TGIF?

Ah the weekend! The long week of working evenings are now behind me and I get to enjoy quality time with my children! Yes! Tonight I shall be the one who puts the kids to bed, laughing with them in the bath, singing to them as they put on pajamas, and that blissful sense of happiness as I turn on the nightlight and watch them drift off to sleep. Except, well, except that now it is only Saturday morning and I am already looking forward to Monday when I wave Giulio off to nursery school escorted by his daddy. This week is a bit of an exception, Giulio has been home from school with laryngitis that turned into bronchitis since last Friday and here we are on Day 9 of All 3 Year Old, All the Time. This morning Giulio was up at 6:45, ready for breakfast and Thomas the Tank Engine even before our alarm clock had gone off. As my husband Lorenzo dozed for a few more minutes (he goes to work on Saturdays and often Sundays but more about that later) I got Giugi his breakfast of milk and a slice of what in the US would be considered pie, but here in Italy is considered breakfast. Italians like sugar and caffeine first thing in the morning, though breakfast cereals are starting to catch on. I try and strike a compromise with Giulio, bread with Nutella and also offer cereal which is occasionally accepted, but it's hard to get a kid excited about whole grain flakes when his father is standing there eating a breakfast cake. This particular morning it's crostata, a kind of thick apricot jam over a pie crust and with a lattice-work top. All is calm until about 8 o'clock when Lorenzo goes off to work and Giulio goes crashing into his room to get his Thomas the Tank Engine train set and in doing so wakes up his sister Livia, seven months, who I had managed to coax back to sleep after nursing around 6:30. She is furious about being woken and then furious about being left alone in dark bedroom. I wait, hoping that she will calm down and fall back asleep the way she does when we actually have to get out of the house in the morning, but she keeps yelling so after a few minutes I go in and get her. Livia is a happy baby, and never happier than when her brother is there, so I put her down on the floor with a few cushions so she can watch Giulio play with his trains, and he gives her a few pieces of plastic track to play with as consolation for waking her. It's a rather one-sided relationship; Livia all smiles and adoring eyes for her brother, him a mix of smiles and well-place bonks on the head for her. Livia takes a lot of the abuse in stride, but sometimes Giulio's impulses are stronger than him, and this morning when my back is turned their adorable grab-my-camera-to-take-pictures play turns ugly and next thing I know Livia is red in the face and screaming, while Giulio looks on a with a guilty expression. He is promptly banished to his room while I coo over Livia and after a few moments she is cooing again too. She keeps fussing though, even after a snack of baby yoghurt, so I put her down for a nap around 10:15, where after a few minutes of outraged crying, she falls asleep.
Sometimes I think if I was a better organized and more energetic mother I would have both children dressed and downstairs in the huge yard that surrounds our apartment building by 8:30. Giulio on his tricycle, Livia in her stroller we would go over to the park down the street and all of the scenes and mess that make up our morning would be avoided. Instead here it is 11 o'clock and Giulio is walking around naked from the waist down (he took off his pyjama bottoms and couldn't be bothered to put them back on) and I am here in my pyjamas, though we need to get a move on if I am going to get to the supermarket and have lunch ready for 2 o'clock when Lorenzo gets home. I'm feeling tired this morning, though all things considered I had a "good" night, I was only woken twice between 11 and 6 and only one of those times was after midnight. For me though the ultimate luxury of Saturday is not having to go anywhere, no trying to get two kids plus myself simutaneously fed and dressed before being taken to school and daycare and then going on to work. When Lorenzo is home that's harder to do, he is a man who never wastes a moment, and in fact suggested that tomorrow being his day off if we felt like going to Liguria, to some town near Genoa and spend the day at the beach. The weather promises to be good, and golden images float through my mind of the kids playing happily together in the sand. But to make the two and half hour drive to Genoa we are going to have to be up early, like 6.30, yet another reason to savour sitting around doing nothing today. But as anyone who has small children can tell you, sitting around doing nothing is really impossilbe. It may be what you are trying to do, between cleaning up messes, wiping noses, conforting tears, making snacks, and changing diapers, but the next thing you know it's 12.30 and you have spent your entire morning trying to just sit down long enough to read the New York Times on-line.