Right Now...Floodmagedon 2014

Back in the Fall of 2010, I can remember reading all about the flooding that Northern Italy was experiencing.  I had a natural curiosity for Italy, as most Americans do, and Steve and I had always planned on spending a couple of weeks here for our 20th anniversary in 2014. (Ironic, I know)  All the weathermen were saying that flooding to that magnitude was a "once in a hundred years occurrence." I can remember hearing about the mudslides in Cinque Terre and thinking that was a place a million miles away from anywhere I'd ever get to experience...

Enter the Fall of 2011, Steve is returning home from 14 months in Afghanistan and the Brock family is in the last weeks of a move to Italy.  We arrived on December 2nd, 2011--my 41st birthday, I might add...

Now fast forward to the Spring of 2012--Floodmagedon 2012 (part 1) was small on the scale of what we would have to experience in a few months, but to us it was scary.  The roads were closed, bridges into our town were closed, it rained and rained and rained!  I though it would never stop!

During the flood, and no flood

The Fall of 2012 brought 2 big periods of flooding--one caused by the early snow melting in the surrounding mountains, resulting in our river flooding; and the second caused by massive amounts of rain. 

Ditto for the Spring of 2013....

May of 2013 was the real "Motherload" of raining and flooding.  It resulted in the first real worrying on our part, our friends literally were flooded out of their house, and we spent weeks cleaning up the mess.

The Fall of 2013 had a few wet spells here and there,  but nothing to really speak of.  We had grown so accustomed to our river rising and falling with each passing rainstorm, we hardly took notice of it anymore.  Even the flooding that happened at the begin of 2014 was barely a blip on our radar.

And then came this storm/flood...

 

                Trey with my boots on...

It has honestly been raining without stop for the past 3 weeks and our ground and river bank finally couldn't take it anymore.  UNCLE!! So on Monday, February 3rd, (yesterday) we called for reinforcements after the sad reality that our house was in serious danger of flooding hit us in the face.

The Polizia Locale showed up in force (all 7 of them--I swear it's the entire police force of our tiny town, plus all of the guys must have brought a friend) and they were so nice to us.  When our military housing office called them, the first two arrived within 3 minutes...and the next 4 showed up 10 minutes later.  I was impressed. I plan to make cookies for them... Our landlord Claudio arrived moments later and he and Steve rushed off to the local "Feed and Seed" to buy sandbags to fill at the town center (the fact that the local Feed and Seed carries sand bags and the local Town Hall has sand available on a regular basis should be a clue as to how much it floods here...) they arrive at 5:15 and the store was closed...shocker...

So it's Tuesday morning now and here's the latest:
The water is up to our patio but hasn't entered the house...we've still got about 4 feet from the edge of the patio to our back door.

The river on the other side of the berm looks to have dropped a bit...

It's supposed to rain all of today, taper off a bit tomorrow, and then pick right back up for the rest of the work week.  Saturday is supposed to offer us a much needed break.

I'll keep y'all posted!  We LOVE Italy, we love Italy, we love Italy, we love Italy.....

And here's the best part:

Love these guys...

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(Almost) Wordless Wednesday

When I told Steve that I loved the picture that Delilah drew of he and I, he wanted to know which one was me...

Hate is a strong word...

I don't know about your kids, but my kids are constantly using the word "hate".  "I hate him", "I hate her", "I hate pizza" (I know, right?), "I hate cheese", etc, etc, etc.  I am constantly correcting them by saying, "Hate is a strong word!" and it is...there are few things, people, etc that I could use that word to describe....I hate hypocrisy, racism, prejudice,,,it fits for those ideas but I think that most people feel the same.  

Today, I took Delilah to the commissary with me.  I knew it wouldn't be a quick trip, but I was in a good mood, she seemed to be in a good mood, and things were looking up, so I took her along.  When she hopped into the car after preschool pickup and I told her we were going, she immediately asked the dreaded question,  "Can we get the car shopping cart?  Please.  Please!!!!"  And like I said, I was in a good mood, so I gave in.  Sure, I thought, how bad can it be....

It was worse, worse than driving a Suburban through the narrow streets of Italy for these past two years, practically worse than childbirth.  Not quite as bad as going to the dentist, which I need to do, BUT CLOSE!! Almost as bad as the dentist.  

I tried to talk her into the new carts our commissary has--you know the kind that has two baskets stacked on top of each other and the car part, complete with steering wheel and horn, is actually in the seat-part of the cart.  Those are much easier to drive.  But no, not Ms. Delilah, NO.  She insisted on the double wide version of the car/shopping cart.  Driving that thing through the aisles is impossible.  And clearly invented by a man.  The constant need to back up and pull forward, back up and pull forward just to make it down the straight grocery aisle after turning is too much!!  TOO MUCH!

Our 20 minutes-tops shopping trip in a good mood quickly turned into an hour of me screaming and cursing that damn cart, while Delilah swung from the hood of it like a tiny Chinese gymnast.  So if you happened to see me at the commissary today, I was not possessed.  It's the cart's fault. I hate it. 

There's a reason these photos are blurry...and it has nothing to do with the camera.

Apparently, I need drugs.

We have our home computer set up to show a repetitive series of words each day for the screen saver. It's something I rarely noticed anymore and instead, simply pass by it without much of a glance.  We really set it up for Tory, who is convinced it will help her improve her SAT scores one day.  Maybe so.  Regardless, Steve and I barely noticed the words most day and when I do notice them, I rarely see the same word twice.  Until this week...

This week, it seems that every time I look at the computer, the same word is scrolling across the screen...

Perhaps it's a message that I need drugs. Thank God it's almost the weekend!

Wrapping up Christmas

We're finally finished with wrapping up Christmas around these parts (yes, total pun intended) and I can't say that I'm too sad this year. It's almost like Christmas came and went so quickly this year, it hardly registered a blip on my radar. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Christmas, but Christmas in  Italy is so different than what I grew up with, I'm just not feelin' it over here.  And we've been so rushed this holiday season--too rushed to even really enjoy much. I swear, next year we will be putting up the tree the week after Halloween, just so that we have a chance to enjoy it instead of rushing to get ready for Christmas and then rushing to put it all away after January 1st. And then I've got it--the dreaded mommy guilt. If you're a normal mom (not a Pinterest mom with far too much time on her hands) like I am, you know what I'm talking about. Nothing is ever good enough and soon your kids won't be little anymore... Ugh, the Guilt!!

When I was a little girl, my parents put up the same fake Christmas tree every year.  I use the word "fake" for a reason... It was white (to portray the image of a snow-covered tree, I guess) and my mother put these pale blue lights on it.  I pretty much hated it.  I wanted a cut tree more than anything but my mom's "allergies" kept us from getting a cut tree.

But my father volunteered with the Lion's Club and every year, he would work the club's Christmas tree lot. And every year, close to Christmas day, he would bring me my own tiny little tree that he would put up on a table and let me decorate with flashing colored lights--you know the huge bulbs and come in a rainbow of colors? I loved my short, fat little tree.  I was perfect to me.

Here in Italy, a cut tree is very hard to find--surprising, right?  They are so popular in Germany! There are some available but they're usually ugly and expensive, so our family was stuck again this year with the pre-lit 220 volt tree that we bought at the PX last year.  It.is.so.ugly.  For some reason, Jackson absolutely LOVES it.  To him, it is the prettiest Christmas tree EVER.  Jackson is our "Christmas kid". He lives for the holidays, and so when Steve and I went to Ikea a couple of weekends before Christmas and they had tiny, fat LIVE Christmas trees that you could plant after Christmas, I knew we were in trouble.  So Jackson got his very own living Christmas tree in his room this year :)  Wish I could have found some big, fat, flashing 220 volt lights for it...

But it was perfect for him.

Textbook Pictures into Reality

This is one of those weird little posts that had never actually occurred to me to write and then something came up and metaphorically smacked me right in the face and so I knew right then and there I had to write about it.

So here it is: 

Bear with me, ok? 

Until I married Steve, I had never really thought of myself as the traveling "type". My parents weren't really big travelers and our family vacations mostly centered around visiting family (who all lived relatively close to home, I might add). So other than a trip to Disney World the Spring after I turned 4, we really didn't do much traveling. Looking back on it now, traveling was never really something I ever considered, but I guess as the old saying goes, "You can't miss what you don't have..."

In the 1st or 2nd grade, I can distinctly remember reading a short story in my Language Arts book about a little dog in Pompeii just before Mt. Vesuvius. It was a fictional story, of coarse, but at the end of the story there were really photos of Pompeii and I remember being FASCINATED with it. And I can remember hearing about the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia on the news and thinking that place was as far away from me as the moon.

When my (much loved and wonderfully awesome) cousins Frank and Joyce came this summer for a visit and we rode in a gondola in Venice, I understood perfectly the tears in their eyes and wonder in their voice when they said repeatedly to us, "I never thought I'd see this".  I get that. And I think it everyday. 

Steve, on the other had, grew up in a family who did do a lot of traveling. His father worked civil service for the Air Force and they spent a great deal of time living overseas. As a child, Steve went to places I didn't even know to dream of. He talks of listening to the 1985 Iron Bowl on a friend's car radio while skiing the Alps in Switzerland and he has a shoebox of communist momentos he picked up on a school trip in 1987 to the then USSR. I remember flipping through family photo albums of his and seeing pictures of Steve in front of places I had only read about. My personal favorite is one of him looking bored and miserable posed in front of The David in Florence, a typical teenager of the 1980's--rock t-shirt, Walkman (tape not CD), zit faced, braces, and oh-so-lovely mullet haircut. (Steve, not David)

Steve caught the travel bug early in life and when the time was right, he wanted to share that opportunity with our kids. 

So here we are today, in Greece--our 11th country we visited in 2013, the 3rd in just the month of December alone. Yep. We caught that bug. 

Which brings us to that smack in the face part of the story I mentioned a million words ago at the beginning of what has turned into a long-winded post. 

We were boarding the plane in Athens today to fly home to Greece and I was walking down the jetway and I happened to look up and see this advertisement on the wall:

Bravo, MasterCard. My sentiments exactly. 

We've gotten to see so many awesome places in the 2 years we've lived here. And I'm so thankful to have memories to go along with those schoolbook picture. 

Grateful for 365

Happy New Year!  What an experience we had getting to spend New Years in GREECE.  We are on our way back and are looking forward to some peace and quite that this New Year will bring. (I'm being hopeful here) I seriously need a vacation from my vacation!  I can't wait to tell you all about our adventures here (and in Prague also), but until then, here's a little project that I actually heard about a while back.  I love the idea and decided to participate this year.  Hopefully, you'll join me! (on Istagram, look for Torysmama or click on the Instagram tab at the top of the blog) Looking forward to a year filled with gratitude and adventures!

Santa Has Arrived!

Look who we caught passing out toys tonight!

Merry Christmas!

Adding a Little Christmas Cheer

I was surprised this week when Jackson's awesome 1st grade teacher sent out a link to the Portable North Pole website.  She got it from a family member back in the states and I was shocked that she'd never heard of it.  (She's pretty with-it)  Equally surprising to me were the number of with-it mommies at the classroom Christmas party, sorry....HOLIDAY party....who hadn't heard of it.  Rarely in life am I the one who is in The Know, especially when there's Technology involved.  Technology and Math...not my strong points.  

Anyhow, our family has been using the Portable North Pole website for several years and our kids always look forward to it.  The awesome thing is--IT'S FREE!  You answer a few simple questions about your kiddo, upload a few pictures, and WHAM...a video arrives into your email box to your child from Santa.  It's the Real Santa, too--not some fake looking guy in a fake beard and red suit. This Santa is legit.  There's also a paid video you can buy for a couple of bucks as well.  Paying will make your video a bit long and more detailed, plus you get to upload more pictures--proof that Santa REALLY is watching and he Knows....This year you can also sign up for a video that will arrive on Christmas Eve.  I'm hoping it tells the kids to get into to bed--somehow, our brats always struggle with that!!

Another one of my favorite Christmas traditions is snapping a picture of Santa in front of our Christmas tree.  On the I Caught Santa website, you can upload a picture of your Christmas tree (or fireplace, outside of your house, etc) and super-impose Santa right into the picture.  It's not super cheap, but my kids LOVE it.  Santa always leaves his picture taken in front of our tree next to our milk and cookies plate. This is great for kids on the brink of doubting Santa's existence--I hate the idea that children are learning "The Jingle News" as we call it at our house at a younger and younger age!

Santa in front of our tree last year...

And finally, my personally favorite: Norad Santa.  We've been using this for years and every year, I cry when my kids are talking with the volunteers at Norad who are spending Christmas Eve answering calls from excited children all over the world.  I remember Tory and Trey calling when they were both little and I remember how sad I was when I thought that we wouldn't be able to call from here in Italy (especially that first year when we were living in the hotel at Christmas while we were waiting for our house to be ready) Cheer up, though...you can call from overseas and the wait time is actually far shorter :) The folks are always super nice and my kids are always thrilled to talk to a real Santa helper.  They have a pretty extensive website also! The number to call is 1 (877) 446-6723. (1-877-HI-NORAD) 

If you've been living under a rock recently and somehow have never heard of these  websites, be sure to check them out. And if you have some equally (or better) Santa websites, be sure to share in the comments below!

Absent With Explanations

Life has been crazy here on Via Fontanelle--so crazy in fact, I couldn't settle down to write anything worthy of reading. I'd taken to writing most of my posts on my phone while waiting in the car for something....for the bus, to pick Delilah up from school, for appointments....

I felt absolutely NO inspiration to write. I just wasn't feeling it. 

All of this told me it was time to take a little break, plus I have a bit of a secret...

Steve (the husband) has been deployed to Africa on a UN mission since the summer. It was one of those fast and furious preparations for deployment--we literally had just a week or so of notice and then he was gone.  It was a short one, as far as deployments go--only four months, which honestly seems like a drop in the bucket compared to our previous deployments, including the most recent one which was 14 months.  But as any Army spouse living overseas can tell you, a deployment here can be extra hard. Kudos to my Army sisters (and brothers) who stuggled through a year long deployment while living in Italy and came out smiling on the other side...I applaud you.

Anyhow, with security being what it is now, I would have been crazy to publicly announce Steve was gone, and I've always promised myself that my blog would be about our real life, not a make-believe one, so I took a little break. 

I'm back now and can't wait to tell you about our latest adventures! (Including an awesome trip to Prague!!)

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday

I pass this house everyday on my trip to and fro and I alway wonder why they haven't replaced that one shutter...

Just Being

This was one of those fabulous Italian weekends where the weather is perfect and where you makes plans weeks in advance and then everything falls through due to some unplanned event.  It sound terrible, right?

It wasn't. As much as I would have liked to hang out in Florence with our wonderful friends traveling to Italy from America, our family just really NEEDED a break from LIFE.  Thankfully, the weather cooperated and we were able to spend some time outside before the weather turns nasty for winter. (It really, really does rain almost every day from October through May) The kids played outside, we took a Sunday afternoon drive (that really happened on Saturday), we washed a ton of clothes and hung them on the clothesline and on the clothes racks, and I shared wine and conversation with a new friend in one of my favorite tiny villages here in Italy. Living here in Europe is such an amazing opportunity, but it can be hard to just take a week off to let normal life happen. You feel as if you always have to go go go and see the sites and visit the places before moving back home to America.  The clock is always ticking--except for us, it's not our biological clock it's our travel clock! It felt nice to just "BE" this weekend....

Here are some "random life" shots from this weekend.