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.

Wordless Wednesday

 

There are no words for this....

Tory's homecoming dress came today...three weeks late. She made her boyfriend try it on...poor guy. 

Sure would love your vote!  (Even if you've voted before..you can vote once a day...) Thanks!

Catch and Release

This morning, I awoke to one of those dark and dreary days that are so typical of Italy in October.  It's almost as if Italy says goodbye to the sun in late September and we aren't reintroduced to her again until late May.  Rain, rain, rain...as the season's change and fall shifts slowly into winter....ugh....

But, as I was saying...this is a dreary, cloudy day here in Italy and I haven't been able to shake the BWB (bad weather blues) lately. You would think that with all the cold and damp weather, and having to keep our windows shut up lately, our fly population (read here about it) would have deminished. Not so. I swear those little suckers have multiplied. Yesterday, I apparently left the window of the car rolled down just a smidge...not enough to let any rain in, but apparently just enough to allow every fly in the Veneto to take up residence on my seats. 

I was greeted by about two dozen of them this morning when Delilah and I were leaving for school. At first, I frantically waved my arms trying to get them out of the window in disgust.  Then, the thought hit me....I strapped Delilah into her car seat and drove off with my windows shut and with flies buzzing around.  

Our first stop way to her preschool.  It was raining, but I rolled down my window, not all the way, but just enough.  

Next stop, Jackson's school....again, I rolled down the window--just about two inches this time.  

It was raining steady by this point, but little did everyone (who passed me and wonder why I had left my window down) know that I had a plan.

Success!  I arrived back to the car a couple hours latter and head back to pick up Delilah...fly-free.

My own "catch and release" plan of action :)

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A Give-Away With Some Friends

I've teamed up with some lovely blogging friends for a give away this week!  Be sure to enter, you just might win! And be sure to check out some of the awesome blogs posted as well!

Starletta Designs | Smile and Write | Postcards from Rachel | Treasure Tromp | Chasing Happy | True Colours

Via Fontanelle | Meet With a Smile | Lazy Boleyn | Lip Gloss & Lunges | The Wellness Doer | The Boots Parade

One&20 | Modernette | A Girl Smitten | Deecoded | Found Love. Now What? | The Nectar Collective

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Giveaway Rules

1. Giveaway is open internationally.

2. Giveaway winner will be selected and contacted by email by October 10th. If you are the winner, you MUST respond to that initial email within 48 hours. If you don't, a new winner will be selected and will be held to the same terms.

Semi-Wordless Wednesday

I took this looking out my bedroom window this morning.  This part of Italy is very foggy--something that I didn't know before I moved here.  I can't help buy think of Heathcliff walking across the moors from Wuthering Heights. 

Our Italian Toll Booth Pees Money

It just so happens that our daily life here in Italy usually involves several trips each day through the toll booth. At least two trips are made each day, sometimes more, depending on the measure of hectic-ness in our day. Four trips each way are not uncommon in a day... I often find myself collecting coins in increments of 80 cents Euro since this is the cost of a trip back and forth from my house to the toll booth nearest to post.

No, I do not have a Telepass...and Yes, having one would make life so much easier.  No excuses....

Anyhow, my children are all use to the trip through the toll booth. And all of them know the cost of the trip. It's the job of the passenger to hold the toll booth ticket until we exit and to riffle through the change in search of the 80 cents Euro. 

Jackson has become increasingly interested in this whole process since at school,  he is learning about making change.  Keep in mind, the money we use over here looks vastly different than the money he is learning about at school but fortunately, his teacher has introduced the concept of American money versus Euro, so he's at least familiar with them both. 

Last week, we were on our way home from picking up the oldest brat from cross country practice on post. We were exiting the Autostrada and had stopped at the toll plaza in our town to pay our 80 cents toll. I inserted my ticket and had dropped my usual 80 cents into the cup and was pleasantly surprised when instead of simply rasing the arm to let me, I was rewarded with a €2 coin dropping into the change return. I excitedly told the kids that we had actually made money on this trip and explained to them what had happened. Jackson immediately asked if it was American money and I told him that no, it was European money. Delilah, who had been uncharacteristically quiet for this ride piped up with, "No, he's not! Jackson's not peeing money!!" 

Get it?

European money...

Ur a Peein' money!

I cracked up!

I'd love your vote for Top Mommy Blog.  All it takes is one click on the picture below.  Thanks!

A Picture Book by Trey

It consistently drives me crazy that my children fight and don't want to spend every waking moment cuddled in the embrace of one or all of their siblings, but since I'm an only child, I'm told by my friends with siblings that I'm totally wacked to think that behavior would ever be normal,  I can dream, right?  And then every now and again they actually act like they don't want to kill each other. Here's proof:

Trey wrote this book about his adventures playing outside and catching lizards with his sister one day after school a couple of weeks ago.  He's been begging me to share it on the blog, so here it goes:

The captions are the words that he wrote for his picture book.

Delilah and Trey's Lizard Hunt

With Sparkle the Lizard 

We are going on a lizard hunt

We look for lizards

Then we find one

We name it Sparkle (Mom's Note: Delilah names everything Sparkle)

We have to let Sparkle go

Sparkle has to go home

Bye bye Sparkle

Credits

*Mom for the pictures

*Delilah for being a great lizard hunter

*Sparkle for being calm while we took pictures

*Me, Trey for everything else

He came up with the story on his own and then printed it himself. 

And then he read it to her...

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