leotards and wear their hair in a bun if it is long enough. Then the maestra comes into the changeroom, taps each little girl with her magic wand to transform her into a ballerina and the girls go running out on tip-toe into the dance studio. They have great fun.

There is just one thing that I don't understand: why, oh why, do the parents, grandparents and nannies of these little girls insist on leaving their child's undershirt on, underneath the leotard. For one, it ruins the whole dance outfit and the effect of uniformity. But secondly, I cannot believe that the children are actually cold when they are play-dancing. But the nonna (grandmother) of Juliette's friend Barbara doesn't agree. "The girls might get cold in just the bodysuit," she insists.

Maestra Simona concurs with my view. She explained to me that the undershirt is something molto italiano and that leaving it on is, in fact, counter-productive, as when the girls dance and run around, wearing an undershirt under the leotard will make them sweat more, which will make them cooler than they otherwise would be without the undershirt. But try telling Barbara's nonna that.

And so the Bambina is usually the only girl in her dance class who wears just the leotard, without the undershirt underneath. She looks sooooo cute in it, I have to say. And as Maestra Simona insisted that the leotard be made to measure, it fits perfectly. She sure is fussy about a leotard that most kids end up wearing over an undershirt anyway but she explained to me, "Le Bambine devono imparare che la danza è un' arte è una discipline." or something like that, meaning "The children must learn that dance is an art and a discipline." But she doesn't have the courage to insist on the girls going undershirt-free.

Our schools are better than yours and other cultural clashes

2008-01-11T11:41:00.000+01:00

Lunch with the ladies at Rome Accueil yesterday. Most of them have older kids in elementary school or lycée who attend the Lycée Chateaubriand, the school for French kids in Rome. They go on and on about what a terrible school the Chateaubriand is. It has, if I understood the discussion correctly, been contaminated by Italian notions of going easy on kids.

"And do you know" Genevieve was saying as I was mowing down my lasagne, "that I called my son to leave a message on his mobile while he was in class, and would you believe it, he answered the phone while in class and then excused himself from class to talk to me on the phone?? And the professeur didn't care at all!"

There were many other shocking and funny anecdotes, but the best anecdote of all was the attitude of the Italian kids to exams. Apparently, there are three sets of exams per year at the Lycée Chateaubriand. The French kids diligently study and take all exams. The Italian kids diligently study and take the first set of exams. If their mark on the first set of exams is high, they skip the next two sets on the grounds that they are "ill" or whatever, so as not to lower their average. And the school buys into it. In France (as anywhere else, I would think) you would get a zero on the exams you did not take and your average would be the mark you received on the first exam divided by three. Here, you just get the mark that you received on the first exam. Amazing.

"And do you know," Genevieve went on, "that we were at an Italian couple's home for dinner the other evening and they asked us if we had children and I said that we had three kids and that they attended the French lycée and do you know what the woman said to us? She was so surprised and she said, 'Ma è troppo severa, il sistema francese, sinora'."

The other French ladies around the table gasped. Too severe? Our school system? This was actually news to them. The Italian system mollycoddles children and gives them no sense of personal responsibility. How could they possibly judge us?

I remained silient through all of this discussion, thinking throughout that both the French and the Italians were 100 percent correct about each other's school systems.

New Year's Resolutions

2008-01-07T22:29:00.000+01:00

I will:

Take one of those Rome tours put on by Rome Accueil (I am a member of the association, after all), no matter how boring I fear that it may turn out to be (my French expat friends tell me that I am crazy not to have attended one yet but come on, can one really enjoy staring at the art of Caravaggio for 90 minutes straight? While listening to a ten minute speech on each painting? In French?).
Listen to Italian radio instead of French or English radio (I may have to kill off this resolution, first of all because all I can get on my portable radio is Radio Vatican (no matter what frequency - very bizzarre - the Frenchman says that it is all part of the Catholic Conspiracy), secondly because the Frenchman has insisted on French satellite on our television, and consequently the only satellite radio we get is French radio and BBC World Service, and thirdly because, well, soccer just does not interest me that much).
Resist having my collazione (breakfast consisting of cornetto and cappuccino) at the bar every day, thereby saving about 30 euro per month (then again, when in Rome....).
No longer purchase one new outfit per week for the Bambina (she currently has a wardrobe that any 16-year old girl would envy).
Wear make-up, jewellry and fur trimmed coat when I drop the Bambina off at school every morning, such that staff and parents no longer assume that I am scruffy and unfeminine anglo-saxon mommy but instead just like the other elegant and sexy French or Italian moms (of course, then they hear me talk...).
Find the Bambina some English nursery music CDs that she will listen to (the one she has sits neatly on the shelf, untouched after one play. I am slowly facing the fact that English preschool music can't compete with il coccodrillo com'e fa and i due liocorni. Italian children's music is so good, it could be on AM radio).
Write a letter to the Economist. The Frenchman hates "that right wing neo-con rag" so lending legitimacy to the publication by getting a letter published in it will annoy him all the more. :)
Follow the American presidential election, firstly because, after all, it is history in the making and secondly, so that I will have some other subject to bring up when I become bored at one of the Frenchman's interminable evening company events or when a friend drones on about some obscure store that she has recently discovered in Trastevere (if there is one thing that is more boring than shopping, it is talking about shopping).

Outdoor Fun in Abruzzo

2008-01-04T20:58:00.000+01:00

Sometimes the Bambina surprises me with her insights. After spending a supposedly fun-filled hour on the toboggan at an Abruzzo ski village, the Frenchman asked the Bambina once we were back in the car:

"Did you like the snow?"

The Bambina's response: "Not really, because it's cold."

And of course she was disappointed because all we could show her was icky powder snow layered with ice, instead of snow that you can pack together to make a snowman. But even if we had the good snow, I am not sure she would have enjoyed herself that much. She didn't seem into being outdoors in below zero weather, even dressed warmly.

Aside from the disheartening revelation that the Bambina does not aspire to become the great Canadian winter athlete that I had dreamed she might become one day, I have discovered that whatever charm lies in the Abruzzo countryside resides far far away from the ski pistes. Industrial skiing anyone?

Tanti Auguri!

2008-01-01T18:01:00.001+01:00

Yes, it seems like a million years since my last entry but I am back again, determined to keep going!

We didn't bother going out on New Year's Eve. Unlike France, where the state seems to control everything from the sale of fireworks to your brand of underwear, in Italy, anyone can buy or sell fireworks. As a result, whereas in Paris, there is just ONE fireworks display that takes place on New Year's Eve (the state-sponsored one, obviously), in Rome, there are lots and lots of them happening all over the city. There is the main one at Piazza del Popolo, the one at the Vatican, the Hilton Hotel, other hotels, lots of private residences of course...

And since we have this fantastic view of the city from our apartment, we stayed home and watched all the fireworks displays going on throughout the city.

Very cool to watch twenty simultaneous fireworks displays, let me tell you.

PISA

2007-12-06T17:13:00.000+01:00

Not the leaning tower but the Programme for International Student Assessment. The results from their most recent triennial study of 15-year old students from 57 different countries in math, science and reading can be found here.

Canada's 15-year olds ranked third in the world in science.

France ranked 22.

The United States ranked 24.

Italy ranked 35.

The outcomes for mathematics and reading were similar.

My first question: How on earth did Italy manage to get such an abysmal ranking.

My next question: Given that Canadian students clearly know their stuff, why, when one of them shows up in France or Italy for a year or two, does he or she get placed two years beneath his grade level? Is old Europe really so snobby that they still think that kids in the new world cannot possibly be up to snuff in school?

What do we tell her about Santa?

2007-12-03T19:48:00.000+01:00

The moment has come. The Frenchman wants to tell the Bambina about Père Noël. I do not. Or should I say, I do not want to tell her that a fat old man in a red suit will be coming down our chimney on Christmas Eve to leave her presents.

What is worse, the Frenchman wants to do Père Noël à la française. The French version of Santa differs a little from how it is explained in North America. Where I grew up, Santa left you some presents but then you also got presents from Grandma and Grandpa (both sides), Auntie Lois, Uncle Jimmy, maybe even from a godparent. In France, all presents come from Père Noël. So when the Frenchman gets a Christmas present for his godson in France, as far as the godson is concerned, the present is from Père Noël, not his godfather. His godfather gave him nothing. How messed up is that?

But my bigger problem is with the whole notion of telling my daughter that any of her presents came Santa at all because, unless I happen to discover gifts that some stranger has surreptitiously placed gifts under our tree while we were asleep, telling her that her presents came from Santa Claus will be a lie.

"So what?", I hear you saying. "It's a nice lie."

I don't agree. When we tell our children about Santa Claus, we do so because we know that small children are too young to know any better. We are appealing to our children's naïve and gullible side. We are saying to our children, "I am going to deceive you because I can, because you are incapable of knowing any better." To me, deception based on the other person's inability to think critically or realistically about something shows that you really do not respect that person. We tell the truth to people whom we respect.

Of course, the Bambina may have an entirely different opinion to the one that I proffer her about Santa Claus. So far, I have told the Bambina that Santa Claus is a nice story. Whether she chooses to believe me or not is another issue.

bye bye baby curls

2007-11-29T14:31:00.000+01:00

When she was born, she had straight black hair. That hair fell out within a few weeks. It came back reddish brown and got blonder and blonder as she got older. By age one, it looked like the hair was growing into little curls. By 18 months, she was a headful of ringlets. She was a true Goldilocks.

And now (sniff, sniff), my little Bambina's hair is getting longer and her ringlets are growing out. What's more, the new hair growing in at the roots is (sniff, sniff) straight as an arrow.

The Frenchman cut off a lock last week and I nearly shot him for it. But he made the point that soon, there will be no more curls to cut and we need to have some kind of souvenir.

I hope that she at least retains a bit of the wave. Anyone know someone whose curls returned later in life or should I just give up all hope?

social doos - just don't.

2007-11-27T17:41:00.000+01:00

Here in Rome, we are expected to do a certain amount of entertaining and socializing, meaning we have to invite people for dinner from time to time and we have to do our fair share of attending dinners, cocktail parties, concerts and other evening doos, be it at the French Embassy, the Villa Medici or an actual person's house.

I don't mind having people over for dinner, as at least then I can choose whom to invite and I always make sure that the invitees consist of a good mix of people whose company I enjoy. I don't mind preparing the meal either, especially if the Frenchman chips in for the meat, which he is better at preparing. The only real downer is getting the guests to leave. I get tired far earlier in the evening than most grown-ups (at 10PM, I'm happy to be reading in bed) and these dinner doos usually last longer than my eyes and brain can stand.

The social events that take place somewhere other than our own home are, for me, a drag. A couple of weeks ago, we had to listen to this concert of "contemporary" classical music at the French Embassy. I thought I was going to die of boredom or my ears were going to tear themselves away from my body to get away from that place, the music was so bad (you know the kind of music that I mean - not one major chord in the entire piece). After the torture, I mean concert, there was a cocktail complete with prosecco and finger food. And it is always finger food at the French Embassy in Rome, never real food. The kind that you know some stranger in the kitchen has had to maul with his sweaty hands and dirty fingernails for a good 10 minutes per piece to make it look perfect. It consists mostly of seafood (which I don't eat anyway), a plate of gorgonzola and ricotta (ditto), and tasteless stale white bread with the crusts cut off.

Then there are the art exhibits at the Villa Medici. Not that I don't enjoy some contemporary art but frankly, I have had enough of the exhibit after looking at it for about, er, ten minutes, at which point I am ready for the food, which admittedly is very good, as long as you don't mind having to make conversation with the people who sit next to you at your table.

But the worst are the dinner parties in people's homes because they go on so late and I am trapped. I am not allowed to leave. Our hosts are usually some other French couple living in Rome (why don't the Americans ever invite us??). And we talk about...what DO we talk about? Absolutely nothing relevant to anyone. The French have this thing about remaining on subjects as impersonal as possible. So we talk about the situation in the Middle East, French politics, Italian politics, our jobs and doing business in Italy. But the conversation never goes into our personal lives, which I find a bit of a shame. The closest we get to it is where we are going on vacation next summer. Boring. The food is okay but inevitably there is too much of it and I am full by the time they serve us the main course. And they always choose to serve something that I will refuse to eat (fois gras, anyone?) and then accuse me (in a teasing way, of course) of having too many Anglo-Saxon sensibilities when I hand over the plate without taking anything.

And no matter what, I am always dead tired by about 10:30 PM.

Not looking forward to December!

house call

2007-11-24T13:28:00.000+01:00

So yesterday, the doctor came to our house (they make house calls in Italy - a big perk). She was French, recommended by the embassy. I was (and still am) afflicted with a sore throat that could cut an ice sculpture, trembling, feverish, and my left ear really hurt.

She didn't bring her bag of instruments with her. Said it would have taken too long to get here. So she didn't have her otoscope or thermometer. She felt my forehead.

"At least 38 degrees," she said. Then she looked down my throat.

"Very red. Definitely a throat infection."

She did have her stethoscope, and she placed it at various points on my back to listen for inner murmerings. She didn't hear anything bad but I guess she was impressed by the view of my spine because when she was done listening, her only comment was,

"You are too thin. How much do you weigh?"

This is the second French doctor to make this remark to me (both women, I might add). I swear, they are obsessed with weight.

"Er, in France, I weighed 57 kg. Here, I am closer to 55 kilo. Not that I have been on a diet. It just happened. Why, do you think low weight has caused my illness?"

"No. But you are nevertheless too thin. Look at me. I am the same height as you and I weigh 70 kilo!"

I looked at her. Her morphology was totally the opposite of mine - skinny legs, larger waist. No way I would ever look like that, no matter how much weight I put on.

"Yes, but this is just the way I am. Even if I gained ten more kilo, I would still be skinny up top," I replied.

"C'est pas vrai. [Basically her way of saying "Rubbish and you don't know what you are talking about"]. What do you eat for breakfast?" she asked. I then told her what I ate for breakfast. Then she wanted to know what I ate for lunch and supper and she proceeded to devise a calorie-rich meal plan for me. All this during a visit to look at my throat and ears.

Meanwhile, my body temperature was over 38°, I could feel myself sweating, pain seared down my throat every time I swallowed and I was wondering when she was going to get down to diagnosing what I had.

After spelling out a meal regime that had about three times the Frenchman's daily calorie intake, she wrote out the prescription for my throat. Now, back home in Canada, a prescription was a small piece of paper with one illegible word scribbled on it that you handed to the pharmacist. In return, you got a little brown bottle with exactly the number of pills that you were to take over the next few days. No more, no less.

In France and in Italy, prescriptions are a whole different ball game. You don't just get one medication. You get a whole laundry list of things that you are supposed to get from the pharmacy. AND, you get the whole box of each item, not just the number you have to take to get well. So I now have:

- Box of Cefixoral (the antibiotics)
- Bottle of FROBEN spray (to spray the back of my throat to numb it. Does not work as far as I can tell).
- Propolis spray (some kind of natural substance also to spray at the back of my throat, in the event that I really want to delay the antibiotics and try to get better without them. I tried it for two hours. Decided that I had suffered enough and took the antibiotics.)
- Acqua di Sirmione (Water that tastes and smells like sewage. I am not kidding. Apparently, it will keep my nose clear and ear tubes clear. Needless to say, I won't be going through one tube a day as prescribed.)

And I have enough Froben, Propolis and Acqua di Sirmione to last me through three or four more illnesses, at least. All paid for by insurance, of course.

Sick of Being Sick

2007-11-21T20:35:00.000+01:00

Woke up this morning with a very sore throat and aching muscles all over. I am so sick of getting sick in this country. What is it about the weather here that is so conducive to microbes? I'm supposed to be the hardy Canadian and yet every month, I have another version of cold, cough and flu. Without fail. The Bambina is sick less often that I.

Ok, I'm going to go to bed now.

Farms to visit near Rome - Agricultura Nuova

2007-11-19T18:31:00.000+01:00

There are a few organic farms around Rome that you can visit and even buy fruit and vegetables, eggs, milk and meat. We always head to Agricultura Nuova.

I always feel a little bit conflicted about visiting this farm. On the one hand, we contribute a lot more carbon emissions by making a point of buying our food there than by heading to our local GS supermarket. On the other hand, they have a much better selection of in-season fruits and vegetables, the food we get there tastes fresher and home-grown, I see how the animals are being raised and I have the assurance that there are few if any nitrates in the Bambina's spinach and swiss chard. AND, if we have reserved ahead of time, we can eat a real Italian farm meal (all organic) on the cheap at their restaurant (which is really more like a big dining room than a restaurant, as you are seated at one table with about ten other people - quite fun really).

Agricultura Nuova is at Via Valle di Perna, 315 - 00129 Rome, near the south end of the Grande Raccordo Anulare. Make sure to call and reserve for lunch. Telephone 06 50 82 82 94 / 06 50 70 453.

I'm back

2007-11-16T11:16:00.000+01:00

I know, I know, it has been eons since I have written a post. I have been busy completing a six-week course on writing, put on by the Writer Mama (great course, by the way. Any moms out there interested in launching a career in freelance writing should check out Writer Mama's courses).

Today, I just wanted to write an observation that I made this week when dropping the Bambina off at her fairly international preschool:

What North American moms are wearing when they drop their kids off at school: track pants and sneakers (Why do we do this? We look so hideous. Why, why why?).

What French moms are wearing when they drop their kids off at school: pencil skirt, silk blouse, high heeled shoes (My question: how do they manage to walk on the cobblestone streets and climb up the 80 or so stairs to the school without breaking a leg?).

What Italian moms are wearing when they drop their kids off at school: designer velour track pants purchased at La Perla or Armani, Converse or other designer sneakers with not a scuff on them, gold necklace, gold earrings, counterfeit Cartier watch.

I think the Italian moms have got a good compromise going between comfort and style...

Autumn in Abruzzo

2007-11-05T11:58:00.000+01:00

Here in Rome, the leaves on the trees are still green and yesterday afternoon, the temperature hovered around 24 degrees celcius.

But the day before, in the mountains in Abruzzo, just two hours away, it was five degrees and the leaves had all turned to hues of yellow, orange and read. I felt like I was back in Canada (except, of course, in Canada, the leaves look like this by the end of September!).

Then we arrived at our destination, Santo Stefano di Sessanio. Definitely not Canada. Here is a glimpse:

More on this incredible destination another day.

The 60-Hour Workweek (for our child, that is...)

2007-10-30T09:59:00.000+01:00

She's only three and wouldn't you know it, I have done the thing that I loathe, the thing that New York City Alpha moms are notorious for, the thing that I rant about all the time when I hear the horror stories coming out of the United States: I have overscheduled my child.

She has preschool (école maternelle) every weekday morning from 8h30 to 12h30. She has stopped taking the afternoon nap, so the rest of her day is, I mean was, free. I figured that since many if not most parents in this country put their three-year olds in preschool for the whole day, five days a week, the Bambina had it pretty good. So I went ahead and signed her up for afternoon activities. Monday she has free. Tuesday she has theatre class at the Centro San Luigi dei Francesi. Wednesday she has dance class (in Italian). Thursday she had an English playgroup and Friday, Suzuki music class.

Did I mention that she has stopped taking the afternoon nap? The result: an exhausted child, ready to collapse at about 18h00, and a schedule that is falling apart. The English playgroup was the first to go. What on earth was I thinking? English is already her dominant language and all the other kids in the group were speaking Italian. What's the point?

I'm now considering dropping Suzuki music, too. I had always dreamed of putting the Bambina in Susuki music but, besides the fact that the class is at 16h30 on Friday afternoon and takes four metro stops and three bus stops to get to, it's an hour long, which is manifestly about 30 minutes too long for the Bambina. At 17h00, she has had enough Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to 20 different rhythms. Plus most of the other kids in the class are a year or two older than she and are far more capable of the finger coordination exercises. She seems a little too young for it all, notwithstanding the Suzuki instructor's insistance that three is the ideal age to start the rhythm classes so that they can begin to play an instrument when they are four.

At least she still loves the dance and theatre.

If I were prime minister of Italy...

2007-10-28T15:49:00.000+01:00

I hereby issue the following decrees:

- It shall be henceforth forbidden to show, distribute, broadcast, sell, or disseminate any film or television programme in dubbed version. All foreign language films and television programmes shall be shown, distributed, sold, broadcast and disseminated in their original language, with Italian subtitles. Persons who violate this decree shall be subject to twenty-five years imprisonment.

- And while we are talking about television, all game shows are hereby banned as well.

Troppe caramelle!

2007-10-25T15:25:00.000+02:00

My question for Italian parents, teachers, caregivers of children, and strangers in the post office: What on earth are y'all thinking handing out candies to every child who passes you by?

Let's take a sample day: I walk out of the house with the Bambina. The friendly chauffeur, who happens to be standing beside his car and waiting for our executive neighbour, sees the Bambina and, you got it, he gives her a candy.

We go to the post office and take a number. We are number 100 and they are currently dealing with number 18 at the counter. The old folks waiting beside us wouldn't dream of giving me and the Bambina one seat between us, but here's a sugar-and-artificial-flavour-laden candy to rot your girl's teeth and make her even more hyper than she already is.

I take the Bambina to her school, where the teacher, being French and in a French school, wouldn't dream of handing out so much as a cookie crumb to the kids without permission, but that's okay, 'cause all the other parents (who happen to be Italian) give their kids (and mine) candy that the school won't provide.

We drop in on our neighbours to say hello and ask if their baby daughter is feeling better after having had a fever the night before. They say yes, and pass the candy dish over to the Bambina.

We head to dance lesson, where the wonderful teacher spends an hour each week transforming our darling girls into elegant ballerinas - and then at the end of the lesson, hands them each a candy. The second time this happened, my friend Laura (who happens to be Italian herself, so this is not just my anglo-saxon bourgeois alpha-mom hypersensitivity to junk food coming through) chimes in (thank god she did so I didn't have to) to ask whether the candy was really necessary, given all the other candies the girls are handed all day long. Si, si, the girls needed una gratificazione for having completed the lesson. Then how about a sticker? Or a stamp on their hand? And good grief, isn't the dancing itself a gratificazione? I mean, it's not like I am dragging the Bambina on her ass to dance lessons every week. She does actually enjoy the activity.

You would never know that the slow food movement started up in this country. So far, I am convinced that they expect my daughter to be on a diet consisting of candies and maybe the odd plate of pasta once in a while.

And God Created the Au Pair

2007-10-22T19:23:00.001+02:00

I never understood the signficance of the title of the book until last week when She arrived. Our French au pair. She helps me out with the Bambina in the afternoons, babysits a couple of evenings of week, and goes grocery shopping with us on Saturday mornings. Can I say just how nice it is to be able to try on clothes in Zara with the assurance that no one is abducting your child or even offering her sweets that you don't approve of? And yesterday afternoon, I was able to go grocery shopping, take a shower, cook supper, and finish an article.

I was initially afraid that the Bambina might not like the Au Pair, but boy, was I wrong. On Saturday at 13h, the Au Pair's quitting time for the weekend, the Bambina all of a sudden became very sad and said to her, "Why you leaving? When you coming back?" And yesterday, coming home from school, her first words at our front door were, "I want to see E!".

One glitch: she's a vegetarian. Not just any kind of vegetarian but the worst kind: she won't eat meat but she doesn't replace it with any meat equivalent and just eats starch instead. I need vegetarian recipes so the poor girl doesn't end up eating pasta and pesto sauce the entire year. She is only 21, after all. In continental Europe, that's still practically a child. I don't want any accusations from her parents that we are malnourishing her.

Chill!

2007-10-20T22:04:00.000+02:00

When I first met the Frenchman, it struck me how alike we were. Now that we have been together for six years, it occurs to me that, although I still think that we are alike, we are opposites in certain ways.

Example: our approach to lost objects. Recently, I misplaced my apricancello, which is this remote control device that opens the large gate outside our home. It used to hang on my keychain, then the little plastic round piece that allows you to put it on a keychain broke and the apricancello fell off my keychain, so I had to keep it in my pocket. And of course, once it was no longer permanently suspended on something, it got lost.

My solution to this problem: spend half an hour looking for the thing in our house (it can't be anywhere else), then pay the portineria (that's our doorman) 25 euro for a new one. And, of course, hope that one day, I will find the old one so that I will have an extra.

In fact, if it weren't for the economies involved, I would buy five or six apricancellos to begin with, so that I always had one around, even when one got lost. Sometimes I would know where all six were, sometimes one or two would get misplaced and then turn up. No biggie.

The Frenchman's approach: Search for half an hour. Curse in frustration. Search for another three hours that evening. Become extremely stressed and refuse to do anything else until the &%$(& apricancello has been found. Search for another three hours the following morning. Finally concede and ask the portineria for a new one. Search the house some more after that.

Total losses
Me: half an hour of time and 25 euro
The Frenchman, hours upon hours (would you believe that he is still looking?), 25 euro and a lot of stress, and don't forget about all those other things he never got to do (watching TV, reading the paper, hanging out with the Bambina) because he spent all that time looking for a gate opener.

I like to minimize hassle, stress and time lost. Once when I was in university, I knew that in the coming month I would have NO time to do things like laundry. So I went to the store and bought twenty five pairs of socks and underwear. My roommates thought that I was nuts, but with the socks and underwear that I already had, my bulk purchase allowed me to have clean socks and underwear everyday for a month without ever doing laundry. The Frenchman would have rejected this strategy. He would have stressed about the cost of socks and underwear (which is silly 'cause you can NEVER have too many socks and underwear), not bothered buying any new pairs, and ten days later, stressed out about having to find the time to do the laundry.

The reason for our different approaches? At first I thought it might be cultural, and then I realized that the reason was probably a lot more basic and boring than that: he is the oldest (and "responsible") child in his family and I, the youngest (and carefree).

Sigh. Now if I could just get the Frenchman see things the my way.

Losing Weight Without Trying

2007-10-17T09:38:00.000+02:00

North American expats out there: ever notice how you weigh less where you are than you did back home, without ever having gone on a diet?

In Canada, I had to make an effort make sure that my weight did not exceed 57 kilo and usually it was more like 59 to 60 kilo. In France, my weight dropped to between 56 and 57 kilo without me even trying.

And here in Italy? Well, people had been asking me if I had lost weight and I said no, I don't think so. Then a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that some pants that I had not worn in a while fit me very loose, indeed. I got onto the scale and lo and behold, 54.5 kilo! Wow!

The Mom Song

2007-10-15T10:18:00.000+02:00

I just had to share this performance.

I have watched it about twenty times and I still find myself in tears of laughter everytime I see it. Enjoy!

Lost Luggage

2007-10-11T14:34:00.000+02:00

So last Friday, I headed to Fiumucino airport for a long weekend in Paris, taking with me:

1) the Bambina;
2) the Bambina's stroller (which I was planning on checking in);
3) the Bambina's carry-on suitcase;
4) my carry-on suitcase; and
5) my purse.

We arrived at the airport and proceeded to the check-in counter. We had to wait in a long line to get to the front, during which time a horde of Japanese tourists in front of us provided in-line entertainment for the Bambina. When we finally got to the counter, the AlItalia agent looked at the stroller and told me that we had to take it with us to the airplane and check it in there.

"But that's not how it works on Air France (AlItalia's partner). Air France says that all strollers must be checked in at the check-in counter," I explained. (Why do I bother?).

But the agent was adamant. The stroller had to stay with me.

Now under normal circumstances, I am happy to push a stroller, but I also had a fairly full purse replete with crayons and books and travel snacks, plus I had the two travel suitcases and the Bambina. Looking back, I should have checked in the two carry-on suitcases. But I was reluctant to do that, first of all because the Bambina would have launched into an enormous, all-out tantrum on the floor of Fiumicino Airport if she were forced to watch her little suitcase disappear into check-in land, and secondly because the last time I checked in luggage in Rome that was not "special luggage" such as the stroller, it took two hours to retrieve it in Paris. So we kept everything.

Or should I say, we didn't check in anything. I unfolded the stroller, and the Bambina, promptly upon realizing its availability, sat in it and refused my suggestion to walk and pull her beloved little suitcase along with her. So I slung my purse over my shoulder, pulled the Bambina's suitcase with one arm behind me, pushed the stroller with the Bambina in it with another, and left my suitcase sitting in front of counter number 130 of Terminal A.

I didn't even notice the loss until we were boarding the flight and suddenly it dawned on me.

In France, the airport police would have blown my luggage to bits as soon as they realized that it had been abandoned. In Italy, not so. The very kind flight attendant told me that they had found my luggage, that they could not bring it to the plane now as the flight would have been delayed as a result, but that it was being taken to the airport Lost and Found and that I could ask the Lost and Found Office at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport to arrange for the suitcase to be retrieved from Rome. Quelle naivete! Of course, the Paris airport authorities would have nothing to do with an abandoned piece of luggage in Rome. So I had to wait until the end of my long weekend to retrieve my luggage on my return to Fiumicino Airport. And nothing had been stolen from it (not that anyone would want to steal four-year old jeans, socks, underwear, and a bunch of used cosmetics).

The Frenchman was furious. How on earth was I able to leave an entire piece of luggage and forget all about it until boarding the plane??? On the other hand, my friend Francesca made me feel much better today. She told me this morning during our scambio di conversazione that four pieces plus a child was way too much for one person, what on earth was I thinking, and that the mother of the child she babysat regularly had lost her passport and ID three times while travelling with the little one. So while I may be somewhat absent-minded, it is a relief to know that I am not the only one. Assures me that I am not going crazy.

A rare sight

2007-10-04T09:30:00.000+02:00

This morning, a driver was standing in front of our palazzo waiting for someone. Our palazzo is surrounded by woods and there is some surprising wildlife near us. There are salamander lizards scampering about. After it rains, worms the length of my foot appear out of nowhere. And once I saw an enormous toad the size of my fist squashed on our driveway, poor thing.

As I passed the driver to get into the house, I said my "Buongiorno!" and he said to me, "Guardi! Ha visto lo scoiattolo? Nel albero li?" He was frantically pointing to something in a tree nearby that he really wanted me to see, but I didn't know what a scoiattolo was in English. Then I saw a squirrel run down the branch of a tree near us. I looked up scoiattolo in my handy pocket dictionary and sure enough, it means squirrel.

"Oh. Uh, yeah. Aren't they all over the place here?"

The driver didn't seem to think so. Not in the city at least.

"But aren't they all over the parks?" (and we live on the edge of a park).

He didn't think so. Come to think of it, I hadn't seen many squirrels around here either. But seeing a squirrel was an amazing thing for him and no big deal for me. And now I understand why. Our cleaner has just informed me that squirrels are pretty rare in Europe. Back in Canada, I used to see squirrels crossing my path every day. Sometimes, they sat on our front porch! (But the SPCA put out a notice not to go near them because they could have rabies). So to me, squirrels are a complete banality, as are racoons, skunks, porcupines, and various vermin that used to raid our outdoor garbage bins at night (at that was in the heart of the city of Toronto).

On the other hand, before coming to Europe I had never in my life seen or heard a cicada. I don't think they exist in Canada, or at least in the province of Saskatchewan, where I grew up, or in Toronto or Montreal, the other two Canadian cities in which I have lived. I guess it is too cold there. So cicadas are something I tune in to everyday here (at least in the summer. They have recently stopped making noise). And the amazing thing is, they all stop making noise for the year on the exact same day at the same time. How do they know to stop? Incredible!

Gym Slippers

2007-10-02T09:50:00.000+02:00

Never seen these before. Am I the only one? They are called chaussons de gymnastique and they are what the Bambina's teacher has instructed me to supply for the Bambina's gym class. They kind of remind me of Robeez, which the Bambina, like all good Canadian babies, wore when she was in the early stages of walking, and for a good while thereafter, until she wiped out in them one day and cut her lip and I decided to hell with the baby books insisting barefoot or slippers were best, and went out and got her some real shoes. (It was also getting to be cold and rainy outside and I didn't think it reasonable to expect the Bambina to walk on freezing wet Paris pavement in leather slippers, notwithstanding encouragement from other Canadian mothers to hold out as long as possible on getting real shoes for the baby).

Unlike the Robeez, the chaussons de gymnastique have grips on the bottom. I think I'm going to write Robeez and tell them to take a look at the chaussons de gymnastique and make some changes to the Robeez slipper based on them. Come to think of it, why don't French babies wear chaussons de gymnastique instead of those hard clunker shoes that their parents force them into at ten months to "support their feet" and "help them learn to walk"? Their parents wouldn't even have to buy imported Robeez shoes!

The four-day school week

2007-10-01T10:58:00.000+02:00

This in from France: Xavier Darcos, the French Minister of National Education, has announced that there will be no more school on Saturday morning.

You're probably raising your eyebrows right now wondering why on earth French children were ever going to school on Saturday morning in the first place. The Frenchman explains it this way: historically, the church in France put a lot of pressure on the state to close schools on Wednesdays so that children could go to catechism (the idea being that if catechism was held on Saturday, no one would attend). And so, to this day, in many communes of France, there is school on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 8h30 to 16h00 or thereabouts, and on Saturday morning from 0830 to 12h00. In other communes, there is school on Wednesday morning (but not the afternoon) and no school on Saturday.

But as of September 2008, there will be no more school on Saturday morning, in any school in France.

So the million euro question becomes: what about Wednesdays? And much to the delighted surprise of many parents and to the annoyance of many other parents, the Ministère de l’Education Nationale has decided that there will be no school on Wednesdays either, and children will have a four-day school week.

I'm thinking that the four-day school week will further ingrain the cultural affinity of the French for as much leisure time as possible. Forget the 35-hour work week so cherished in present day France. This generation of French children will be pushing for the four-day work week once they are adults...

The Italian system (at least in Rome) is interesting on school schedule front: school Monday through Friday from 0800 until 13h20, then home for the day. But I think that Italian kids go to school for thirteen years instead of twelve years (not counting kindergarten). The four-day school week could also be a good idea, if there are activities on Wednesdays that children can do. To me, either system sounds better than the traditional North American system of school Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM to 3:30 PM!

And I have no idea what this means for the Bambina's school next year (it being an accredited French school but in Italy).

Mirtilli, Mirtilli Rossi, Cranberries...

2007-09-28T21:39:00.001+02:00

At the pharmacy today, I asked the pharmacist to please give me something to treat cistit (not sure what the exact Italian spelling is but I meant cystitis, otherwise known as urinary tract infection or bladder infection). This pharmacist and I are good buddies and she knows all my ailments, so she smiled and went to the back to get the medication that she gave me the last time I had cystitis.

When she came back, I opened my dictionary, looked up the word "cranberry" and then asked her for some "mirtilli rossi" capsules. She asked if this was also to treat the cistit to which I replied a big si (I am in such pain whenever I wee that I'll take anything and everything that might cure my condition). Then she went to the back and returned with a box of pills labelled mirtilli.

Maybe the fact that the box was red told me that I didn't need to double check, but I should have. When I got home, I took two of capsules and then looked closely at the box. The berries pictured were blue. It occurred to me at that point that myrtilles, in French, is blueberries. Hmmmm. I called the pharmacy.

"Uh, I don't think what you gave me was mirtilli rossi."

"No, they are mirtilli, but they are good for circulation, and also can help cure cistit." (How she came to the conclusion that capsules to treat circulation would treat a bladder infection, I don't know).

"But it was mirtilli rossi that I wanted."

Long pause.

"Ah, you wanted cranberries! Cranberries treat cistit directly. But mirtilli rossi and cranberries are NOT the same thing."

"But my dictionary translates cranberries as mirtilli rossi."

"Mmmm, no they are not quite the same thing."

Now I am really wondering what on earth mirtilli rossi are. Red currents?

Anyway, the pharmacist let me exchange my already-opened container of mirtilli capsules for cranberry capsules, free of charge.

Colouring within the lines

2007-09-23T19:25:00.000+02:00

"Come in and see what she has done today!" the Bambina's teacher says to me. And then she shows me the painting. The teacher had drawn a big flower in marker and had instructed the Bambina as follows: "Please paint the flower, but you must always stay within the lines! Do not paint outside the lines".

"Look!" the teachers says to me, proudly, pointing to the result. "She did a good job, didn't she? Very good for a three year old. She went a little bit outside the lines but still, she made a good effort."

The super-educated, pedagogy-crazy, Montessori Mommy in me wants to scream. Haven't French teachers read Young At Art? Haven't they ever seen a copy of The Anti-Coloring Book? Why must they continue to follow this ancient rite of forcing kids to paint or colour pre-drawn pictures? It stifles creativity. It makes kids view art as something that is to be copied or mimicked or done for them, not something to be expressed. My face is blank and I remain silent.

The teacher immediately clarifies her position. "This exercise is an essential first step for learning how to write in cursive, which they will begin at age five."

Wow. Cursive writing at age five. I think I learned to write cursive when I was something like nine years old. I know that in Montessori schools they learn to write cursive at age five, too, but they teach kids this skill by getting them to trace sandpaper letters instead of making them colour or paint predrawn pictures. Oh well.

Then an Italian mother shows up to pick up her daughter, Matilde. The teacher briskly turns towards Matilde's mamma and leads her to the predrawn flower that Matilde has painted. In a hesitent voice, the teacher points to Matilde's oevre and explains that, while initially Matilde did a wonderful job painting within the lines, afterward, little Matilde chose to embellish her painting somewhat with some additional strokes of red around the flower, and hence outside the lines (after which Matilde proceeded to paint her own face and arms).

"Mais, c'est pas grave. Elle va apprendre," ("But it's okay. She will learn") says the teacher.

The expression on the Matilde's mother's face leads me to believe that she would prefer that Matilde NOT learn this particular skill of, shall we say, stifled self-expression.

"But this is her own style. That's all," Matilde's mother says, shrugging her shoulders and smiling. To my mind, this is the best of all possible answers.

Now if only my little Bambina could be as rebellious as Matilde.

Stay at Home Moms: How do you get anything done?

2007-09-20T14:05:00.000+02:00

So this was the Bambina's first week at her new school. Now, I'm pretty happy with this school so far, but it does have one fairly huge disadvantage, being that unlike the nido where the Bambina attended this past year, which allowed me to pick up the Bambina at 15h15 right after the afternoon nap, the school has me pick the Bambina up at 12h30. This would be fine if the Bambina were willing to take a nap in the afternoon at home but unfortunately the Bambina has decided that she does not need an afternoon nap anymore and I cannot convince her otherwise.

All this to say that my efforts to write prodigious numbers of articles for publication (freelance writing and all that) have borne absolutely no fruit this week. And of course, this blog has also suffered.

My question for all those mothers out there who have an only child (I am assuming that if there are siblings, they entertain each other) age three or under at home with them all the time: How do you get anything done? I am lucky enough to have 3.5 hours free in the mornings. If I didn't have that, our refrigerator would be bare and errands would remain on the "to-do" list forevermore. But if there is no minute in the day when the little one is not demanding your attention, how do you do it? Tell me your secrets, please!

On that note, I think I will give the au pair agency another call and see if they have any more candidates to present us...

The Italians really do want their children to learn English

2007-09-14T22:07:00.001+02:00

Scene witnessed in bakery a few days ago:

Little girl (about five years old) asks her mother (in Italian) if mother can do something. Mother says, in heavily accented English, "Just a minute".

Little girl's older brother (about nine years old), has heard what his mother said and asks his mother to repeat it.

"Just a minute", repeats his mother, in accented English.

"Ma non capisco. Che vuole dire?" ("But I don't understand. What does that mean?"), he asks.

"Ho detto 'Just a minute'. 'Just a minute'," she repeats.

"Ma che vuole dire?"

"Just a minute!"

All this time, I am asking myself, why on earth does this woman keep repeating this English line to her children.

"Ma che vuole dire?"

"Just a minute!"

"Ma non capisco. Che vuole dire?"

Mother at this point gives her son a good wallop across the back of his head.

"Impari inglese a scuola da cinque anni e non capisci 'Just a minute'? Vuole dire un attimo!" And another two smacks across the back of his head. And then more yelling in rapid Italian that I did not manage to capture.

I had to stop myself from laughing out loud. (OK, not nice to hit child for not knowing his English, but still, the scene was absolutely comical).

Are American parents too lax?

2007-09-13T10:41:00.001+02:00

I have already written about a few funny Italian parenting practices that I have noticed, but now I see that Italians also have a certain perception of American parenting (which, for them, includes Canadian parenting). It is quite similar to the French perception of how American parents deal with their children: they think that we let our kids do anything.

Just last week, while the Bambina was playing with her friend, Angelica, I was talking to Angelica's nonna, who told me that American parents were very permissivi.

Now initially, I thought that this perception might be a generational thing, and that only Italian grandparents held this view, not Italian parents. But the more I reflect, the more I think that Angelica's mother and many other Italian parents probably think the same of us North American parents: we let our kids get away with too much.

We let them play in the dirt, for example. Just last week, I was in our front yard with our neighbour and her nine-month old baby was squirming in her arms. "Amore, what's wrong?", she asked her baby.

"I think she wants to crawl on the ground", I suggested, trying to be helpful.

"Non va", replied my neighbour, a little tartly. She could not possibly let her baby crawl on the grass. Grass, after all, has dirt in it. And leaving aside the actual dirt and microbes in the grass, there might be other nasty things in the grass, too. Cat poo, bottle caps, pebbles that the baby could put in her mouth, who knows? I suppose she had a point.

I didn't have the gumption to tell her that when the Bambina was at the crawling stage, I used to put her on the floor in stores, bakeries, and restaurants. You don't realize how filthy the floors are in stores until you have let a child crawl on them. But keeping a 14-month old in stroller prison is harder than you think and I figured that the dirt might not be great for her clothes but it wouldn't hurt her.

And Americans don't force their kids to dress warmly. So many times last winter, someone looked at the Bambina walking around in a T-shirt in 16 degree weather and after a few rounds of "Ciao, Bellissima", turned to me and asked "Isn't she cold?". Now, it is true that often, the Bambina refuses to put on a coat or sweater even if I find it a bit chilly. And I do not generally press the issue. But it is her body after all. I am sure that if she gets cold, she will let me know. And I bring her coat along with us just in case.

And we let our babies eat by themselves from when they start solids, no matter how much mess they make. Here is an example of the Bambina eating yogurt on her own, at around age ten months. My neighbour cannot believe that I ever let the Bambina make that kind of a mess and that more importantly, we were willing to clean it up. Every day, at every meal. She thinks that it makes more sense to wait until the baby is old enough to be able to control the spoon properly herself. Except that I keep trying to explain to her that in order for her baby to learn to be able to control the spoon herself, you have to let her use the spoon. She is not buying it.

My French friend Cécile agrees with our neighbour. She enthusiastically told me the other day that her 18-month old was already "eating by herself".

"Uh, haven't you been letting her eat stuff by herself for a while now? I mean, we let our daughter have the spoon pretty much from the beginning."

"Bien sur que non!!"

Were we crazy?

And we let our children climb trees and do dangerous things in the yard. This is definitely cultural. Americans think that their children should be able to take some defined risks, such as climbing a tall tree, even if it means that the child ends up breaking an arm. After all, isn't that what childhood is about? But I know for sure that tree-climbing is not well-tolerated in the French mindset and it wouldn't surprise me to see an Italian mamma telling her child to come down from a tree subito before the child breaks a leg.

Perhaps just another case of Not Wrong Just Different?

No more Montessori baby

2007-09-11T12:48:00.001+02:00

It is with some heartache but great relief that I report that the Bambina will be (and indeed, is) attending the French school, and not the Italian public Montessori school that I was so keen on.

We discussed our dilemma with an American speech pathologist who specializes in bilingual and multilingual families. She basically said that it made no sense to put the Bambina in the local Italian school system if we were not planning on staying here beyond three years. She added that, in any event (1) the Bambina would learn Italian (even at the French school, where most of the kids are Italian) and that (2) the Bambina would promptly unlearn Italian when she turned six and we left Italy.

She also strongly recommended that, if we did choose to send the Bambina to the Italian public school, the Bambina nevertheless start in the French system at age five (not age six), so that she was not, at age six, learning to read a language that she had not even mastered speaking. To me, the whole Montessori idea doesn't seem so worth it if the Bambina can't do the three-year cycle. Plus I just don't want to deal with two years of stress trying to keep the Bambina's French up (which would be necessary in order to avoid domestic conflicts), all so that she can leave her Montessori school at age five.

The teaching techniques at the French école maternelle are based very loosely on the pedagogy of Celestin Freinet, a pedagogy that, like Montessori, is child-centered, but that places more stress on children cooperating and working together on common projects. The French system has modified Freinet's approach somewhat to put more focus on the role of the teacher. This is because the French, being obsessed with ensuring that France's children master the French language (a language that is, of course, superior to all others) by age five, cannot imagine a child learning proper French by simply working with other children, as Freinet proposed. And so, although the children do often work with each other à la méthode Freinet, thereby learning through doing and interacting as Freinet would have wanted, they are also stuck listening to a teacher a lot of the time.

The Bambina's classroom is cozy (gemuetlich would be a better word), although when I scanned the room and saw the fake kitchen and the dolls, I couldn't help thinking that even the articles in the Bambina's Montessori nursery were more advanced. But the teacher is absolutely lovely and the class consists of 22 children, which for me, seems the perfect size (that was one thing I didn't like about the Montessori school - 25 kids to a room but then there were three classrooms and they were free to wander from room to room, making it essentially a class of 75. Yikes!).

All in all, if I have to go with any French école maternelle, this one is definitely my first choice.

Simple meals

2007-09-09T12:49:00.000+02:00

I think that Italian mothers have the impression that I malnourish the Bambina. The other day, I was in our garden with Alessandra and her two-year old, Filipo.

"Hmm. Can't decide what to make for supper. What you are going to give Filipo?", I ask.

"For the antipasto, some cooked peppers, then some pasta with tomatoes, then some veal, and for the contorno, maybe some spinach".

"Oh," I replied. "I was thinking about maybe putting some avocado on bread."

Alessandra shook her head. "This is very American. In Italy, we believe in making proper meals."

But you see, I don't do the big meal at supper because the Bambina already eats meat, fish or eggs at lunch and I had always thought that this was enough protein for one day. Alessandra begs to differ. She thinks that you should give a full meal twice a day. I am dubious. But the other Italian mothers whom I have casually talked to at the nursery this past year all seem to share Alessandra's view. Even though their little one had already eaten a full four-course meal at lunchtime at the nursery, they always prepared an evening meal consisting, at a minimum, of meat and rice/pasta plus a vegetable.

The impression that I give is all the worse because I don't even bother tackling proper recipes. The Frenchman and I always have a salad, which the Bambina won't touch, and I give the Bambina what you might call a "non-meal". For example, yesterday's "supper" for the Bambina consisted of the following:

- a bowl of chick peas
- a peach.

Today's lunch (we are having a big meal tonight):
- boiled carrots with butter
- a slice of whole wheat bread.

Basically, I prepare very little. Sometimes, she just has a plate of spinach (cooked, as she refuses to eat it raw) and some bread (but always whole wheat bread). Sometimes I make pasta but then it really is just pasta and a vegetable, without meat or bread. And then there is always the trustee avocado on bread.

I can see Alessandra shaking her head now.

My Anglo friends aren't that impressed either but they understand. They are all into Annabel Karmel, which they highly recommend to me so that the Bambina can start eating suppers that have more than two ingredients. I have looked at some of Annabel's Karmel's recipes but I kind of lost confidence when I read her recipe for hidden vegetables tomato sauce. It contains 100 ml of vegetable stock, replete with enormous concentrations of salt, hydrogenated oils and MSG. She recommends it for children nine months and older. Hmmm. I am not persuaded that soup stock is good for babies. And why is all this fuss necessary? If you have to hide the vegetables, why not just make a tomato sauce with pureed veg but leave out the soup stock? And, since the Bambina is willing to eat many of the veggies identified in the recipe, why not just give her tomatoes and carrots? She can have a big bowl of cherry tomatoes for one meal and a big bowl of carrots for the next, without all the salt, hydrogenated oil and MSG found in vegetable stock and with much less preparation time. Easy. :)

But I sense that my readers will be less than convinced.

Anyone see Sicko?

2007-09-07T13:54:00.000+02:00

I saw it two nights ago in versione originale. It is definitely worth seeing, especially if one is American, just to see the devastating effects of fully privatized health care and how evil HMOs really are.

That being said, I have to say that I did find Michael Moore's depiction of the public health care systems in Canada and in France to be, er, shall way say, a little too paradisical. Let's begin with the Canadian public health care system. He tells us that all medical treatment is free in Canada, which is true. But he does not adequately respond to the (also true) allegations that there are long waiting lists for surgery that is not considered urgent. Moore does note on his website that 70 to 80 percent of Canadians feel that the wait times for diagnostic tests and non-emergency surgery are acceptable, but that means that 20 to 30 percent feel that they are unacceptable, which to me seems pretty high.

Moore also does not mention that when it comes to doctors, Canada has a serious brain drain problem, because our best and brightest doctors all move south of the border where they can earn some real money. And finally, he forgot to mention that any Canadian with serious money will, when seriously ill, drive to the United States to get the best treatment available. In Canada, you get decent health care but let's face it, the Mayo Clinic is in New York City (or is it in Minnesota?), not Toronto.

On to France: Moore interviewed a seemingly "average" French family with a household income of 8,000 euro per month. Now, let me just clarify that the vast majority of households in France earn far less than that, perhaps 3,000 euro per month or so. The film also leaves you with the impression that in France, all medical care is free, which is not true. The majority of people in France have to carry supplementary insurance to cover items that the public health insurance won't cover. Example: our pediatrician in Paris charged us 90 euro per visit. But the public health care system would only reimburse us 60 euro. That means that either we paid the extra 40 euro [editor's correction: 30 euro!] out of our own pockets or had to carry a supplementary insurance plan to cover the extra cost. And it is not always easy to find a doctor that does not charge more than what the public health insurance will reimburse you, especially a specialist. The doctors who do charge only what the public health care system will reimburse are forced into a volume-based practice, where earnings depend on seeing huge numbers of patients per day.

I can't comment on what the film says about the system in the United Kingdom but I would be very interested in Iota's thoughts on it, given that she is a Brit now living in the States.

But don't get me wrong. Sicko recounts horror stories of what can happen in a privatized health insurance system. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that the American culture of individualism, entrepreneurialism and self-preservation (a culture that I quite admire, incidentally) will ever be able to stomach fully public health care. Something really should change over there, though. Someone needs to find a way to banish HMOs and PPPs but keep the Mayo Clinic.

School Smocks?

2007-09-05T22:26:00.000+02:00

The Italian public scuola materna that the Bambina is registered for has sent us a letter with a list of some school supplies that we have to provide. At the top of the list is as follows:

"two smocks, but please avoid the traditional pink and blue ones, and opt
instead for smocks full of bright colours and fantasy."

"Why?" was my first question (regarding the smocks, that is. The question of colour had not even occurred to me at that point). Then my friend Gaia explained to me that kids in Italy wear these smock get-ups in school until something like grade five, and not just for when they are doing some artwork. The children are expected to wear them ALL DAY, like a uniform. The Frenchman tells me that this smock tradition ended in France in 1920, but well, I guess things in Italy are not so dynamic.

So I headed to Upim yesterday (the Rome equivalent of Gap) and checked out their smock rack. There were about fifty pink smocks and fifty baby blue smocks on the rack. There were absolutely no "smocks full of bright colours and fantasy".

So I headed for some other stores, but there too, all the smocks for scuola materna were the same: baby pink for girls and baby blue for boys.

Then I read the letter of the school a little more carefully (my Italian being still kind of rusty, and all) and they seem to recognize this problem of lack of availability of fantasy smocks because after asking us to provide the colourful smocks, there is written: "(perhaps someone can sew them?)".

Um, that would be a big "no", first of all because I don't own a sewing machine and secondly because, being a product of the feminist generation, I can't sew.

Maybe the Bambina will attend the French school after all. They don't require fantasy smocks, just good shoes for running around.

School Dilemma. Help please!

2007-09-03T12:03:00.000+02:00

One week to go and we still haven't decided where to send the Bambina to school. I have to say, though, the little that I have seen of a nearby Italian public school where we have signed up the Bambina has impressed me. It is universal and free from age three. The classes in the preschool-kindergarden (scuola materna) are mixed age three to five. The school provides free lunch every day and all the food happens to be organic. I visited the school a couple of times last January and the teachers seemed really affectionate with the children. Seeing a teacher plant a big bacio on a child's cheek was not unusual at all (unheard of in a French school). The classrooms that I saw were beautiful and there will be a music and theatre programme, too. And, to top everything off, this particular public school happens to be one of the fifty or so public schools in Italy which is also a Montessori school. The school does not have a great outdoor play area but it is next to the Villa Borghese and the school claims that they do a lot of outings to the park and the zoo.

BUT the public Italian school is, well, Italian-speaking, and the Frenchman, understandably, would appreciate his daughter being able to understand what he is saying to her once in a while and maybe even reply to him in French. It is not that we are afraid that the Bambina will never learn to speak French. She will have no choice but to understand and speak French fluently once she starts (French) elementary school at age six. But in the mean time, things are getting kind of, well, strained between the Frenchman and the Bambina. In addition to being three and therefore quite oppositional already, she at times acts completely uninterested in anything her father has to say to her. Now, she does this to me, too, at times, but the Frenchman insists that when the Bambina ignores HIM, it is not because she is three but rather because she does not understand what he is saying.

There is a private French school that we have also signed the Bambina up at. I prefer the Italian public school classrooms BUT the French school does have a much nicer and bigger outdoor play area. No organic lunch (sniff), though, and no special music or theatre programme. The linguistic mix would be perfect: Italian children within a French learning environment. The Bambina would be fluent in both languages in no time. It's not Montessori (another sniff) but yes, they do learn things. Dr. Montessori once said that children have "absorbant minds" and I guess one could go further and say that their minds really DO absorb, no matter what school they are in.

And does it really make sense to send the Bambina to an Italian school when we know that she will not be continuing in the Italian system in the long term? Wouldn't it be better for her to learn her letters and numbers in French before starting grade one at French elementary school? I just don't know.

All points of view welcome!

Il Contadino

2007-08-30T22:56:00.000+02:00

Yet another vacation write-up before I start going on about my life in Rome again.

Please allow me to take this opportunity to recommend Il Contadino to families wanting to vacation in Puglia. Il Contadino is an agriturismo just two kilometres north of Otranto. You get:

- a rustic cabin that fits four, five or six persons, with kitchenette;

- fifty metres from your cabin, a restaurant that serves specialties from Puglia using ingredients from the farm;

- one hundred metres from your cabin, another restaurant that has a different menu (but still all local specialties) and a shop where you can buy Il Contadino olive oil in five litre tins;

- a luxury-size swimming pool;

- a bar next to the pool;

- a playground for the kids (right next to the bar, so they can play while you sip your cappucino and read the newspaper every morning);

- soccor field and tennis courts;

- free access to a sand beach that is perfect for children, one km away;

- bike rental (ideal for getting to the beach).

We were particularly impressed with the quality of the food at the two restaurants. Ninety nine percent of the clientele is Italian so I guess the standard has to be high.

Above all, life at Il Contadino is so practical. Don't want to take the kids to the restaurant? Order all your food at the main restaurant ahead of time, pick it up at 20h and the kids can eat it on the porch of your cabin before you put them to bed. (Pizza from the wood oven works best - just boxes, no cutlery necessary, no dishes afterward). You can then have a romantic dinner with your spouse on the porch while the kids sleep inside.

Some qualifications to this recommendation:

The cabins are rustic. The screen door might have a hole in it, the hot water tap produces water that is dangerously hot, your fingers get caught in between the bathroom door and the medicine cabinet every time you close the door, there is no daily maid service (there is maid service once a week if you ask, at an extra cost), there is no bath, just a cube shower, you get the idea. We liked it but if you are looking for four or five star-luxury, it ain't that.

The food at the restaurant was delicious but the service, like everywhere else in Puglia, was slow.

Watch out for your clothing on the deck chairs by pool!

Il Contadino
via Azienda Frassanito
73028 OTRANTO (Lecce)
Tel +39 836 803065
Tel +39 836 803214
Fax +39 836 803300
http://www.ilcontadino.it/

Puglia

2007-08-28T10:54:00.001+02:00

It has wide sand beaches and cities filled with exquisite baroque architecture (Lecce, Otranto, Galipoli) but the service is absolutely abysmal. Here is just one anecdote from our visit last week:

Me (to front desk at the agriturismo): I wanted to avert you to the fact that all of your deck chairs by the pool are broken and (showing torn tunic) the cracked seat caused my tunic to rip.

Woman behind front desk: I know that all the chairs are broken. But they are broken because people have sat on them. Quindi, non é la nostra colpa - So it's not our fault.

I am not kidding. This was the actual response, word for word.

At least the front desk person was kind enough to relay my complaint to the manager. Later on, the manager approached us in the restaurant and told me that he was very sorry for what had happened to my tunic. But then, instead of offering us, say, a five euro discount on our supper, he said to us, smiling:

"But it is your fault because we bought the chairs from a French company and the chairs were defective. So the broken chairs are not the responsibility of the
hotel. It is the fault of the French."

Now, I will acknowledge that the man was at least half-joking but that doesn't make up for the fact that their chairs are crap and my tunic is ripped because of it. I swear, I thought I was back in France, dealing with the whole "Ce n'est pas de ma faute!" defence mechanism that the French hone their entire lives. I'm not used to this type of response in Italy. I'm used to Italians happily acknowledging the mistake with a smile on their face and an "I know I screwed up but can't we still be friends?" attitude. But maybe that's just in Rome?

Club Med Napitia: The Complete Review

2007-08-27T15:05:00.000+02:00

For future reference of all holiday goers considering Club Med Napitia in Calabria, Italy, voilà, a complete review.

Atmosphere: beautiful. Before Club Med acquired the site, it was a botanical garden, and it shows. There are begonias, hibiscus, and flowers whose name I don't know everywhere. And there is a gorgeous pine and eucalyptus forest that leads you to the beach (with hammocks tied to the trees in case you feel like taking a snooze after lunch). There is green everywhere, plus the sea, two luxury swimming pools, tennis courts, and southern Italian sunshine.

Rooms: We stayed in one of the bungalows, which would fit a family of four comfortably. It was not luxurious but very practically laid out with lots of shelf space in the bathroom (but only a shower, no bath) and a little terrace in the back. Book early for a bungalow. There are fewer of them than the hotel rooms and I am told that they get swiped quickly.

The Beach: Beautiful but not altogether practical for those with small children. The beach starts off as sand and then turns into pebbles that burn your feet as you get closer and closer to the water. The water is very wavey and gets deep suddenly and quickly. There is no real shallow part. The Bambina preferred the swimming pools. On a positive note, the umbrellas and sunbeds are not packed close together like in the rest of southern Italy, so you don't have the sardine box feel. There is lots and lots of space. There are jellyfish in the water but a net keeps them out of the swimming area. Oh, and shaded areas have been set up especially for children to play in the sand. And of course there is a bar next to the beach. In the afternoon, the staff go from chair to chair on the beach distributing watermelon to everyone.

The Swimming Pools: There are two large pools, one of them intended for those who like swimming lengths during their vacation (e.g., the Frenchman) and the other, more recently constructed pool, intended for small children and playing around(but really, they both have deep and shallow ends and both are fine for kids). The water (in August) was the perfect temperature - around 29 to 30°. Aquagym is every day at 11:30 and 16h30.

One of the more interesting diversions is the sunbathing beach towels. This consists of waking up very early in the morning to deposit your beach towel on one of the deck chairs at the pool and then leaving your towel there to enjoy the sun for the rest of the day, without ever using the chair once yourself. Don't forget to go pick your towel up at the end of the day. Ignore comments from other pesky guests who complain that they can't find a chair ot lie on. Obviously, your towel's need to lie alone on a deck chair is more important than the desire of other persons to actually use the deck chairs at some point in the day. And if those other residents are lucky, they will find a chair when they arrive at the pool at around 11h00, even if it is not in the shade.

The Food: Overall good but it's not from the local trattoria. The hamburger patties are of the frozen variety, not fresh from the butcher. The ice cream is not Italian gelato but industrial Carte d'Or from the box. The juice is from concentrate from a bottle (unless you get it at the bar where you can order a spremuta). But the choice is great. There is everything from local Calabrian food to standard pasta to sausages and hamburgers. There are three restaurants. The one with the most variety is the one next to the new swimming pool with the kiddy area. The restaurant at the beach only serves fish so don't bother going it you're not a fish eater.

Other Activities: Salsa lessons, archery, tennis, pétanque (proof that Club Med is still French), beach volley, climbing wall, aquagym, yadda yadda yadda. Don't do what I did and forget to bring your sneakers (trainers for you Brits out there). I tried to sneak into the gym barefoot but one of those gentil organisateurs kicked me out.

Animation: For children, the Mini Club Dance every night at 21h00 is a must, even for the adolescents and the adults. As for the nightly animation at 21h30, never have I seen such lame shows in my entire holiday existence (but we always went 'cause we liked doing the Club Med song and dance at the beginning of the show. Tee hee). Oh, and if your children are in the petit club or mini club, they will present you with their own animations at certain times of the week, so bring your video camera.

Service: Perfect. It's very French, though, be warned. See my previous post regarding this.

Excursions: Be sure to head into the town of Pizzo, a few kilometres away, to try some tartufo di Pizzo. It's essentially coated gelato with melted chocolate inside. Mmmmmmm. Don't worry about which bar you pick in the town's central piazza for your tartuffo. The lady at the tourist information center told us that to "assucurare la qualità" of the tartufo, the bar owners have entered into a cartell (Only in Italy. Who are they kidding?), so all the tartufos are the same. The tartufo at the bars closer to the sea (and therefore with a view) are just slightly more expensive (but the view is worth it). Don't bother planning to eat lunch at the club after that. You'll be too full.

Overall: We would go back to Club Med Napitia without hesitation, except that we have this dumb rule that we never go anywhere twice.

No more camera

2007-08-16T09:20:00.001+02:00

So since my last entry, we have left Club Med Napitia (sniff), spent three days with friends in the Sila mountains eating homemade Calabrian food (grazie mille, Emilie's mamma), and now we are in Matera, in the province of Basilicata, where we will explore some paleolithic caves, I think, after heading to the beach for a bit.

One problem: the Bambina broke the Frenchman's 400 euro camera. It was my fault. I left it on the nighttable, fully accessible to the Bambina's curious and swift hands. The Bambina picked it up, turned it on and started to try to take pictures. When I told her to please put it down, she said "No, I going to take some pictures!" When I approached her to take it away, well, what could she do? Concede to Mommy? No way! So she resorted to desperate measures and threw the camera on the floor.

I made her tell papa what happened, which was a mistake because then, in addition to dealing with an oppositional child, I had to deal with an irate Frenchman. I should have just hid the stupid camera, suggested heading to the local Carrefour the next day, and bought an identical camera while feigning shopping for Italian children's books.

All this of course means that even if I had a connection with which I could download photos, I could not.

Incidentally, any suggestions for disciplining a three-year old (who still laughs when we tell her that she broke our camera, adding to the Frenchman's ire) are most welcome. The Frenchman, who prior to our having a child, had convinced me that all corporal punishment was wrong, has had a sudden change of mind.

A Downside of Club Med

2007-08-10T08:42:00.000+02:00

This place charges a whopping EIGHT EURO PER HOUR for an internet connection! EIGHT EURO! HAVE THEY LOST THEIR MINDS?

More to come once we have left this place, lest they bankrupt me.

Club Med Napitia

2007-08-06T21:19:00.000+02:00

So, here we are in Calabria and yet, we are not really in Calabria. We are, to be exact, at Club Med Napitia, which, if you have ever been to a Club Med anywhere in Europe, you know is essentially a French compound. Of the one thousand or so guests at this resort, I have spotted three Italian families and two British families. The rest are French, or French Belgian, or French Swiss. The women have pale skin and short hair (the shoulders are as long as it gets). Some even wear one-piece bathing suits. And unlike the Italian women who love to flaunt their dark locks, these women, if they have dark hair, have had blonde highlights added. No gold hoop earrings. The children are all thin, extraordinarily well-behaved and wear t-shirts or maillots anti-UV in the swimming pool, duly purchased for them at Decathlon or Graine d’Eveil.

There is, of course, true to French cultural norms regarding children having their place (a place as far from the adults as possible), a Petit Club, for children aged two and up, open twelve hours per day. You can deposit your child there in the morning and pick her up at nine in the evening. But you do need to be there for dinnertime. Of the thirty children enrolled in the age two and three section of the Petit Club, only one is Italian. (We met the child’s parents last night. They’re from Florence.)

The Bambina took one look at the Petit Club and immediately turned around and walked the other way. “I don’t want to go to the nursery!”, she said. And who can blame her? The place has the institutional look and feel of a crèche in the sixth arrondissement of Paris. The caregivers won’t even take the children to the swimming pool. (Trop dangereux!) The children have instead been relegated to a nine-inch deep wading pool beside the nursery facilities, in which they are permitted to paddle one hour per day from 15h00 to 16h00. Pas terrible. So the Bambina has been spending most of her time with us. I say most because she did attend one day to perform in a spectacle, and tomorrow, she will go to the Petit Club while the Frenchman and I take some salsa lessons.

As for languages spoken here, well, it goes without saying that since ninety percent of the clientele here is francophone, so is ninety percent of the staff (except for the staff in the kitchen, which is one hundred percent Italian – probably a good thing). Announcements are made in French, then in broken Italian, then in even more broken English. Aquagym and aerobics take place in French, with a one-two-three in English here and there. The evening animation (le spectacle) is entirely in French. Basically, if you don’t understand French, you might have a hard time here.

Each of the gentils organisateurs (G.O. for short) wears a pin on his or her chest, adorned with tiny flags to indicate which languages he or she speaks. Many G.O.s wear a pin brandishing the U.K. flag, but approach one of these G.O.s and ask them a question in English and you get a blank stare, followed by a look of pained concentration as they listen to your question as they might a Hollywood movie that they have been forced to watch in version originale. Their response will have very obviously been selected from the collection of fifty or so phrases that they learned at lycée or in their G.O. training, punctuated with inexistent grammar, vocabulary borrowed from French (and used the wrong way) and direct translations, such as: “Will your daughter assist at ze spectacle tonight?” (meaning, “will she attend”, not “will she be helping out”, as one might conclude) or “Zer exeest two swimming pools at zees club”.

I was initially intent of speaking English to the personnel here, just because, even though I do speak French, I was kind of hoping to speak my native language while I am paying these wonderful people for their marvelous service and excellent facilities. I mean, it’s not like I expect them to speak Swahili. Club Med is a publicly traded company on the international markets, with resorts everywhere under the sun. Is it asking too much that their staff be comfortable speaking the world’s lingua franca?

But I have come to realize that English is too much effort (for me and them). I can’t be bothered. I have given up and just speak French. And anyway, I fit right in with the women here (having ditched the gold hoop earrings). If you can’t be ‘em, join em!

Things to do before we leave on vacation

2007-08-01T09:23:00.000+02:00

Our computer connection has been on the blink for the past few days so I have been unable to write any blog entries. In the mean time, here are some things that I have had to do to get ready for our August vacation (and the time allocated to each activity):

Get pedicure (no way am I stepping onto an Italian beach with unpainted toenails) (1 hour);

Buy gold hoop earrings to wear with bathing suit at beach (got to fit in with all those Calabrian women) (2 minutes at any stand on street);

Locate and purchase bathing suit that fits properly and covers sufficient amount of rear end (six months);

Buy sunscreen and fake tan lotion (another dismal attempt at fitting in at an Italian beach) (15 minutes);

Pack my suitcase (1 hour);

Pack the Bambina's suitcase (2 hours);

Tell the Bambina to tidy her playroom (30 seconds, repeated once every half an hour over a period of 5 days);

Tidy the Bambina's playroom (1 hour);

Make list of all things I am unable to pack because I don't have it or have run out (e.g., proper beach sandals, shaving creme) (15 minutes);

Purchase missing items (3 hours);

Repack suitcase so that all additional items purchased will now fit (2 hours);

Tidy the Bambina's playroom again and tell her not to keep messing it up (20 minutes);

Get anti-cellulite cure in desperate last-minute attempt to save appearance at beach (2 hours);

Remind Frenchman to pack (once every 2 hours for the next three days until thirty minutes before departure);

Go to pharmacy and buy all products that treat constipation (20 minutes);

Buy stamps to put on postcards to be mailed to envious friends and relatives who are freezing and wet in Northern Europe (1 hour (taking into account line at the post office at 10 AM on a Saturday));

(On day of departure) pack toiletry bag; repack suitcase to fit toiletry bag; leave; return to house to get the camera; return to house to get cellular phone; return to house to get the Bambina's lovey.

Has anyone heard of this?

2007-07-28T10:52:00.000+02:00

I open my email this morning and lo and behold there is an invitation from my friend Solmaz in Canada to join yamky.com. She says in the message that I am going to love it and "all the cool people are doing it". Ok. So I naively go to yamky.com and sign up. I fill in the profile, tell everyone my interests, even post a photo.

Within about 30 seconds of having posted the phote and completed the first third of the profile, I have seven messages in my Yamky inbox. Sure enough, there are seven Italians, all men, saying ciao to me. Now, I marked on the profile that I was "married" and "with children" so this seems a little strange to me but perhaps they are not looking for that or perhaps they don't care. Either way, all I can say is, WOW! I mean, if I were single, this yamky thing would be cool. But since I really don't care to find out what these people are seeking, I logged out. I'm not sure if I will be using Yamky that much. Must send out invitations to all my single girlfriends, though...

I finished it!

2007-07-26T19:11:00.000+02:00

What a great read! I think I will read it all over again. In fact, I think that I am going to read all seven books all over again, from start to finish.

Ok, maybe not right away. But one day. First I have to find where I put the first book in the series (The Philosopher's Stone). I seem to have lost it.

So now that I have read what was supposed to be my reading material at the beach in August, I have to go find other books to take with me to the beach. Anyone have any suggestions? All trashy chick books welcome (I find the ones published in the United Kingdom to be the best for some reason. Marion Keyes is great). Suggestions for simple but good Italian books are also welcome, all the more because I really should work on expanding my Italian vocabulary (ever get to the point in a language where you feel like you have the grammar down but you still need to go flipping through a dictionary looking up words like "box", "floor" and "piece" every time you leave the house?).

Suggestions for French books not so welcome at this time, as I really need to work on Italian. But merci anyway.

The weather in T.R.O.E (The Rest Of Europe)

2007-07-25T13:38:00.000+02:00

Anyone notice how crappy the weather is in northern and western Europe and how unbearably hot it is in eastern and southern Europe?

Mind you, today in Paris, it's supposed to be 23 degrees celcius, which is pretty good considering that up until a week ago, you could have mistaken the months of June and July for the beginning of November. Now it feels closer to June, at least.

The Visitor

2007-07-23T16:56:00.000+02:00

So, yesterday, we headed to see beautiful Orvieto (see picture,left, of me and the lovely Bambina exiting a church). I wore a summery if not slightly touristy semi-transparent white skirt, pink shirt, and pink bikini underneath, plus straw hat. We had lunch at an Etruscan restaurant (Aside: What exactly is Etruscan food? I mean, didn't they (the Etruscans, I mean) die out or get assimilated with the Romans something like 1500 years ago? The food we ate was basically Italian as far as I could tell).

And then, very unexpectedly, I had a visitor. Aunt Flo. She arrived, er, rather unexpectedly and manifested herself on my backside. The Bambina pointed to the spot and said "Look, Mommy! What's that?", as I got up from my seat in the restaurant. For the entire restaurant to hear.

Oh well. At least I was amongst strangers.

And then we got home and our air conditioners (all four of them) had broken down (Nana complained, as you can imagine).

Feeling hot hot hot!

2007-07-20T14:51:00.000+02:00

It is so hot here that by the time we arrived at the zoo at 0930 this morning, my bra was wet (why do I bother wearing one?).

It is now 14h45 and the Bambina is taking a nap. I'm hoping that she remains conked out until 17h00 when the temperature is slightly more bearable and we can go outside again. If she does happen to wake up before then, then teletubbies in the air-conditioned living room it is. Who would know that back in Paris, I all but banished television from the Bambina's line of vision (she did get to watch the World Cup with us)?

Nineteen degrees today in Paris, by the way. How cool is that?

Edited to add: the Bambina slept from 14h00 to 18h00 and then went to bed at 23h00 this evening. My, my, we are falling into the Mediterranean lifestyle.

Check out my swim gear!

2007-07-19T23:25:00.000+02:00

I have already written about the stares we got last year when the Bambina wore her anti-UV suit on the beach in Ischia. Well, here is this year's model (or at least one of them. I got her a pink one, too).

So once again, this year at the beach, we will be looked upon as aliens from another planet.

Told the dermatologist our story last week. He thinks that we should just keep the Bambina inside every day of the summer between the hours of noon and 17h00.

Okay, I accept that this suggestion makes sense, but in reality, who actually does this? I mean, I can maybe manage to keep the Bambina inside while we are at home, but on vacation? What is she going to do in a hotel room? She is getting old for naps. We could maybe have a long lunch but that will take us to maybe 14h30, max.

And what about older kids? How does one keep a seven-year old indoors, for what is effectively the bulk of a summer day? Does anyone succeed in doing this?

But then he did say that if we could not keep the Bambina inside, we had absolument raison (he's French, by the way. See yesterday's post) to keep her in the anti-UV suit and that the Italians were all nuts to let their kids run naked in the August midday sun.

So there. (Need tongue-sticking-out emoticon here).

La Dottoressa /le medecin/the doctor

2007-07-18T19:44:00.000+02:00

First telltale sign that we are an expat family: the doctors we see when we fall ill. They're not "local".

Expats never trust local doctors. Here in Rome, for example, the other Anglo-Saxons and even French expats keep relaying outrageous stories about how Italian doctors are twenty, maybe even fifty, years behind the times. If you have lung cancer, for example, the doctor will tell you to cut down to ten cigarettes a day. If you are pregnant, the doctor will limit you to two glasses of wine a day. The slightest cold gets antibiotics. And don't get me started on the horrors of public hospitals here. They haven't received additional funding (or staffing) since before you were born.

Of course, back in Paris, all the Anglo-Saxons told me that French doctors were twenty years or more behind the times. So maybe what we hear about local doctors is just an urban legend that expats pass on to one another whereever they happen to be in the world.

Then again, at least with respect to antibiotics, French doctors are smack in the 1970s. They have a habit of prescribing antibiotics even when the illness in question is due to a virus.

Anyway, even if the local doctors are not so bad, when it comes to health, I like being able to speak in English (but I will settle for French), so I figure the foreign doctor is worth the subway ride. We go to the Aventino Medical Group. The doctors we see there are French (no antibiotics yet) or Belgian.

The Bambina had one of those "well-baby" checkup thingies yesterday (I guess it would be a "well-toddler" or "well-child" check-up at this point) (who invents these terms, anyway?). I'm not too religious about these checkups. Some parents take their kids every six months for these things, which I tend to think of as overkill. I mean, you want to know whether your kid is healthy and doing well, just take a look at her. Is she happy? Does she eat more than just orange juice all day? Does she poo every other day or so?

Anyway, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that the Bambina has grown TEN centimetres since the last checkup late last summer. (This would explain why she is the tallest of all her little friends her age and why she has the biggest feet of any almost-three year old I know...).

Oh, and we are so behind on the vaccinations, it's embarrassing. Dr. S scolded me when we first arrived in Rome because the Bambina, two years old at the time, had not had any vaccinations since she was about 11 months old. Since then she has scolded me twice more because I still had not bothered updating them. Finally, she gave the Bambina had two vaccinations yesterday. But the Bambina is still behind on the vaccination schedule, a fact that would thrill my granola friends. My more non-granola "vaccinations are a responsibility" friends are bemused by my lack of attention to this matter. Oh well.

Spoleto's Other Festival

2007-07-17T23:07:00.000+02:00

Saw this poster during our weekend in Spoleto.

Okay, I understand communism as an ideal. I do not understand how anyone could use the Soviet hammer and sickle to symbolize that ideal. Leaving aside the fact that Soviet style "communism" (if you can call it that - it was more akin to a central planning dictatorship) can hardly be said to have worked, do these people have any idea just how many people died in Joseph Stalin's purges? We are talking something like twenty five million people. I wouldn't have the Soviet hammer and sickle for the symbol of my political party anymore than I would use the swastika! What is wrong with these people?

Of course, the Frenchman (in true French fashion) calls me a fascist every time he hears me make this complaint. (He voted for the Trotskyist candidate in the first round of the last French election, "in recognition of her contribution to democracy in France," he explained). (Need a rolling eyes emoticon here).

Spoleto

2007-07-16T15:47:00.000+02:00

This weekend, we headed to Spoleto (in Umbria - a 1.5 hour drive from Rome) for the Festival dei Due Mondi.

We got there in the Frenchman's 1965 convertible Alpha Romeo (the Frenchman's toys consist of pens, watches and antique cars. He loves to play with the cars). In the interests of controlling my hair during the ride, I got to look like Jacquie Kennedy (or a woman from the Arabian peninsula, depending on your take).

Now, as a teenager, I used to dream of riding in a convertible down the highway with the man of my dreams. Having now experienced being a semi-free flying object going 160 km per hour (have I mentioned that the Frenchman likes to drive fast?) in a roofless, seatbeltless vehicle in 40 degree heat and Rome-level air pollution, I can honestly say that the dream has lost much of its charm. (And before you all jump on me for being an irresponsible parent, we left the Bambina at home with Nana).

In other news, guess what! We are thinking of buying....a house! In Umbria. Actually, not really a house. We would not really know what to do with just a house and we hate the idea of a "summer house", "second residence", or whatever people call it. We would like to buy an olive grove. To live and work in all the time forever. What do you all think? Are we crazy?

Of course, we would like the Bambina to complete some years of school in French so perhaps this dream will wait for a bit. But we're going to start looking now! Here is the kind of landscape we would like to see every day around our dream house/olive orchard:

And we have lemons...

2007-07-12T16:02:00.000+02:00

Small and green still but there. We have had this plant for about four years now. In Paris, it never bore fruit.

Question: In keeping with hippy, tree-hugging, organic self, how do I keep these babies safe from the Other Living Things on our terrace (and I am not talking about other plant life) who threaten to infest my lemon tree?

Something else on our terrace: In true I'm-French-but-I-really-wannabe-Italian fashion, the Frenchman has insisted on an olive tree. On our terrace. There are no olives on it and if it ever does bear fruit, I am not sure that I will want to eat it.

Plus I don't know what we are going to do when it gets too big for the pot it is in...

Nana is here!

2007-07-11T14:38:00.000+02:00

Mum (known to the Bambina as Nana) arrived in Rome last night and will be staying with us for the next three weeks. She is seventy-six years old, English, and (as to be expected) rather fond of cold, overcast and rainy weather. To her, twenty degrees celcius is a heat wave. It is about thirty degrees celcius in Rome these days, so the air conditioning will be on full blast for a while and our apartment will be the temperature of a movie cinema in Florida (bring a sweater if you plan to stop by).

Other implications of Mum's visit:

The Bambina will have a playmate for the rest of July. Mommy makes a hopelessly uninspiring playmate. Nana, on the other hand, is a fantastic playmate. Never tires. Never gets bored. Only, as Nana does not suffer temperatures above twenty degrees celcius, they won't be able to leave the house, except maybe to go to Explora (you guessed it, fully air-conditioned).

Cleaning help (our cleaner has abandoned us for the months of July and August, in true Italian fashion, even though she happens to be French and not Italian).

Cooking. Can you say yorkshire pudding? Bangers and mash? Fish and chips?

Company. There is no one left in Rome! It's getting kind of lonely here!

Seen, last weekend in Paris....

2007-07-08T11:09:00.000+02:00

...this sign in the Champs de Mars park.

Could it be that the Parisiens' dissolute attitude to dog mess is finally, er, changing? Is it now safe to walk in the city without looking down all the time?

No More Part Time Mommy

2007-07-06T14:35:00.000+02:00

The Bambina had her last day of nursery last Thursday and it is now "summer holidays" ... for her, anyway. For me, it is time to be a "full-time mom".

I never relished the idea of being a "full-time mom" when I was working full time as a lawyer (side note: are all those fathers who work full time "part-time dads"?). When I left my job last year, I still didn't relish the idea of spending every hour of the day keeping a two-year old occupied, much as I love her. So as soon as we got settled in Rome, I put her in another nursery for part of each day. It started out as 0900 until 13h00, but then the Bambina decided once she was home every day that she did not want to take her nap, a nap she really needed. On the other hand, if I left her at the nursery until 15h00, she would take her nap there, no problem. This was the first chip away at mommy's authority. For some reason, the Bambina was willing to nap at the nursery, but not at home. So I decided deal with things as they were rather than try to change them, and picked the Bambina up at the nursery every weekday at 15h00.

Since then, the nursery has usurped even more of my authority. Sample discussion:

Me, looking at glass beads strewn all over the floor: Please put your things away when you have finished with them.

Bambina: My don't want to put my things away.

Me: Doesn't Francesca (her teacher) at the nursery tell you that you should put things away when you have finished with them?

Bambina: But, but, but [she is in the stuttering stage], but, but, but, but, but that's at the nursery. At the nursery, my put things away. At home, my don't put things away. [Big grin on face]

All those "full time moms" now have assurance that they were right.

Feeding Infants: Anglo-Saxons, French and Italians Compared

2007-06-27T20:43:00.000+02:00

Warning: Sweeping generalizations below.

But there is truth in all generalizations...

These generalizations only apply to bourgeois, educated parents in all three countries, by the way.

Breastfeeding

Anglo-Saxon Mommy - The Academy of American Pediatrics recommends breastfeeding for a minimum of one year. Health Canada recommends two years, as does the World Health Organization. So highly educated Anglo-Saxon mommy, aware of all of these recommendations, gives breastfeeding a go. She even pumps milk when she has to go back to work.

After six months of stares, insinuations and nudges from family, friends and people on the street who are, er, uncomfortable with breastfeeding, Anglo-Saxon mommy switches to formula.

Italian Mamma - The pediatrician told me to stop breastfeeding at sixteen weeks. I must obey the pediatrician, no matter how contrary to nature and common sense his or her advice seems. The pediatrician is God (editor's note: since the pediatrician has not read an article or book in about twenty years, I guess he must be).

French Maman - You want me to do what? And ruin my beautiful breasts? Are you kidding me?

Breastfeeding in Public

Anglo-Saxon Mommy - Oh my God. Are you crazy? I can't breastfeed in public. Someone might see a bit of my nipple. What if I offend the person (editor's note: because heaven forbid that your baby's well-being might be a greater priority than some other person's aesthetic sensibilities). I need a blanket to cover up. Or maybe I should breastfeed in the public restroom (editor's note: EEWWWW!!).

Italian Mamma - Italian mamma will breastfeed baby in public but if the baby is older than four months, family will inquire as to why she is "still" breastfeeding and older men will offer her a blanket (editor's note: why not ask the older man if he would like to eat under a blanket?).

French Maman - Okay if I have to but I really hate for men to see my breasts outside of a sexual context. After all, I have my femininity to preserve [and breastfeeding is masculine?].

(Aside: One well-known and respected French psycho-pediatre, Dr. Marcel Rufo, said in an interview with Elle magazine that a mother should wean her baby from the breast at six months, latest, because baby needs to "learn" that maman's breasts are for papa and not for baby. WTF???).

Bottle-feeding

Anglo-Saxons- Most North American doctors recommend bottle-weaning around one year, 18 months latest. Most Anglo-Saxon parents don't get around to it until their child is two years old. There was one recent study that showed a significant link between extended bottle feeding and anemia, particularly in hispanic children.

French and Italians - Not uncommon to see four-year olds sucking up a bottle of milk or, worse, apple juice. While sitting in a stroller.

Solids

Anglo-Saxons - The Academy of American Pediatrics and the World Health Organization recommend that infants start solids no earlier than the age of six months. The educated Anglo-Saxon mommy has every intention of following this recommendation...until her bruiser five month old shows various signs (waking up all hours of the night to nurse, crying for milk every hour during the day and generally being insufferable) that he already has the appetite of the average Bangladeshi eight month old and to please give him some real food now.

Unfortunately, even the most educated Anglo-Saxon parents have been brainwashed by Nestle to believe that they need to feed their infant processed rice cereal (read food having no nutritional value whatsoever except for a huge overdose of iron to really kill the baby's liver).

Italians - The pediatrician told me to start solids at sixteen weeks. I must obey the pediatrician, no matter how contrary to nature and common sense his or her advice seems. Pureed fruit and veggies (in addition to formula) from sixteen weeks it is.

French - Baby gets haute cuisine from five months onward. This consists of adding pureed vegetables to baby's bottle, in addition to the formula (no breastfeeding here), so that baby gets used to the taste of real vegetables.

To the credit of the French, rice cereal is hardly known or available in France, although I have noticed Bledina trying to make inroads with its version. I remember our French pediatrician telling me that when the Bambina would be ready to eat real bread, she would eat real bread and that there was no need to give her some refined, processed, and stripped cereal as a substitute.

Of course, I am only talking about trends here. And not everyone follows trends (fortunately!). I have a French friend who firmly believed in "child-led weaning" and who breastfed her daughter for five years. I have Italian friends who breastfed beyond one year. I know Anglo-Saxons who chose not to breastfeed at all. But the trends are definitely there.

Scenes from Matera - City of Stone

2007-06-25T11:15:00.000+02:00

We drove all the way down to the Basilicata region this weekend. On the way, we were thinking of making a pitstop for lunch at KC's place in the region of Campania but it would have been short notice and I don't have her exact address. Next time, KC (unless you are in labour)!

We ended up in the city of Matera. People haven't stopped living here since the paleolithic age. Absolutely everything is stone and our hotel room was in a cave. The Bambina found all the stairs rather daunting and I was very glad that we decided not to bring the stroller. (Note to self: tell the Bambina this week that there will be no more stroller once she turns three years old).

We left Sunday morning and headed to the Amalfi coast for lunch and a swim at the beach. And then back to Rome. Does life get any better?

Children's Parties: What's to Like?

2007-06-20T19:10:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, the Bambina attended yet another festa di compleanno. It was the birthday of one of her little friends, who had just turned three.

I don't think that my mother even started organising birthday parties for me until I was, maybe, five years old. And even then, she specified "NO GIFTS PLEASE" on the invitation, thinking that surely fifteen gifts at once for a child barely conscious of the concept of a year gone by, let alone the idea of celebrating it, was absurd.

Nowadays, you are robbing your little one of her childhood if you don't go all out on the festivities when she turns three. I suppose I can live with that. It's just that I really don't enjoy going to these parties.

The problem is that, whenever I attend one of these functions, it reminds me all over again of all the things that I do differently from other parents - which I can live with, except when I am thrown into their surroundings and forced to remain for three hours.

Take something simple, like the beverages on offer. There is Coca-Cola (which I am supposed to give to my two-year old, mind you). There is gassy water. Uh, maybe for me but not for the Bambina. She hates that stuff. There there is diet Fanta. You want me to give my two-year old a diet beverage. Filled with Aspartame? Eewww! And there is that disgusting fake orange drink filled with sugar and E129 red artificial colour. I don't think so.

There is no regular mineral water. There is no regular juice. So I end up having to look for tap water for the Bambina, while trying not to offend the parents, who happen to think that I am a loony mamma for not offering her two-year old a glass of Coke to drink "just this once".

The food at Italian parties is normally not bad. In fact, the selection is much better than at the Anglo-Saxon doos, I find. There is pizzette and ham (probably pre-packaged but still...) on buns and Parmesan cheese and, of course, a cake. Very good. Then there is this big and completely age-inappropriate pinata that the kids are way too young to be able to break, so some bigger sibling has to do it. When some nine-year old has finally managed to break open the pinata, a hundred or so candies pour out onto the floor. Not jellies, mind you. Large, coloured, rock-hard candies. For two and three-year olds. Can you say "choking hazard"? And apart from the significant choking risk for children that age, why on earth would I encourage my daughter to eat that? It has refined sugar, artificial colour and artificial flavour and absolutely nothing good in it. And it rots teeth. It is junk. Other parents think that candies are a necessary part of parties. I don't. But its their party and we are stuck here. See what I mean?

But the worst is that, although I am supposed to attend these functions with the Bambina (i.e., I cannot just leave her at the door as I might in Canada or the USA), there is nothing really there for adults. So I sit bored for three hours, watching the children be entertained. I don't drink Coke, diet Fanta or fake juice so I can't even sip something. Oh, and I make small talk with the mommies from Parioli (rich, snobby area next door to where we live), with whom I have very little in common, other than children, as far as I can tell.

Finally, when we leave the party, after reciting the requisite farewell and thank you to the parents, the birthday child, the birthday child's grandparents from both sides, etc., the Bambina gets this little present, which is generally a piece of plastic junk that I do not need my house littered with. I put the last one in recycling a few days ago.

How would I do things differently, were I to throw a similar party for the Bambina (which I don't have to 'cause her birthday is in August when no one will be here. yay!)?

Prosecco, beer and wine, coffee and mineral water available for the adults and a separate room for the adults to hang out in and hob-nob a little (I might as well be able to drink alcohol in peace while forced to spend time with these people);
A magician and/or other non-frightening person (i.e. not Mickey Mouse or other enormous fantasy character that makes the Bambina shriek in terror when he approaches) to entertain the little ones away from the grown-ups;
For children's beverages, water and real 100% juice and maybe some sugary drink but without aspartame or artificial colour;
No candies;
Water pistols or a sprinkler in the hot summer sun (I would, of course, tell the parents to bring a change of clothes for their child, lest they have a fit that their child is going to catch pneumonia from getting wet in thirty degree celcius weather);
Each child gets a small book when he or she says goodbye.

Basta.

Getting an Annual Pass to the Zoo : Can it really be this Hard?

2007-06-19T10:12:00.000+02:00

My need to find diversions for the Bambina this summer has led me to our local zoo, called the Bioparco. It is just a bike ride away in the Villa Borghese. It is close enough that we can always stop over for a few minutes when we are in the park and there is even this fantastic reptile house that you can check out when you are getting too hot walking outside in the Roman summer sun.

The first time we visited (just the Bambina and I), I just bought a one-time ticket to see what it was like. It cost 8.50 euro for me and the Bambina got in free. After being impressed by all the animals and not so impressed by the stroller and wheelchair-unfriendly staircases throughout (who designs these places?), I decided that, on balance, it might be worth purchasing an annual pass for 52 euro. After all, the Bambina would very soon be three years old and no longer get in free, the zoo is not too far away from where we live, and there is not much else appropriate for her age nearby. We might as well have the zoo pass.

So one day I go to the zoo, wallet in one hand, the Bambina in the other, to purchase our annual pass. We arrive at 16h55. I am aware that the zoo closes at 18h00 during summer hours so am not worried about getting in. There is a small queue and when we finally make it to the wicket, I ask in my best Italian for an annual pass for one child and one adult. In very rapid Italian, the woman responds that this is not possible, as it is now 17h05 and the zoo office closes at 17h00 (despite the fact that the zoo closes at 18h00). "Come back tomorrow," she says.

So the next day, Saturday, the Frenchman, the Bambina and I all stroll to the other end of the park once again with the intention of buying an annual pass and visiting the zoo. Once again, there is a small queue and when we arrive at the wicket, I stammer in my best Italian that we would like an annual pass for one adult and one child. "It is not possible" she replies. "Today is Saturday. Administration closed on Saturday. Cannot process application. Come back Monday".

Of course, I had been an idiot to think that they might "process the application" (what on earth does one have to "process" to get a zoo pass, for God's sake?) on Saturday, if they were not willing to do it on Friday at 17h05 but the lady the day before might have spared me the trip by not telling me to "come back tomorrow".

Monday afternoon, I had my wallet ready and everything else prepared to go to the zoo. Once again, the Bambina and I trekked across the park to the Bioparco and stood in line. We arrived at the wicket and I asked to purchase an annual pass for one adult and one child.

"Do you have two pocket-sized photographs of your daughter?"

Photographs? Noone told me anything about photographs.

"We cannot give you the pass without having the photographs".

After some pleading on my part, the woman agreed to let me purchase the pass then if I returned later with the photos.

"Great!" I beamed, all too soon. I pulled out my bancomat card and handed it to her. I had wanted to pay cash but the bancomat machine (that's ATM for you Americans out there) at the post office had broken down, once again.

"Sorry, we cannot take cards today", the woman behind the counter said, pointing to a notice that said that their bancomat machine was out of order.

Tuesday morning, I scrounge our office for old leftover passport photos of the Bambina, thinking that if I have to actually pay to have photos taken of her, the zoo pass may no longer make economic sense. Having located photos that do not look too out of date, I go to the zoo again, this time without the Bambina. I don't want her to suffer another disappointment of not being able to go in.

I get to the wicket and ask for the zoo pass. The woman asks for the photos. I hand them to her along with 52 euro in cash. She hands me a form to fill out and then starts furiously to look for something else. I can't figure out what. Five minutes go by. She returns to the wicket and tries to tell me that she cannot give me the zoo pass as she cannot find the other form that has to be filled out.

This time, I refuse to move until I have the zoo pass. I am not returning to that wicket for a fifth time. No way. She gives in but makes me promise to return on the next visit to complete the form, which in the end I agree to do.

And now we have our zoo pass. It only took five visits.

Is Maman Mean or Magnifique?

2007-06-18T10:16:00.001+02:00

This is the title of an article by Janine di Giovanni that was printed in the Daily Telegraph last week. According to the article, we Anglo-Saxon mothers think that French mothers are awfully hard on their children. They shout, they slap, they enforce manners.

I do think that French parents make a bigger deal about enforcing manners, even on very small children. Take table manners, for example. When the Bambina gets up from the table before she has finished her meal, I think of various culturally-based parenting practices that I could apply. The Anglo-Saxon in me says "Oh, well, she is only two years old. She doesn't have the attention span to sit through a meal. Let her walk around and come back when she is ready to eat more".

Then then Italian mamma in me wants to chase the Bambina around the table with a spoon and try to convince her to eat some more. "Please, you must eat! You are a growing girl!" (I have not actually seen this happen but my French girlfriends here in Rome assure me that this is what Italian parents do when their children don't eat. These French mothers are, of course, aghast, at such absurd tactics. "It puts the child at the centre of attention, exactly what he is seeking," they say).

And then there is the French way: The Bambina stays at the table until I say that the meal is over or she will be disciplined, which usually means sent to her room but maybe some parents do smack.

I tend to do a mixture of French - Anglo-Saxon. The Bambina is only two (albeit almost three), so I do expect that she will get up from the table periodically. When she does, I say "Oh, I guess you have finished your supper" and proceed to take the plate away. At which point, she either returns to her chair to eat, in which case it worked, or she does not, in which case she really has eaten enough. I don't make her clean her plate. (I don't serve snacks between meals, either, except fruit, so if she gets hungry before the next meal, she either eats fruit or waits).

I am not personally convinced that the French spank or shout more than Anglo-Saxon parents or even Italian parents (who are known for being extra affectionate and doting). I think that French parents might enforce manners a little more, which may be appropriate or not, depending on the age and the child. The Frenchman absolutely insists on the Bambina saying "Bonjour, Papa" to him every morning. He ingrained this practice into her when she was the ripe age of 20 months she was just learning to talk. Sometimes, she still doesn't say it (she never was a morning person). But the Frenchman certainly doesn't smack her or shout at her if she does not say the requisite "Bonjour" first thing. He just gets really grouchy (that must be where she gets it from).

Things that Embarrass the Frenchman

2007-06-12T13:02:00.000+02:00

1. When I order french fries at a restaurant (I try to justify by saying that french fries are, after all, Belgian in origin and therefore, European, but he doesn't buy it).

2. When I ask for ketchup with my fries.

3. When I neglect to utter the perfunctory Bonjour/Buongiorno (depending on the country) as we enter a shop or Au revoir/Arrivederci as we exit the shop, demonstrating that not only am I mal-eduqué, but that so is he for being with me.

4. When I insinuate, in front of French friends or acquaintances, that the French just might be be wrong about something.

5. When I ask the waiter if the fish is farmed or wild ("Of course, it's farmed", the Frenchman says. "Why waste everyone's time asking?")

6. When, having unfolded some merchandise in a clothing store to have a look at it, I leave same merchandise unfolded for the employees to refold and put away, thinking that I will, in any event, never be able to get the article back into the perfectly folded and flat state that it was in before I went and touched it. This comportment also shows that I am mal-eduqué. (And to think that I thought that part of working in a clothing store might involve refolding and reshelving the clothes. How unreasonable of me.)

No doubt I will come up with more.

Ponza

2007-06-11T12:38:00.000+02:00

It is beautiful - I won't deny it. But it's thirty percent more expensive than any other travel destination near Rome.

For example:

ferry to get to the island - 150 euro for three return tickets

fish for two people - 100 euro, whatever the fish

3-star hotel - 200 euro per night

I didn't know about the fish until well after we had left the restaurant. The Frenchman's deft fingers managed to snap up the bill and hand the credit card over before I had the chance to see the price and publicly express my anglo-saxon outrage at not having been informed of the price ahead of time.

On day two, we wanted to rent a barca (a rickety motor boat). The Frenchman asked every single outfit lining the harbor how much it would be to rent a boat for the day and cursed under his breath as every response was somewhere around 70 euro. Fed up with being ripped off, the Frenchman asked for a smallest boat available and we ended up paying only 40 euro plus the cost of the gas.

The island is a marvel of nature and definitely worth seeing. And the people are lovely (but nonetheless crooks).

You, you and you

2007-06-08T20:27:00.000+02:00

In Italian, there are three words for the word "you" (as the subject of a sentence, that is. I am not even going to get into other parts of speech). There is "tu" for when you are talking to family or friends, "lei" for when you are talking to a person you don't know well or with whom you want to maintain a certain distance or respect, and "voi" for when you are talking to more than one person.

At least, that is what they taught me at Italian school.

So why, when I go into a store or to the market, do the people refer to me in the tu form? I feel like asking them, "Ci conosciamo?" ("Do we know each other?").

I suppose it shouldn't bother me but it does. In France, calling another adult who is not your friend or work colleague "tu", even if the person is your own age, just isn't done. Even after five years of going to the same butcher in Paris, we used vous when conversing with him, never tu. To do anything else would have made all of us uncomfortable.

"It's all part of the anglosization of the Italian language", someone tells me. "After all, in English, there is no formal version of "you". There is just you, which obviously means tu."

Wrong. In fact, in modern English, it is the tu that is missing. Whether we are talking to the Queen or to our dog, we use what used to be exclusively the second person plural, "you". The second person singular, thou, became obsolete a long time ago and is now reserved for when we want to talk to God, the most personal of beings.

English is, in fact, the most democratic of languages, because in English, we assume that everyone, even animals and children, deserves designation of the formal "you".

And so, if the Italians really wanted their language to be a little closer to English, everyone would be lei , or possibly voi. Certainly not tu.

You're It!

2007-06-07T12:43:00.000+02:00

I have been "tagged" and now it's my turn. Bear with me, people.

1. Add a direct link to your post below the name of the person who tagged you. Include the city/state and country you’re in.

Okay. Here goes.

Nicole (Sydney, Australia)
velverse (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
LB (San Giovanni in Marignano, Italy)
Selba (Jakarta, Indonesia)
Olivia (London, England)
ML (Utah, United States)
Lotus (Toronto, Canada)
tanabata (Saitama, Japan)
Andi (Dallas [ish], Texas, United States)
Lulu (Chicago, Illinois, United States)
Chris (Boyne City, Michigan, United States)
AB (Cave Creek, Arizona, United States)
Johnny Yen (Chicago, Illinois, United States)
Bubs (Mt Prospect, Illinois, United States)
Mob (Midland, Texas United States)
Yas (Ahwatukee, Arizona USA)
Alicia(Idaho Falls, Idaho, USA)
Tug (Hell, Colorado, USA)
Bond (Memphis, TN, USA)
TopChamp (Glasgow, UK)
Kailani (Honolulu, HI, USA)
Amber (Henderson, TN, USA)
the weirdgirl (San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA)
JChevais (Paris, France)
Gem (Norfolk, VA, USA)
Caroline (Rome, Italy)

2. List out your top five favorite places to eat at your location.

Well, the selection is, er, rather abundant here. Best to start off with an out-of-the-way place that you would never know existed unless you lived here. In the Jewish quarter, there is this shabby looking place with no sign on the front and about 8 tables inside. You have to buy a membership to eat there because it doesn't even have a liquor licence. It's called Sora Margherita, Piazza delle Cinque Scole 30, telephone 06 687 42 16. Order the artichokes (carcioffi), one in Roman style and one in Jewish Ibraica style. Delicious.

For super trendy, try Shaki restaurant near piazza Navona, via del governo vecchio 123 - 123a, telephone 06 68308796.

For upscale traditional fare in the heart of the historical centre, there is traditional Da Fortunato Al Pantheon Via Pantheon, 55, telephone 06 679 27 88.

For a sumptious view of Rome and okay food, there is the Hotel Eden, Via Ludovisi, 49, telephone 06 482 15 84.

And finally, for authentic Roman food, there is Nino at Via Borgognona 11, telephone 06 679 56 76.

3. Tag five other people (preferably from other countries/states) and let them know they’ve been tagged.

Oooo, this is fun. Here goes:

Wabash Cannonball 'cause she gives such great travel tips and should be a known resource for all;
Charlotte over in Germany;
Polly in Paris;
KC (Southern Italy counts as a separate country); and
My Melange for her love of France and Italy.

Fashion Baby

2007-06-05T20:36:00.000+02:00

Raincoat and matching boots by Kidorable. Available at Coin (at least the one on via Cola di Rienzo)!

I still think that Paris offers the best selection of children's clothes but I see now that there is hope for Rome to catch up.

The Trilingual Child: Can this Work?

2007-06-04T23:17:00.000+02:00

When I was working full time in Paris, the Bambina started talking at around sixteen months and her words were pretty much all in ... French, much to my disappointment. She even insisted on calling me maman instead of mommy.

A few months later, I left my job for good. The Bambina still went to daycare for a few hours a day so that I could get things done but her English vocabulary rapidly picked up just from seeing a lot more of me. By twenty-two months, the Bambina was speaking about fifty percent English and fifty percent French. And she started calling me mommy instead of maman about half the time.

And then we moved to Italy.

Now, the Bambina speaks: one hundred percent English (with me) and one hundred percent Italian (at the nursery). She speaks no French.

With the Frenchman, she tries to speak Italian (somehow knowing that it is closer to French than is English) and if that fails, she resorts to English (which annoys him to no end). What's more, she claims that she does not understand the Frenchman when he speaks French to her.

And yet, back in Paris, a speech pathologist (who also happened to be a bilingualism expert) had assured us that trilingualism was entirely do-able and yes, the "third language" would be a bit behind the other two dominant languages but it could still "work".

It's not working.

I am even considering lifting (gasp!) the ban on television (the Bambina doesn't watch except when she is at her nana's place) so that she can (gasp!) watch the teletubbies in French (nana has offered to purchase requisite set of French teletubby DVDs). Anything to motivate her to understand and speak to her father.

I suppose I could also enroll her in the French school this year, notwithstanding the catastrophic visit at the Lycee Chateaubriand but I think I will hold out for now. Worse comes to worse, she can go there when she turns five and still barely utters Bonjour to a French acquaintance.

Montessori Nido

2007-06-03T00:08:00.000+02:00

Last Tuesday, there was a meeting at the Bambina's nido for all parents. I was expecting some long question and answer period but in fact the staff showed us an hour-long film of a typical day at the nido.

This nido is a Montessori nursery, which makes is so different from other nurseries that the Bambina has attended in France and Italy. The Montessori method is based on the assumption that children prefer order over chaos and reality over fantasy. In her other nurseries, there were a lot of plastic toys, generally strewn all over the floor within an hour's time, lots of crying and whining, running around, and lots of noise.

In this nursery, there is no running permitted inside (too disruptive), I have never heard whining or crying there during the work time, and there is an aura of peace and tranquillity. There is, in a nutshell, no chaos. It is wonderful. And there are not many toys, plastic or otherwise. There is a wooden train set and a there is a doll to dress. And there are many materials. There are pitchers of water to pour into a funnel. There are beeds of varying sizes to transfer with a spoon from one bowl to another without dropping any. There are cloths to hang on a clothes rack. And there are numerous puzzles to work on.

Which leads me to another difference from the traditional nurseries. Here, the children do not play. They "work". Or at least that is what they are told they are doing. To them, it is all play. As Dr. Montessori once said, "Children's work is their play". In the film that we saw, the children's faces looked so focused as they tried to pour, construct, transfer, clean up, wash. You would never have believed that a two-year old child had developed that level of concentration. It was certainly something that we as parents did not witness at home.

After work, it is lunchtime. The children sit around a table and eat a three-course meal that is served on real, porcelain, dishes. The children eat, by themselves and without making a mess, from real metal spoons and forks and drink water from real glasses. Not one child gets up from the table.

After the meal, it is bathroom time. Here, too, the emphasis is on autonomy. A couple of weeks ago, the educatrice asked me to please stop dressing the Bambina in overalls. "Why ever not? ," I asked. Overalls are, after all, ideal for play.

"It limits her autonomy", she explained. "She can't take them off and put them back on by herself when she goes to the toilet by herself." Which makes complete sense. Yet how many traditional nurseries or daycares would have given me this piece of advice?

In September, the Bambina will attend an Italian public Montessori preschool/kindergarten (scuola materna). I am so grateful that in Rome, this option exists. I can only hope that the fact that the school is public will not mean that it does not maintain its true Montessori distinctiveness.

Training Pants

2007-06-01T11:04:00.000+02:00

Today, one of the other mamma's at the Bambina's nido bumped into me in the street. "I need to know where you buy the special panties for the Bambina", she asks. "Special panties?" I ask, a look of bewilderment crosses my face. "Yes. Francesca (the educatrice at the nido) says that the Bambina has some underwear that are fantasticha for potty training."

"Ah! The training pants!" Now, it is clear. The Bambina has some cloth training pants that I put her in all the time when she turned two and was learning to go on the potty. You can't get them in Italy (or France, or anywhere else in continental Europe, that I know of), so my sister sent them to me from Canada. Because the training pants are basically just extra thick underwear, the Bambina still wears them once in a while as regular underwear just because they are comfortable.

So I explained to the mamma that you can't buy them here but that I would be happy to give her the Bambina's to use, since the Bambina doesn't need them anymore. We have about eight or nine pairs.

The mamma looked really confused, and then said "Oh, you mean you can wash them?"

I think she was hoping that we North Americans had invented some kind of new-fangled disposible pull-up that succeeded in toilet training where Huggies and Pampers pull-ups had hopelessly failed.

Child-Friendliness: How do the French and the Italians Compare?

2007-05-30T21:39:00.000+02:00

Availability of Public Daycare:

France – You, too, can leave your three-month old baby in a daycare five days per week, eleven hours per day, and not feel guilty about it.

Italy - Are you suffering from poverty of Dickensian proportions?

Sweets for children:

France: Friends and acquaintances whom you see in your home, in others' homes and in the park will often offer your little one juice, cakes, cookies or crackers, whether or not you would like your little one to eat sweets at that particular time.

Italy - Multiply offers of sweets by a factor of ten and include every time you step into the elevator and someone else is in it, all outings to a children's clothing store, and all visits to the bakery (fortunately, the bread in Italy is so bad that your child may actually reject what the baker offers him). Include therein chocolate, lollipops, hard candy and all the neon pink and green complete junk food that you can imagine. Expect the person offering the sweets to take umbrage should you refuse on your tot's behalf.

Toy Stores:

France – Toys R Us, Eveil & Jeux, La Grande Recrée, and numerous boutiques filled with wooden toys can be found in the city of Paris.

Italy – Imagine stores with half the selection of the Toys R Us but with the "plastic junk" factor multiplied by ten (Città del Sole being the exception.)

Comments in the Street Regarding One's Child:

In Paris – (Older French woman in ultra polite and modest tone, faint smile barely visible) "Vous avez un très beau bébé, madame", as she briskly passes by.

In Rome – (Older Italian woman in ecstatic voice, broad grin on face) "Che bella! Ciao, bellisima! Come si chiama? E Carena! Bellissima! Ciao bella! Ciao bella! Come ti chiami? Non capisci italiano? Ciao! Ciao!" (continue for a good five more minutes...).

Restaurants:

France - Your 2-year old will be welcomed with open arms into any restaurant and promptly seated right next to you at a table. Of course, her eyes will be at the level of the table, as the restaurant has no highchairs. That's okay, though. The fact that she is sitting at a lower level than the adults around her will enable her to avoid breathing in the wafts of cigarette smoke blown her way from every single other table in the restaurant. Your waiter will pass you a look of disdain as he collects the unfinished meal of your enfant reine.

Italy - Even a three-star Michelin restaurant will have a high chair available for your little one. And smoking has been banned indoors so no worries there, either. What is more, your waiter will be shocked and impressed that your two-year old is willing to eat the food that she is served, including some of the meat, the cheese and maybe even some veggies and the fruit served for dessert. His two-year old has refused to eat anything but pasta since she started solids at sixteen weeks.

Parks:

Paris - Besides the champs de mars and the fantastic jardin du luxembourg (carrousels, pony rides, at least 5 playareas with sandbox and/or equipment for small children, puppet theatre, fish pond), Paris has hundreds of little play areas dotting the city, each engineered to French mathematical perfection to fit into an area that is shaded from the sun between 15h00 and 18h00 every afternoon.

Rome - There is the Bioparco, the Cassina di Raffaello, the puppet theatre and cinema dei piccoli, all in the Villa Borghese. All good BUT only the Bioparco is suitable for children under 4. And the Villa Borghese, a park measuring a few square kilometres, has approximately (no, exactly) one half decent play area for children, right next to the Casina di Raffaello. No sandboxes anywhere.

Conclusion:

The French have better facilities for children, probably because in the French culture, children are traditionally expected to occupy their own space, separate from the adults, where they are seen not heard. Italy (or at least Rome) has fewer facilities available just for children (especially very small children), but my impression is that the Italians enjoy hanging out with children more than the French do.

Nemi

2007-05-28T12:35:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, we visited the Lago di Nemi (Lake Nemi) and accompanying village, just 45 minutes from Rome. This is the season for wild strawberries and the Bambina devoured three baskets of them.

After-School Snack

2007-05-26T14:26:00.000+02:00

Two questions: 1) What is with some parents's insistance on stuffing their children with crap food at every available opportunity? 2) Why do they feel that they must feed my child crap food at the same time?

I pick up the Bambina at around 15h30 every weekday from her nido (that's Italian for daycare, nursury, creche, pick a term). She often likes to stick around in the courtyard of the school afterwards and run around with her friends. Now, the children are given an afternoon merenda (snack) in the nido at 15h00, which generally consists of yogurt or milk and a biscotto. There is therefore no reason to feed the children once again while they they are playing in the courtyard before going home. It seems that this fact does not stop many adults, though.

Two days ago, I pick up the Bambina at the nido at 15h30 as usual and I let her run around in the courtyard for an hour or so before we head home. At one point, the Bambina is playing with her best girlfriend, Barbara. Barbara's nanny is watching the two of them and I am watching from a little further away. Suddenly, I see that the Bambina is sucking on something. I walk up to her and ask her to open her mouth and show me what it is. It is a candy. A rock-hard sugary candy which, apart from being a choking hazard for children under three years' of age, serves no purpose other than to rot a child's teeth.

"Who gave this to you?" I ask. The Bambina pointed to the guilty party, Barbara's nanny.

"Spit it out, please." and she spits it out in my hand and starts to cry. "Please do not give her candy", I tell the nanny.

The next day, the same time, the Bambina is running around in the courtyard of her nido with three older girls. And sure enough, a nanny in charge of one of the girls pulls out a package of Tuc crackers and offers it to her charge.

"Crackers are okay", I hear you saying. Not true. Most brands are nothing more than processed junk food. Read the ingredients! If you take a look at the ingredients on a package of Tuc crackers, the first ingredient is white flour, the second ingredient is vegetable oil and the third ingredient is glucose syrop.

The nanny then proceeds to offer the Tuc crackers to the other two girls. She is then at least polite enough turn to me and ask if the Bambina may have a cracker, to which I answer, "No". (The Bambina, incidentally, does not protest at all).

"E perche non?", she asks me.

Er, because I am her parent and that is my wish? Can we leave it at that?

"Because she has already had a snack and I prefer that she wait until supper before eating," I respond.

"Let her have just one" she says, and then hands the Bambina a cracker!! Against my explicit NO! I am so flabbergasted, I just turn and walk away. I should protest but the Italian is not forthcoming and I do not have the energy. I am boiling inside, though.

Five minutes later, I see the Bambina on the other side of the courtyard, and she is eating a chocolate wafer. Noone has asked me. The failure to so much as ask me if the Bambina could eat a certain food REALLY infuriates me. What if the Bambina were diabetic? Or on a special diet prescribed by the doctor? I take it away, and tell yet another nanny that the Bambina has eaten already and that I prefer that she not eat again before suppertime.

The thing that amazes me is that these children are eating these snacks every single day in the courtyard. It is an expectation for them. They are all still thin. But if you look at the children in the school who are just a few years older, age 6 and up, you notice that in a class of sixteen kids, seven are overweight or even obese. When you go to the beach in the summer, it is staggering to see the number of obese children running around. You would think that you were in the United States, not Italy.

France vs. Italy: Whose Food is Better?

2007-05-24T10:30:00.000+02:00

Before moving to Rome, I would have said that Italy's food was better, hands down. Now that I am living here and have a better sense of what people eat from day to day and not just at restaurants, I still think that Italy has better food, BUT with some qualifications.

The Italians' forte is pasta and vegetables, especially vegetables. They know how to make vegetables taste good, whether in an antipasta, in a pasta, fritate, ratatouille, or just as a contorno all by itself. And who can really expect anything less given the ingredients available in Italy? I head to the market on any given morning to buy my vegetables and find myself deciding which of eight kinds of tomatoes to buy, some of which cost as little as one euro for a kilogram. And that is just tomatoes. There are varieties of greens, onions, broccoli and peppers that I did not even know existed before coming to Italy.

And who could deny how good the pasta is, prepared in ways that I had never imagined in France and North America?

So what are Italians bad at, when it comes to cuisine? Just a few things:

1) The bread. The bread in Italy is dry, generally unsalted, and tasteless. Even the Italians don't eat much of it. They eat pasta instead.

2) The butter. It is as bad, if not worse than the bread.

3) The cheese. I love parmagiano. Not just on pasta but eaten in chunks all by itself, with a glass of red wine to accompany it. The photo above shows the huge chunk that we are currently nibbling our way through. And I really do like mozzarella di bufala but only in combination with tomatoes, olive oil and fresh basil. The other Italian cheeses are really not my thing. Fontina, gorganzola, and pecorino all have this really pungent taste that just does not agree with me. Although one could argue that surely this is a matter of personal taste, I think that most people would agree that the French are the real masters when it comes to cheese and what's more, there are a lot more cheeses to choose from in France. We are talking around one thousand varieties. That is hard to beat.

4) The meat. I find the cuts of meat in Italy a little odd. I think the French might be a bit more skilled at it, which makes sense, given their pride in producing haute cuisine from huge slabs of meat. The Italians have good veal and that's about it.

Oh, and the French are also better at pastries and cakes, but I still always prefer a gelato for dessert. Buon appetito!

Where's the Juice?!

2007-05-22T14:52:00.000+02:00

I have just returned from the grocery store and I am furious. Why? Because once again this week, I checked the refrigerated food and drink section only to discover that there was no juice. This is not a one-time occurrence. It happens at least every two weeks.

Actually, there is something that the store personnel call juice. It contains a bit of juice from blood oranges, sugar, and E129 artificial colour and artificial flavour. Aside from being wholly unnutritious bordering on junk food, I know that it tastes disgusting. I had the privilege of trying it at one of the many birthday parties that the Bambina got to attend.

I asked one of the staff at the store where the spremuta (the Italian word for juice that is not from concentrate) was. "Over there", she said, pointing to the drink containing sugar and artificial colour and flavour. In my home country of Canada, no one would call it juice. In fact, it is against law in Canada to call anything that is not 100 percent pure juice, "juice". You have to call it "drink".

"Er, I meant the real juice that does not contain sugar or colour", I tried to clarify.

"All we have is that, this week. Next week, we might get some other juice".

What is this, the Soviet Republic of Italy? Has central planning taken hold here? I am not asking that they import Tropicana brand juice from Florida, for heaven's sake. I just want a regular carton of 100 percent not-from-concentrate, generic, Sicilian orange juice. What on earth could possibly be preventing this store, in the capital city of the country that probably has more orange trees than anywhere else in Europe (barring Spain, perhaps) from having a ongoing, reliable supply of real juice????!!

Okay, rant over. But I really would like an answer. Can anyone out there enlighten me?

The English Language: Easy-Peasy?

2007-05-17T11:09:00.000+02:00

I have been taking Italian language lessons for the past seven months. Learning the grammar is pretty tedious but I have managed to catch on and now it is just a matter of learning more and more vocabulary and, of course, speaking the language as much as possible. The Italians that I have met compliment me on the Italian that I have learned in this short amount of time, especially given that "Italian is so much harder to learn than English". Is it, though?

This is not the first time that I have heard someone make this assertion. I have often heard Italian, French and German people remark that that their language is much harder than English to learn. After all, they say, the verb conjugations in English are so easy! And there are no genders, so there is no need to determine whether a noun is "masculine" or "feminine" in order to know which article to use.

Also, the pronouns are easier in English. If you are talking about a thing and not a person, the pronoun to use is "it", whether such pronoun is meant to be the subject, the direct object or the indirect object in the sentence. In German, French and Italian, the pronoun changes depending on the gender of the noun, whether singular or plural, and whether the pronoun is the subject, direct or the indirect object. Very complicated stuff and very tedious to learn.

But is English really all that easy, apart from what I have mentioned above? My thinking is that it is not. The number one proof that English is not so easy to learn is the failure of the vast majority of continental Europeans, apart from the Scandinavians and the Dutch, to learn to speak it well, even at a basic level. And this, despite the ubiquity of English in our world. Yes, English verbs, conjugated in the present tense, are easy. And yet how often I hear a non-native say "he have" instead of "he has". Yes, English nouns are not generally assigned a gender. But articles are a very small element of language.

And if English is so easy, why is it that the vast majority of continental Europeans cannot bear to watch a Hollywood film in the original version with subtitles, instead of in the dubbed version? Shouldn't they understand this easy language sufficiently to want to hear the actors' real voices instead of some dub-in whose words don't even match the lip movements of the actors?

The truth is, English is easy to learn to speak badly. It is not an easy language to learn to speak well. It is not an easy language for a non-native to understand when listening to a native speaker speak it at a normal, native speaker, pace. And it is a very difficult language to learn to read.

What elements of English make it a difficult second language to learn? To begin with, English does not have a consistent grammatical structure that is recognizable as deriving from one particular language. It is pretty much a mish-mash of French and German grammar. For example, English has a near future tense (e.g."I am going to ride my bike today), as does French, but uses "would" to form almost all verbs in the conditional mode and "will" to form the simple future tense ("We will go again next year"), as in German.

Secondly, English has, unlike almost any other language in the world, a "progressive" form that can be used within each verb tense. We don't say "I walk to the store" when we are trying to tell someone that this is what we are in the process of doing at this very moment. We say "I am walking to the store". It would be bad English not to say it that way.

You might think the progressive form is easy enough to catch onto but it is rare for a non-native speaker to be completely comfortable with when and when not to use it and which tense to use it in! Try explaining to a German, a French person or an Italian why we say "I have been living in Italy for 5 years now" when in their language, they would say "I live in Italy for 5 years now". At best, they might say in English "I am living in Italy for 5 years now", which would still be wrong.

Thirdly, English has more past tenses than the majority of western languages. To start with, you can say "I have gone on a walk" (called the present perfect tense even though it is actually a past tense) or you can say "I went on a walk" (the simple past tense). The difference between the two is subtle but meaningful. The first means either that (1) you are still on the walk or (2) you have returned from the walk very recently. This tense is used with reference to the present, even though it is a past tense. For example, "I have already gone on a walk today" or "I have not gone on a walk yet today". On the other hand, "I went on a walk" means that you returned from the walk a while ago (which could mean this morning or a few years ago).

In German, French and Italian, there is no distinction between the actions described above. You use their present perfect tense to express each (ich bin gegangen, je suis allé, and io sono andato) and the listener has to judge from the context what is meant. In English, we distinguish.

You might say that this distinction between the present perfect and simple past is pretty simple but again, it is rare to find a non-native English speaker who can get this right all the time (the Spanish are the exception - they have the same idea in their language). The Frenchman, who has been speaking English for 25 years now, is constantly saying things like "Yesterday, we have gone to see a film" or even worse "Yesterday, we have been going to see a film".

When you add in the progressive form, the distinction between the present perfect and simple past becomes even more difficult to master. Sentences such as "What have you been doing today"? just don't exist in other languages in that exact form. Italian comes close with "cosa stavi facendo" but not quite there, since this is closer to "What were you doing?", and therefore fails to capture the recent nature of the events.

When you add up all the different ways one can say something in the past tense in English, you end up with a pretty long list:

- I have gone on a walk (present perfect tense)
- I went on a walk (simple past tense)
- I have been going on a walk (present perfect progressive tense)
- I was going on a walk (imperfect tense)
- I used to go on a walk (remote past tense for a repeated action)
- I would go on a walk (conditional mode used as past tense for a repeated action)
- I had gone on a walk; (past perfect tense (also known as the pluperfect)
- I had been going on a walk (past perfect progressive tense)

In spoken French, you have the passé composé, imparfait and plusqueparfait and that is it. In spoken Italian, you have the passato prossimo, the imperfetto and the trapassato. Compare that with the list above. One can always memorize how to conjugate even the most irregular verbs. It is a far more daunting task to understand to subtleties of when to use eight past tenses.

And then you have to get the past participles right in English. English verb conjugations might be easy in general but the past participles can be as irregular as in any other language. I drink, I drank, I have drunk. I take, I took, I have taken. I swim, I swam, I have swum. I speak, I spoke, I have spoken....

Finally, English just has so many many many more words and expressions than any other Western language and probably any other language in the world. Take a look at an English-French or English-German or English-Italian dictionary and it is immediately obvious that the English part is so much thicker than the part containing words in the other language. The historical reason for this abundant vocabulary is that the English language inherited, in fact, two vocabularies. There is the Germanic base. And then there is the more sophisticated vocabulary inherited from the French Normans following the Norman Conquest in 1066. In addition to that, there are all the words developed in the colonies of the British Empire. Australian English is not exactly the same as American English which is not the same as Canadian English or British English. And then, there are the thousands of words that are invented and absorbed into the English language every day. I once asked a Danish woman who had been living in California for the past twenty-five years which language she now preferred to speak and she replied "English, because there are so many more words to express oneself with than in Danish."

I won't even get into reading and writing English except to say that there is no question that English is the singularly most difficult language to read of all European languages using the same alphabet. Harder than French and definitely harder than German or Italian, both of which are completely phonetic.

So when someone says to me that English is just so much easier to learn, I usually reply, "I find it much easier, too. Let's speak English to each other from now on!"

Things I Miss About France: Part 1 - Children's Clothing

2007-05-15T22:04:00.000+02:00

Paris has the cutest, most adorable, most fashionable, gorgeous and well-made children's clothes of anywhere in the western world (except, possibly, Madrid). And what is more, they come in a really wide price range. Forget Gap. Their kids' clothes fit too large, anyway. There is the ultra cute, practical and cheap Tout Compte Fait. You can also head to Monoprix, which has an adorable children's collection. Then there is Zara, which has a cute albeit limited selection at very low prices, and Du Pareil au Meme, which also emphasizes practical and reasonably priced. Don't forget Petit Bateau, the "must" for all underwear and pyjamas. And there is the classic look at Neck and Neck, and the ultra French, ultra classic, ultra expensive Bonpoint. And there is my personal all-time favourite, Catimini. Oh, and if you don't feel like going out to shop at all, you can always order online from La Redoute or Verbaudet. Both have very cheap and nice children's clothes. Oh yeah, and there is a Gap. But I hardly ever bought anything there.

In Rome, there is Benetton (boring), Prenatal (boring) and Zara (cute and cheap, so one point there - but Zara is Spanish, not Italian). There are two Petit Bateau stores, each with about half the selection available in Paris at about 1.25 times the price. There is also a Bonpoint, whose already outrageous prices have been hiked to 1.34 times the price. And there is not much else. There isn't even a Gap.

In Paris, there are entire streets dedicated to children's clothing. Not in Rome. When I take the Bambina to her nursery, the other parents often say what a lovely outfit the Bambina is wearing and whereever did I find it. "In Paris", I reply, trying not to sound like a snob. But I can't help it. Deep down, I know that, in this respect, Paris is definitely oh so superior.

Preschool

2007-05-14T11:16:00.000+02:00

Or should I say, just plain school, since it's not really preschool here. It's called scuola materna and it starts at age 3. It is universal and free. Or that's what they say but we had to pay 100 euro when we registered the Bambina.

The system is not bad. You get to pick whichever public school you want your little tyke to attend. It does not have to be the one closest to your house. Then fill out the form to register your child.

The problem arises when you have picked a school that lots of other parents want their child to attend as well, which of course always happens. There is this point system to determine whether your child gets in or not. 300 points if your child is handicapped. 100 points if you live in the area. An extra 40 points if you are a single parent. 40 points if your name is Maria, etc.

If your child does not have enough "points" and you have not registered your child for another school as well, you could be in trouble. Your child might be stuck with a second-rate public school with no garden or courtyard. So many parents register their child at two schools and then cancel at one of them once their child has been assured admission into the other. Apparently, it is illegal to register one's child at two schools and yet, the point system for getting admitted effectively requires that this be done. That's Italy for you!

The school that we have chosen is a public Montessori school. Because it is a Montessori school, children applying for a place in the preschool and who have already been attending a Montessori daycare (a nido) are given an extra 40 points towards meeting admission criteria. Since I knew all about this point system and the priority given to children that had been attending a Montessori nido, I enrolled the Bambina in a Montessori nido in January, just one week before enrolling the Bambina for September of this year in the Montessori public school (shortly after the catastrophic visit at the Lycee Chateaubriand). And sure enough, she got into the public Montessori school thanks to the extra points she had. In New York City, doing that would make me an Alpha Mom, a genre of parenting that I generally loathe. But in this systen, you have to be an Alpha Mom to get your child into a good public school.

Before I enrolled the Bambina at this school, I attended a meeting with seventy other Italian Alpha Mammas at the school. We were introduced to the teachers, given a tour of the school, and told a little about Montessori education. It was very nice except that, between the fact that the other mothers were all yelling out questions simultaniously and the fact that it was all in Italian, I understood very little of what was said. I can only hope that it really is a Montessori school and not just a watered down version of the same.

I suppose some people would criticize this system for creating unequal schools. On the other hand, back in France, parents are forced to send their children to the school that is closest to their residence, even if it is a lousy school. This also creates a multi-tiered system - a uniformly lousy system for poor children living in the banlieu (the slum areas of the suburbs) who are all forced to attend the same school, an okay system for middle class children, and a superior system for the children whose parents have enough money to send their children to a private school instead.

Dispelling Myths Abounding in Italian Parenting Culture

2007-05-11T19:29:00.000+02:00

No doubt, parents in all cultures adhere to rules based on precepts that are just plain wrong. Here are the things that I wish I could tell many Italian parents:

1.) Breastfeeding your baby beyond 16 weeks will not turn him into a sexual pervert.

2.) Your child's pediatrician is not God.

3.) Your child does not need an undershirt, jacket and/or sweater when it is 20° Celcius outside. Really.

4.) Orange drink containing inverted sugar and E129 red artificial colour does not qualify as "juice" and is probably not the best thing to give your child as part of her nutritious breakfast every morning.

5.) Your child will not die of pneumonia if she gets a little water on her pantleg just above her rubber boots from splashing in a puddle.

6.) You will not be compromising your child's emotional well-being by refusing to take her out of her carseat when she cries while in it. You might, however, compromise her physical well-being by taking her out of the carseat.

7.) Soda crackers are empty calories, not a "nutritious snack".

8.) White pasta has the same nutritional value as a piece of cake.

9.) Parmesan cheese is not high in iron, despite what your child's pediatrician has told you (See number 2.), above).

10.) Most children need to go to bed before 11PM at night if they are to get enough sleep.

11.) Assuming that your 12-year old really does "need" a cellular phone (which is doubtful), he definitely does not need it with him and turned on at all times during class at school.

Choosing a School: The Process of Elimination

2007-05-09T11:03:00.000+02:00

One of the hardest decisions for an international or expatriate family is which school to send their children to. Do you send them to the local public school where you live? Or do you send them to the school that represents your or your spouse's nationality? Or some other bilingual school?

The Bambina has Canadian and French nationality. It might therefore make sense to send her to a French school or to an English school, especially given that she will not likely be living in Italy in three or four years' time. What's more, the principal French school in Rome, the Lycee Chateaubriand, is just a few metres away from our home, and it goes from ecole maternelle (preschool) to terminale (end of high school). So early one morning in January, I headed over to the Lycee Chateaubriand to inquire about registering the Bambina for preschool in September of this year.

There is no denying that, even as I entered the school grounds, I had some reservations about putting the Bambina in a French preschool. The French school system has a reputation among anglo-saxons for teaching children conformity above all else. Thus, French teachers do not reward (and even positively discourage) children who try to be different in any way. The push for conformity applies to how the child is supposed to learn (children are expected to learn by sitting still among 29 other children and listening to the teacher talk in front of the class) as well as to the work a child produces: what counts getting the answer right, period, not the process one takes or any creative discoveries along the way. And sure enough, upon entering the building of the school, my worst suspicians were confirmed. Hanging on the wall were thirty identical paintings, each one consisting of a blue house, a brown and green tree and a yellow sun.

When I walked into the secretariat and asked (in French) about registering the Bambina, the woman behind the desk, who I assume was a secretary or other support staff member, handed me a form to fill out without another word. When she realized that I was not going to just fill out the form, give it to her and leave, she started to describe the operations of the school. "The school starts every day at 8h45 and finishes at 15h45, or it might start at 9h00 and finish at 16h00. This has not been decided yet. On Wednesdays, school finishes at noon."

"Oh, our daughter will not be needing to stay for the afternoons. Mornings will be sufficient. I can pick her up at noon. We live nearby," I replied, naively.

"This will not be possible. No child is allowed to leave the school gate before the end of the school day at 15h45 or 16h00." Keep in mind here that she was talking about children who are THREE YEARS OLD.

"Oh. Why is that? Do you have some kind of special activities going on in the afternoon that are part of your didactic programme?", I asked, once again naively.

"No. The children sleep in the afternoon," she replied in a completely banal voice. She provided no other explanation whatsoever as to why a three-year old child needed seven hours of pre-school per day. None.

"My daughter sleeps better at home, and we live very close by. Can you not make an exception?" I asked, trying very hard to be polite while feeling like I was talking to a wall.

"This will not be possible. We make no exceptions." Again, no further explanation.

Seeing that I was evidently banging my head against a brick wall on this point, I decided to move on to another question. "Could you provide me with any information about the programme that is offered at the ecole maternelle?", I ask "the things the children are supposed to learn, the method of teaching...".

"You will have to check the website for the 'education nationale'", she quipped.

"I will be sure to do that. Thank you. May I see a classroom?", I asked.

"That will not be possible. Classes are in session."

"What if I come back during the lunch break when classes are not in session?" I asked.

"That will not be possible. The secretariat is closed at that time." This woman was beginning to sound like a broken record.

"So, your telling me that I should enroll my child in your school, without ever having seen a classroom?" I asked, probably in an exasperated tone by then.

"I understand what you mean but I cannot do anything about it. We do not let parents see the classrooms before their children are enrolled. There will be a meeting with parents in October," she said, her voice completely expressionless.

This woman was really starting to annoy me. And yet, I should have known that it would be this way. How typically French to provide abysmal service to people who are one's potential clients. And how even more typically French to feel absolutely no sense of personal responsibility in providing such abysmal service or even consideration for the implications of what one is saying. I mean, this woman had basically told me that the school would be imprisoning my 3-year old daughter seven hours per day in a classroom that I was not allowed to see with an adult that I was not allowed to meet, teaching her I had no idea what. (Oh, and we were to pay them 3,200 Euro per year for this privilege). I was incredulous but, looking back, I should not have been. I left, the untouched form still lying on the secretary's desk.

Rewind to two months before, when I inquired at St. George's British International School and received a rather different reception. When I had arrived at St. George's, the administration immediately escorted me to the principal's office. Classes were in session, and after a 30-minute discussion with the principal regarding the preschool and kindergarten programme and the school's pedagogical approach, the principal gave me a tour of the entire school and interrupted each class to introduce me to the teachers. From the perspective of a parent seeking a school that is responsive to the parent's questions and concerns, St. George's was to Chateaubriand as French haute cuisine is to McDonalds.

Unfortunately, St. George's British International School is too far away from our home to be practical for getting a three-year old there and back every day. It would have otherwise been a wonderful option. Italian public school, here we come.

Cultural Differences Regarding Children and the Sun

2007-05-08T09:55:00.001+02:00

This week, we are busy planning our vacation this summer. All the fuss over choosing the right beach destination has reminded me of our summer vacation last year on the Island of Ischia, just off the coast of Naples. It was our first visit to Ischia with the Bambina.

Ischia has some long, albeit crowded, beaches as well as some fantastic thermal water parks, and so of course, I wanted the proper bathing attire for the Bambina. Back in France, I had purchased for an anti-UV swimsuit for her. It is a one-piece suit that covers her entire torso, upper arms and thighs.

Now, in the United States, these suits appear to be commonplace. The Bambina had worn her anti-UV swimsuit when she went swimming during our visit to New York City a month before our vacation in Ischia. When my friend in New York, Pamela, saw her in it, a look of grave concern fell upon her face. "Are you sure that suit covers enough of her skin?" she asked. "You know, most people here like to make sure that small children are completely covered, from neck to toes, when bathing outdoors." And sure enough, her 3-year old daughter stepped into the room wearing a neon pink anti-UV suit covering every inch of her epidermis, apart from her face, hands and feet.

"Well", I explained, "In France, these suits are just catching on, and this is what you get. I don't think that you can get the full cover ones in France." "Hmm", she replied, her voice still full of grave concern, "Order off the internet next time! I can send you a link of a good site. The sun's rays can cause serious skin cancer."

Upon arriving at the beach in Ischia, I realized that we had a different cultural battle on our hands. Every child was in nothing more than bikini-sized swim pants and some of the little girls were wearing, er, a thong! The Frenchman urged me to take the anti-UV suit off the Bambina. "She'll feel like a freak if she has to wear it and no one else does" he said.

I refused to take the anti-UV suit off the Bambina. First of all, she was barely 2 years old at the time, so she hardly realized or cared that she was the only one in an anti-UV suit. Secondly, you should have seen these kids. Most of them had skin that was almost black from the sun. Some had severe burns. Both suntans and sunburns are harmful to a child's skin. So the anti-UV suit stayed on.

A couple of hours later, I went off to get some ice cream while the Frenchman played with the Bambina. When I returned, an Italian mamma was berating the Frenchman. She was saying, in rapid Italian and in near hysteric tones "Take that suit OFF the poor girl. She needs the sun!"

Have these people talked to their pediatricians lately? Noone needs the sun so much that he has to run naked under it all day for weeks at a time in August.

"Just put some cream on to prevent the burning", she continued. "You are depriving her of vitamin D by putting that suit on her!"

Er, she wears clothes the rest of the year (and I might add, she is not nearly as overdressed as her Italian peers most of the time) and she still seems to get enough vitamin D, even in the winter. But if I ever had reason to be concerned about the amount of vitamin D that the Bambina was getting, I would give her some vitamin D drops or give her some fish to eat or take her out in regular clothes in the early morning or late afternoon when there was also plenty of daylight. You don't need to parade your child naked in the August midday sun to ensure sufficient vitamin D!

So I was trying to explain this to the over-zealous mamma but the Frenchman stopped me in my tracks. "This is a cultural battle", he explained to both of us, "as much as it is a scientific battle. A Canadian mother and an Italian mother? You will never agree about the dangers of or the need for the sun. There is no point in continuing this discussion."

And I suppose he was right.

The anti-UV suit from last year does not fit the Bambina anymore, so this week I will buy her new one for this year's summer vacation in the south of Italy...

The Beginnings of our Sojourn in Italy

2007-05-07T10:44:00.000+02:00

We arrived in Rome for the Frenchman's four-year workstint last summer. Our apartment is glorious if not a bit too "rustic" for my tastes at times. It is the third and fourth floor of a "villa" which itself is located in the Villa Borghese, the Central Park of Rome. Our villa is called the "Villa Santini", named after its owners, the Santini family. The Santinis claim to be Italian royalty from southern Italy, princes and princess and the like. Last time I checked, Italy was a republic but they don't seem to have caught on to this fact. Never mind that the principessa is charging us unheard of thousands in rent per month for the privilege of living in what is effectively her attic. When we asked if she would be so kind as to replace a few things in the 110 year old palazzo, she was aghast that we would deign to make such a request of her. The furniture that she has provided us (she had to give us some, as the apartment is being rented on a furnished basis) looks as if it has been here since the house was built, in terms of style, state of repair and cleanliness.

The house itself looks magnificent, even under the chipped paint. There is a beautiful English-style (or is it French style?) garden in front of it, with a little basin of water in the middle. Upon moving in, I checked the garden basin more closely and noted that, in fact, there was not water flowing into it and the water already in it was stagnant, making it effectively a breeding ground for mosquitos.

When we moved in last August, the apartment was as wonderful as I remembered it to be the previous May when we looked at it for the first time. Only in August, it was very very hot. The Frenchman located the air conditioning unit but it was broken. Also, I had not realized that we were really effectively living in a forest and the house had Other Residents, including some spiders (acceptable) and many many ants (NOT acceptable). I purchased Raid, lots of ant traps and other legal insecticides but to no avail. The ants finally disappeared for the winter but now that it is springtime, They Have Returned. We have two terraces - a small one over looking the city and a larger one overlooking the forest. We prefer the smaller one for dining as it is closer to the kitchen. We eat on the terrace to avoid feeding the ants in the kitchen.

Unfortately, the awning on the terrace, intended to shade us from the hot summer sun, was also broken when we moved in. It is electri and when we flipped on the switch to bring it out, it would not move. There were also numerous electrical sockets that did not work, as well as the apparatus to clear out the chimney. The electrician finally came. "Capisce l'inglese?", I asked. "No, ma lei capisce italiano," he replied (no, but you understand Italian). I do? He then proceeded to explain to me, in minute detail, the ins and outs of electricity at the Villa Santini. I understood none of it but nodded as if I did. Our awning worked after that but we had to wait a while longer for the air conditioning.

The French Presidential Election

2007-05-06T15:36:00.000+02:00

Today is the "2eme tour" of the French presidential election. The Frenchman and the Bambina are both French, we have spent the last five years living in France, and although we now live in Italy, our home is immersed in French books, radio, television and newspapers. So although I cannot vote, as I am not a French citizen (yet!!!!), I kind of feel like France is my second country.

So for the past 2 months, we have been glued to French radio and television (thank you satellite TV), following Segolène Royal and Nicholas Sarkozy on the campaign trail. The Frenchman agrees with virtually every idea put forward by Nicholas Sarkozy, the right wing candidate, but, in true French form, says that he voted for the Trotskyist candidate in the first round and Madame Royal in today's second round. He says that Nicholas Sarkozy is corrupt (so take it to the judge), power hungry (aren't they all?), too close to the media (and yet, the Frenchman had no problem voting for François Mitterand, who prevented the press from reporting about his illegitimate daughter living in social housing for free). He doesn't like Segolène Royal, either. Says she is méchante and admits that her proposals lack substance. But he could not bring himself to vote for Nicholas Sarkozy.

I would have voted for Sarkozy but that is no surprise to the Frenchman. He knows that if I had the right to vote we would probably cancel out each other's vote in every election. I watched the televised debate last Wednesday between Royal and Sarkozy. The first proposal that Royal came up with was that every female fonctionnaire should be accompanied home at night. Has she lost her mind?

Madame Royal's only solution to the questions of pension reform, retirement, and the 35-hour workweek, was that she would have to consult with the partenaires sociaux. After hearing her repeat for the umpteenth time that she would have to as the partenaires sociaux, I had to ask myself, are we supposed to be electing her, or the partenaires sociaux? At least Sarkozy has concrete solutions to offer.

I also feel that Segolène Royal had the chance to offer real reform and modernization to the French Socialist Party and she let the opportunity pass by, hanging on to the same old 1960s labour rhetoric and no new ideas for real economic and social reform. After all, why is Nicholas Sarkozy the one proposing affirmative action, school choice, better access for handicapped children to public schools, and an opposable right to childcare?

In the end, whatever the French decide, they will get the government that they deserve!