Everything else from Winter and EarlySpring 2013

Ben finally started walking in January!  We bought him a play kitchen, the kind that you stand at, and two days later, he was walking.  I am convinced that’s what finally got him going.  He had been walking while holding our hands since the previous spring, but he had no interest in doing it on his own.  Maybe we were trying too hard, because there was a period over late summer and early fall, where he refused to walk at all.  Of course, kids do everything on their own time.

He is saying more words every day.  He speaks mostly in English while he is at home, as far as we can tell.  Of course there is a lot of babble that we’re not sure about.  He speaks and understands Italian at daycare.  I’m pretty sure he already understands more Italian than we do, and he might speaking better than us shortly.  We are still taking lessons, and trying to improve our own Italian.

Ben is a good little helper around the house.  He can bring us things when we ask (although he can’t open the refrigerator yet), put things into our sorted recycling, empty our small recycling bins into the bigger ones, help us unload groceries, and put away his toys.  It’s a nice age where he actually wants to do all these things.

Ben’s favorite activities are (in no particular order) going to the park, going to daycare, skyping with his grandparents and friends, reading books, taking baths, taking stroller rides, riding his cars around our apartment, and giving our cat a hug.  He is really into putting on his shoes lately, but unfortunately this sometimes leads to a temper tantrum if he then wants to go outside but we say no.  I think he must be tired of being in the apartment so much over winter, because he really just loves going anywhere.  Even when we took him to get a haircut one day, which he hated, he still wanted to go out the next day.  He is always excited to go to daycare in the morning, not even wanting to take the time to kiss us goodbye (but he is just as happy to see us at the end of the day).  Whenever we try to ask him about daycare, he just says the names of (I suppose) his two best friends.  Always the same names, for the past month or two.

 Giving Zeus a hug.  Zeus is sometimes tolerant, but always gentle with Ben.

Ben is learning to eat like a European, knife in right hand, fork in left.

 And he dabs his mouth with a napkin.

 And loves dessert.

Playing in the bidet. He climbed in all by himself while I was getting ready one day.

 Shaving cream in the bathtub.  He mostly just ate it, so this activity didn't last long.

 Do-oo  (as best as I can spell what he says).  Looking for Zeus under the bed.

 Ben got stuck, Austin Powers style.

 Ciao, chi e?  Talking on the baby monitor like a phone: hello, who is it?

 Playing in the tunnel, also a favorite for Zeus.

 Both cars at once.

 We have an extra deadbolt down low, and Ben loves playing with the keys with it.  I think it is another of his attempts to tell us he wants to go outside.

 Walking like a silly.

 Being silly.

 Reading.  Sometimes he goes through all of the books on that shelf.

 Merry-go-round.  Daddy was the one who had to get off first. 

Baby Girl is growing and growing.  And kicking, and hiccuping.  We have started playing the body part guessing game when we feel lumps moving across or poking out.  We don’t have a name picked out yet, but we have both been through our Italian Names book, and we have a short list. 

We keep telling Ben there is a baby girl in there, and sometimes he responds with “ciao baby” and a wave, or “cara baby” and a stroke of my belly.  (Hi baby or nice baby.)  We have no idea if he really understands, but he seems to a little bit.  He knows what a baby is, and points them out all the time, but his term “baby” applies up to about age 5, so he’s probably expecting a playmate his own age.

Playing in the Snow

This year, we had the best kind of snow, where you get a couple inches on the grass, but none sticks on the roads.  This happened three times, and the third time it was finally on a weekend so we could take Ben out.

We bundled him up in his new snow suit and boots, and went to our regular park.  He had fun filling and dumping a cup, and he ate some snow, made a snow angel, and tried to throw snowballs, but they just stuck to his mittens.  He was done with it all after about 20 minutes.  It was pretty cold, and snow was still falling and making his face cold I think.  When we got back home, we were glad to see that he was still nice and warm under all his layers.

Carnevale 2013

Ben’s daycare had a Carnevale party on a Saturday.  All the kids dressed up, and some of the parents.  Ben was a tiger (the same one from Halloween that Tim’s mom made for Tim).  There were other costumes of animals, superheroes, and cartoon characters.  Some of the adults were cowboys and Indians (yes, the American kind), Smurfs, and Star Wars characters.

The kids sang songs and played games.  Ben played a few, but also had fun stacking, unstacking, and climbing in the little chairs.  And playing with (and eating) the streamers.  As for items meant for eating, they had the carnevale staple, chiacchiere, which Ben wasn’t too sure of at first, but soon grew to love.  It is a fried, flat strip of dough, covered in sugar and drizzled with chocolate.  It has a consistency almost like a saltine cracker, but tastes like something fried and coated in sugar.  Yeah, we like them too.

 Stacking and unstacking the chairs.

The next weekend our town did its Carnevale celebration.  They had a parade, if you could call it that, with one marching band and two groups of dancers.  Ben kind of played with some other kids, and he got confetti bombed in the process.  And he really wanted one of the huge balloons.  Ben was dressed up as a teddy bear for this one.

A Day at the Spa

Our company offered a “winter trip” for all the employees one day in mid-February.  The trip was on a Friday, and your options are go to a thermal spa for the day, go skiing for the day, or go to work for the day.  We chose the spa obviously, with Ben, the pregnancy, and Tim’s old ACL injury, skiing was not really an option.  The people who went on the trip were pretty evenly split to the two destinations, but the crazy thing was that half of the employees chose to go to work and pass up the free field trip!

 A bus was offered for the hour and a half drive, but it left at 6am, so we decided to drive ourselves.  This was also our escape route if Ben was less than a perfect gentleman at dinner.  So, we arrived at the spa late that morning.  The main spa area, once you went through the locker room, was a big room with floor to ceiling windows and views of the mountains.  There were three pools inside, warm-ish, warm, and warmest.  They were like giant hot tubs, with jets and fountains.  Scattered throughout the area, were little sauna rooms with varying temperatures and humidity levels, showers for a quick rinse, and a mini shaved-ice shower.  The areas in front of the sunny windows were lined with lounge chairs.  There was also a pool outside that was really hot.

 We spent most of our day in the warm pool.  Ben was having a blast.  He was kicking and splashing, putting his face in, and playing with the jets and the waterfall.  Tim went to the outdoor pool and a couple different saunas for a bit, and took Ben in the warmest indoor pool (too warm for me and baby, but it didn’t bother Ben).  We could have purchased a massage or treatment, but Ben was having too good a time in the pool, and we were hanging out with our coworkers.  We also had lunch there, and Ben even got a little nap on one of the sun chairs.

Afterwards, all of the relaxed spa people met with all the rowdy skiers for dinner.  Dinner was fun, with little heated granite slabs on the tables to cook your food.  Ben did great, even being up late.  Some of our Italian friends were asking him his animal sounds in Italian, and he understood and responded perfectly.

New Year's Resolution

While many people make a New Year’s Resolution to eat healthier, I am making a resolution to eat more pasta.  More specifically, I want to do more “Real Italian” cooking, (which in a lot of ways is healthier than a lot of American cooking anyway).  A new recipe every week.  I have a few Italian cookbooks from the US, and they are giving me a good start, but they use American units of measure and American ingredients.  So, I am also using Italian websites similar to the American allrecipes,com or cooks,com.  There are just as many or more of these Italian sites as there are American ones, so I have no shortage of recipes.  Many of them even have photos at every step.  But, yes, they are in Italian. 

What I have been doing is copying a recipe into my word doc recipe file, while also plugging it into a translator.  Any words I don’t understand, I type in English in parentheses behind the Italian word.  Then I print and work from the Italian version.  I feel like a better, more authentic Italian cook this way, and it is easier to make grocery lists.  I have found myself subconsciously writing some things in Italian when I write out my grocery lists.

 I didn’t start this until close to the end of January, but I do have some success stories already.  I did a baked Penne pasta with parmesan and prosciutto from my American cookbook, which was really good.  I also made a chocolate pie from that same cookbook.  I ran into some problems with this one. 

 First it required a graham cracker crust, but we don’t have graham crackers here.  And it called for unsweetened baking chocolate, which I also couldn’t find.  So, I was questioning this one from the get-go, but it looked so good in the book, and this was in place of a cake for Tim’s birthday.  I used cookies for the crust.  They were something between a butter cookie and a vanilla wafer, and they worked surprisingly well.  I just used plain chocolate bars and decreased the amount of sugar for the chocolate pie part.  This worked okay, but I think a simple pudding mix would have turned out much better.  There were also eggs involved, which I may have overcooked to make it safe for my pregnant self (after all, I am NOT making a pie I can’t eat!).  The whipped topping, however, was a huge success.  It was made of whipping cream and mascarpone cheese, and I will definitely be making it again.  It would have been great for strawberry shortcake. 

 I made a third thing from this American-Italian book, chicken alla Milanese, which is a breaded and pan fried chicken breast fillet generously topped with a creamy cheese mixture.  This was also really good, but I’m not convinced that it is “real” Italian.  The Milanese part yes, but the cheesy goodness on top sounds like an American addition.

From Italian websites, I made cacio and pepe, which is simply thick spaghetti noodles (I used troccoli) with cheese and pepper, but you have to do it just right.  Mine tasted good, but my cheese clumped together, so I need a little more practice.  For a Friday during Lent, I made pasta with salmon and a cream sauce, and that was really good.  Another day I made a bucatini all’amatriciana, which is like thick spaghetti noodles in a tomato sauce with pork cheek (I promise this is not gross as all).  That could have been a meal, but I served it with a parmesan crusted pork chop from an American Italian recipe.  Those both turned out really well.  Next, I made pasta con la’nduja, using a recipe I got from an Italian friend.  She is from Calabria, in the south of Italy, where this dish is popular.  The sauce uses spicy ‘nduja, a soft, spreadable salami made with red peppers.  I used the leftover meat with smoked scamorza cheese to make a rolled up spicy pastry.  The pasta and the pastries were both very good.  I've also done some without a "sauce", like aglio, olio, and pepperoncino (garlic, oil, and red pepper on spaghetti pasta).  These are also really good, and really simple, but not so common in the US.

Perhaps my best success story is my lasagna that was Tim's birthday request.  I can’t say that I made it from scratch because my recipe wanted you to actually make the pasta and the besciamella sauce, which I didn’t do, but I did make the 2-hour ragu (meat sauce).  And of course, I put all the layers together.  It turned out amazing.  Tim wouldn’t let me bring leftovers to work because that would mean less for him at home.  Ben’s first time eating it, he had three helpings.

 Onions, carrots, and celery.

Red wine in a juice box, genius!

 Starting the layers.

 Just put in the oven.

 Finished product.