All God's Children got....

I have decided that the perfect adult to three year old ratio is 4 to 1. My mother thinks so too. My parents were just here in Italy for three weeks and we all found that handling Giulio and Livia is so much easier when there are four able bodied adults around. One to hustle Giulio out of a restaurant when he starts to pitch a fit while the other sits and swills white wine. Another adult to get up in the night with the baby while the other, in this case me, sleeps on and on in the next room too tired to hear anything. We only had one bad run in with too many adults around, Livia rolled off the couch during a chaotic moment when we all assumed that another person was watching her.
Otherwise she was the star of this trip as it was for her baptism that my parents decided to come. The whole thing had been planned months in advanced, as things often are when there are airline tickets involved. We came back from the US at the end of December and I think January 2nd I had my husband on the phone to handle the details with the priest. As are so many other things in our lives, the intial organzation proved to be a bit complicated. First of all it seems, we were planning too far ahead. No one, least of all a parish priest, still recovering from Christmas wants to plan a baptism in January set for April. Plus, I didn't want to have the baptism at the church in our neighborhood, but at the basilica in the historic center where Giulio was baptized, so we were going to need permission from "our" priest (I have yet to set foot in our neighborhood church during mass) to do it at the basilica. Why, you may ask, was this so important? I'm not even Catholic, I grew up in a Jewish-Episcopal household where the menorah rubbed shoulders with the Christmas tree ornaments, and the Passover sedar sometimes came on the heels of Easter dinner. However we live in Italy where being Catholic is part of the Italian national identity, you do it not so much out of strong personal belief but because it is what everyone does. Children do one hour of religion in school a week in the public schools(though they can opt out of it if their parents don't want them too), and all classrooms have a crusafix hanging over the blackboard. The church youth clubs called Oratorio are where many kids go after school and on weekends to hang out or play sports. In the summer they organize day camps and also go on week-long trips to the beach, and each oratorio has its own feast day where they set up a huge tent and sell food and organize a band to come and play music and people dance.
So no, I wasn't going to keep my children from partaking in all this fun, all this stuff that makes living in Italy worthwhile. They will be good little Catholics, though how good depends on their father, I have left their religious upbringing up to him. Giulio is already learning about Gesu' at school and brought home at Easter break a little book that told the story of Easter. The best part was when we came to the page about Palm Sunday and he started waving his arms and yelling "Yay Gesu'!" as his religion teacher had obviously taught them in class.
So while we have a very active church right here in our neigborhood, it has one drawback. It is terribly ugly. Yes, I know, how shallow can you get? But somehow I felt that asking people to come thousands of miles to Italy for a baptism, it should be in a place that looks like how you think churches in Italy should look like, i.e. elaborate Baroque design with an ornante baptismal font and not a little concrete building with a grey cement ceiling. I was an Art History major in college, though I have come to term with the post Vatican II architecture that one finds here, other people new to Italy may not be ready for it.

In the end though our priest gave the OK to our doing the baptism at the main church. The nun and personal attack dog of the Basilica gave her OK too and we were able to book the date for April 1st. All we had to do was meet with "our" priest beforehand, and make a contribution to the church. I was fine with meeting with Don Vincenzo, say in the parish office some afternoon after school. Instead he decided to come over to explain the whole service to us right as we were sitting down to eat. The phone rings just asI have sat down to eat and I am raising my first spoonful of soup to my mouth and I hear Lorenzo tell someone on the other end that now is a great time to come over. Giulio is still in various stages of undress (read:naked from the waist down), Livia is still wailing from the next room, and I have to be at work in less than 90 minutes. Lorenzo hangs up and throws the phone down on the table. "That was the priest, he's coming over now." and takes our uneaten dinners back into the kitchen, and starts straightening the cushions on the couch. I wrestle Giulio into some pajamas while Lorenzo starts cleaning as though Don Vincenzo upon his arrival will start inspecting our closet and bathroom drawers to determine if we are worthy enough to baptize our daughter. I just hope she stops wailing before Don Vincenzo gets here or he is going to think that we neglect her by leaving her to cry it out in the next room. She has just settled down when Lorenzo goes into the bedroom and carries the baby out, rubbing her eyes and blinking. "What are you doing??!!" I yell "She was finally asleep."
"He is going to want to see the baby who is getting baptized!'
I'm about to say something back when the buzzer goes.
"Whatever you do," I say before opening the door, "Don't mention that I am not Catholic or we will be here all night." Don Vincenzo is a young for a priest, in his mid forties and rather sloppily dressed, a t-shirt visible through the top of his black sweater, white tube socks on his feet. He comes and takes the seat offered to him on the couch, not seeming to notice how tidy our house (now) is. All is smooth sailing until we mention that Giulio, who has been sitting on my lap opposite the priest, has been really enjoying religion at school. The teacher is young, blonde, and pretty, and it's the one class that Giulio is always well behaved in, perhaps already appreciating pretty blondes at the age of 3. "Oh, well then," says Don Vincenzo "Can you show me the drawing you did of the Madonna in class?' What drawing the Madonna? Shit, I don't remember seeing anything like that, though it would be hard to tell. Giulio's art work is mostly scribbles and I am suprisingly unsentimental about it. I usually empty his backpack at the end of the day, look at it, and then throw most of it away. I certainly did not see, or save, any drawings of the Madonna. Lorenzo gets up and starts looking around, going through folders where we keep his 'good" art work, and the priest waits, long after most people would have said to just forget about it. In the end we have to admit defeat. Don Vincenzo leaves, but not before saying the Lord's prayer over us. Lorenzo joins in with him and afterwards asks why I wasn't praying as well. Hey, I tell him, I may speak Italian well, but I don't know the Lord's prayer in Italian. This whole Religion thing in Italy, I remind him, is your department.