Superman meets Power Ranger Filippo

The kids are doing better. Giulio, after five days of fever, vomiting, and painful canker sores in his mouth, got up and started teasing his sister. He then proceeded to ignore me when I told him to stop so I knew right then that he was feeling better. Unfortunately, though he is better, schools are closed Monday and Tuesday for the Carnevale holiday, so Lorenzo has taken some vacation time to stay home with him, vacation time he had asked for weeks in advanced as soon as I saw them on the academic calender. It's this last minute, the night-before stuff that is killing us. Tuesday evening we stood there in the kitchen as Lorenzo tensely sliced yellow pepper and Giulio lay forlornly on the sofa. WHAT were we going to do? That morning I had gone to work late, Sig.ra Pala had come upstairs like the angel she is and stayed with Giulio until Lorenzo came home at 1. She also mended Lorenzo's uniform pants while she was there, but Sig.ra Pala is a busy woman, she certainly couldn't stay with Giulio for two days in a row. Lorenzo had already taken 3 days off the week before and once this week and while there is no risk of him being fired (he has the equivalent of tenure) his boss hadn't been happy that he had needed to stay home with his kids those days. It seems that caring for your sick children shouldn't really be the parents' responsibility, it's our responsibility as parents to find someone else to care for them. And apparently Lorenzo and I had let the side down because there we were at 7 pm on a Tuesday, the next work day less than 14 hours away and we had no one to stay with Giulio. Lorenzo called his colleague whose mother-in-law babysits children during the day and apparently, normally she would be happy to watch Giulio but unfortunately she had the flu. Join the club.
I ran through a mental list of people I know and then started running through the actual list of people I know on my cell phone. My female friends all work, the one I did try and call wasn't home, Terry downstairs was home because she has hurt her knee and is on sick leave, but she wasn't going to want Alessandro exposed to Giulio. And then it came to me, Giusy. Some of you may remember Giusy as the woman I flagged down from kitchen window to come upstairs and be with the kids for 10 minutes until Lorenzo came home because I HAD to leave for work. Giusy has been taking care of Alessandro in the mornings while Terry works, but as I mentioned, Terry isn't going to work right now. And Giusy had told me that if I ever needed anything all I had to do was ask. People offer things like that all the time, most of the time you know that if you did call them ready to cash in on that favor they would be seriously put out. I decided to think that Giusy had been sincere and meant it when she offered to help so I went downstairs to Terry's to get the number. Thankfully Giulio was, in Giusy's words, welcome to come and she hoped he would stay for lunch too, and Giulio, in spite of his illness, was quite pleased to be going to her house. And so we lived to fight another day, and the day after that when Giulio went back again, still ill but loving Giusy's house with its two firetrucks to play with, (Giusy's husband Angelo is a retired fireman.) I still felt awful leaving him with other people, he was sick and I couldn't (well, I probably could, but right now it is all about giving a good impression at work) be with him. On Friday Lorenzo was on for the night shift and so was able to be with Giulio during the day. Giulio spent the day with me on Saturday and I was so happy to be able to spend the whole day with my kids, enjoying them and cuddling with them and playing with them, but my son wasn't feeling the love, he spent much of the day asking if he could go to Giusy's.
In any case, Giulio recovered just in time because Saturday there was the Carnevale party at the church down the street, the same party we went to last year. Giulio has been asking for weeks to "go" to carnevale. Here's a typical exchange:
"Mommy, I want to go to Carnevale."
"Not yet Giulio, Carnevale hasn't happened yet."
"Please Mommy. I really want to go."
"Giulio, it hasn't happened yet. We have to wait for it, like your birthday or Christmas." He pauses for a second, thinking this over.
"Mommy? Can we go in one minute?'
Seeing that he was much better I used the party as a way to get him to eat all his dinner, though he still has these painful canker sores which make eating really hard. His costume this year was Superman, a kind of homemade concoction using blue long-johns, red rain boots, a pair of old red shorts and a cape that was handmade by my mom's best friend and given last year as a Christmas present, because all little children need capes, don't they? What made the costume so great was the Superman "S" which Lorenzo had handpainted on the front of the shirt. He found the logo on the computer and doing the kind of mathematical equation that one finds on Algebra tests but rarely in real life, adapted the size of the logo to fit on the shirt where he traced the outlines and painted them in. It was a true labour of love.
Livia was a ladybug, which for some reason has been deemed an appropriate costume for girls before moving into the princess costumes. She'll be a ladybug next year too, different costume, but same thing. My mom finds them and gets them on sale for us after Halloween, which is the best time to buy a costumes, though we weren't lucky this past year with Giulio, which is how the whole Superman thing came together. Livia wasn't thrilled with the costume, she cried and kept trying to pull it off without success, before resigning herself to the inevitable. The little headband with the antennae was a no-go however.
We walked to the party. Inside we found about fifty kids running around hurling confetti at each other, scooping it off the floor while parents sat on chairs along the walls and watched. There was a table loaded with food at one end and this year they hired a band for the event: three middle aged men with keyboards who seemed to have been hired to keep the over 50 group happy. We sat down next to Filippo's parents, comparing our health bulletins of the last few weeks. Filippo had scarlet fever, but only missed two days of school thanks to antibiotics, while another woman had two kids with re-occurring bronchitis, and a bout of scarlet fever thrown in for fun. As both these woman have many family members around to help, they couldn't truly feel my pain. Giulio began the party kneeling on the floor scooping up confetti and ignoring the children who kept asking him to play, including one darling little girl from his class dressed as a princess in a yellow dress who brushed dust off of Giulio's blue long johns and who Giulio barely even acknowledged. He finally got into the swing of things when Filippo, who was a sword carrying Power Ranger, presented Giulio with his own plastic pitchfork type thing to run around with, truly the finishing touch for the Superman costume. We stayed later than we planned, so glad to see Giulio running around acting like himself that it was after 11 when we left with the party in full swing, so today the kids are healthy but cranky. At least they can still go to school when they are cranky.