Niccolo is off for a few days with the nonni. It is the first time he has been without us since Caterina was born and I was a bit worried that he might have a difficult time. Looks like I fretted for nothing. He couldn’t wait to hop on the aeroplane with Nonna last Tuesday and he has been having a whale of a time ever since. He was apparently ‘too busy’ to speak to me on the phone and rightly so, considering he absolutely has to play football, do some gardening, walk the dogs and go and look for enemies in the woodland (dressed in full knight regalia) every day.

Nicco the diver

Oh and wear his diving suit (even though he is a fair few miles away from the sea). Caterina and I are joining him tomorrow. It will be her first aeroplane journey—I wonder how she will take to it?

When I first started paper-crafting, I had a passion for photo montages. I’d stick Niccolo’s head on a Victorian boy or one of Raphael’s angels and turn them into cards with gusto. It had been a while since I last did that, but last week I came across an image of a Victorian baby girl which I could not pass up. It just screamed at me to be montaged with Caterina’s face and set against a pretty floral background.

Caterina as a Victorian baby

And since I also wanted to use a stamp with it, I decided to give it a square shape and use it for Wednesday Stamper’s latest challenge. I am conscious it is no great artwork—but it was a heck of a lot of fun to make.

I can barely believe it, but I made it. Yesterday was Manfredi’s birthday and I managed to have the booklet (and the card, and the cake) done in time. OK, so I got it all finished at 8pm, thus delaying our supper, but it was still before he got down to opening the presents.

Even better, he really liked the booklet, almost as much as he liked his other present, the Wii (because some people age without ever growing up). Or at least he lied very convincingly about liking it.

Two of my favourite pages from the booklet

So now I can lie down and sleep for the entire weekend. Or, more likely, lie down for five minutes and make armour and feed children for the entire weekend.

Niccolo is so much into knights just now that I thought it would be fun to have a medieval supper. I have done this kind of stuff before—complete with authentic recipes from Le Menagier de Paris and Maestro Martino—and love it, but it rarely is a hit with other people. Manfredi endures it patiently, everyone else usually runs away as fast as they can.

So imagine my joy when it turned out Nicco loves it too. He wasn’t too keen on eating without forks initially (he must be the only four-year-old who doesn’t like to dirty his hands) but really enjoyed using a trencher (in a small deviation from authenticity, I used a double trencher for him—wooden board and slices of stale bread—to contain the damage to the tablecloth), and eating by candlelight. Much to my suprise, he even took to the idea that knights often started their supper with fruit and gobbled up an entire apple before his roast beef. Sadly, his enthusiasm did not extend to the Menagier’s split pea soup and Maestro Martino’s swiss chard tart. Guess I’ll have to find another ruse to make him eat vegetables.

Sir Niccolo at the table

He liked the whole thing so much that he asked to eat like knights again yesterday. This was unexpected and, in Manfredi’s case, not entirely welcome. Therefore, he tried to trick Niccolo by subtly adding modern comforts (such as fork, plates and a little electricity) to our knightly table—only to be stopped in his tracks by the little one.

“But papa, knights did not have forks. But papa, knights did not have plates. But papa, knights did not have lights.”

So there was nothing to do but eat roast chicken off wooden trenchers with our fingers in the encroaching darkness. Well, at least two of us thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Nicco’s drawing of Julius Caesar, complete with sword, shield and…crown!

Now, however, things may be about to take a turn for the worse as Nicco is developing a fascination for Julius Caesar and the Romans. We have already added a Roman shield and gladius to our armoury, and included a Roman re-enactment video in Nicco’s Youtube staple of medieval joust re-enactments and Fifth Gear car tests. So I expect we will soon have to try hosting a Roman banquet. But then even I will have a problem at the prospect of eating liquamen-soaked snails!

What a packed day. Nicco ran the first race of his life, and I had so much fun watching him. There is little as cute as a bunch of three to five year-old children engaged in a relay race. The things they come up with—like the kid who did the entire bean bag leg of the race (bean bag on the head, arms out) with his head bent forward. The bean bag kept sliding of course, but no amount of coaching from teacher or parent could persuade that little boy to change his mind and lift his head up. That was the way he was going to run and that was it.

Going fast

I have also discovered that Nicco is fast, very fast. I always knew he could run—he started to run practically on the same day he started to walk—but hadn’t realised just how fast he could go until I saw him alongside other small children. That said, he hardly took off like the wind when his team mate handed him the baton (or rather, the ring). He stood stock still for a while, waiting and waiting for the teacher to signal he could start running. Clearly, he is not very clear on the rules of a relay race!

Only die-hard fans of Thomas the Tank Engine (or the mothers thereof) will get the “nearly there” quote from the Spencer book, but I do feel much like Edward, a slow, old steam engine, trying to beat shiny new Spencer in a race to the duke’s summer house. Except that —in my quest to finish the little family booklet that will be my husband’s birthday present—I am trying to beat Time itself, so the odds are definitely against me. After all, there is no chance that Time will magically fall asleep just before the end of the race, thus letting me win with relative ease.

So I am scrambling to get as many pages done as quickly as possible. Here is the latest one, which is, unsurprisingly, another showcase for a picture of Caterina and Niccolo.

Proud brother

As with the previous page, I am also entering this for the Wednesday Stamper art challenge (create something that has a the word art, and at least one stamped image, in it). Although, if truth be told, the stamping here is very subtle—only the numbers 14 and 21, which are the children’s birth dates, and are from the Oxford Impressions range. Other than that it is mostly a hybrid collage—a digital collage as background, with a photo, some lace and the title glued on top.

Seeing it alongside the other, I am starting to think the book pages all look a bit samey, but then I am sure my husband will enjoy the subjects!

After last week’s wobble, Nicco is doing rather well. He still has a rough time when I feed Caterina—he usually does his worst to attract attention then—and occasionally overreacts to reprimands, but getting him to snap out of his mood is becoming easier. Or perhaps I am learning how to handle him (hint: give him as much attention as possible, and defuse any tense situation with humour; never tell him off unless he has done something absolutely unforgivable). Still, I suspect this will be a steep learning curve for both of us.

It helps that Caterina sleeps most of the time. This allows me to spend plenty of one-to-one time with Nicco—a result of which is that I have now become quite adept at making helms and armour. Archery, however, remains beyond me. Being thoroughly beaten by a not-quite-four-year-old is fairly humbling experience. Especially when he then adds innocently: “But mummy why are you so bad at all sports?” Hmm, perhaps because I read, drew and crafted during the time I should have spent exercising?

Talking of which (crafting that is, not exercising) I miraculously managed to find a spare minute or thirty to work on the family book I am giving my husband as his birthday present. Which is a good thing, considering his birthday is now just nine days away. Here is my latest page—now I only have four more pages to go, plus the front and back covers. At this rate, I may even finish the book in time.

Children in a pocket

Incidentally, I am also entering this for the Created by hand challenge, which is all about using textiles in your projects (I used lace here to decorate the tag that’s in the bookpage pocket). That’s because I no longer have time to make any dedicated effort for any challenge—beyond keeping Nicco entertained while I feed Caterina, that is!

As I feared, Nicco has started showing signs of distress. He is biting his fingernails with gusto—a sure indicator of stress which he has ‘inherited’ from me—and trying to attract attention by misbehaving. If he gets reprimanded, he either becomes aggressive or oversensitive—once, he even told me: “No one loves me any more,” which very nearly broke my heart. Apparently, though, it is good that he can articulate his distress rather than bottling it all up, so I am trying to encourage him to do so. Yesterday, I also kept him home and played with him the whole day. Hide and seek, knights and villains, archery, running, football, reading stories—we did it all (thankfully, Caterina sleeps most of the time).

Niccolo the archer

At the end of it, he seemed to be a lot more cheerful and hardly misbehaved at all, to the point that we decided to go out for a meal, as he wanted to eat fish, and there is no way I am going to cook the thing at home (not that I would know how to, having a deep-set diffidence towards all food coming from the sea).

It was Caterina’s first restaurant outing, at the grand old age of 16 days, and she slept through it all. Niccolo, on the other hand, had a whale of a time. He thoroughly enjoyed his grilled seabass and even ate a plateful of fried courgettes, thanks to Manfredi’s inspired white lie, which passed them off as whitebait. I had long suspected Nicco’s aversion to all vegetables except peas was more psychological than real, and this is proof. I am now going to serve fried ‘fake whitebait’ at regular intervals and see what happens.

More importantly, though, the meal out really seemed to restore his good mood, and this morning he went to nursery school without a peep. I am not deluding myself that this is the end of his difficult time, but hopefully grown-up things like going to the restaurant, in which Caterina can’t really participate, can help soften the blow.

Gosh, it is the first time in four days that I manage to sit down at my desk. I can barely believe it. The four days of May 1-4 are a Bank Holiday weekend in Italy, where we are at the moment. I had to work through the first two days anyway (in an rather annoying lack of sync, May 1 and 2 are not a Bank Holiday in the UK, although May 5 is, and I had two articles due in). Then I had to make up for having worked on Friday afternoon and Saturday by taking Niccolo and Caterina to every possible park and shop imaginable.

Having fun…


…in the park…


..and at home…

The end result was that they had oodles of fun—well Nicco did; Caterina slept most of the time—and I fell asleep like a rock at 9pm every evening. Or tried to, anyway. It seems that all this fresh air is tiring me out, but having no effect whatsoever on the children, especially Nicco, who last night kept asking for another read of Aladdin, two Great Explorer stories (Sir Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh), the story of how the goddess Aphrodite was born of teh sea foam and, while we were at it, the Trojan war. Mind you, it is entirely my fault. I remember that my mother’s adaptations of Homer’s Iliad were among the stories I enjoyed the most as a child, and decided to tell them to Niccolo. He clearly likes them as much as I did.

Niccolo’s one successful attempt at taking a picture

And crafting, I hear you ask? Well, I am half way through making a golden sword (guess who asked for it) but other than that…I have only been able to think of some collages I want to do in the ten seconds it takes for me to fall asleep.