One of the advantages of living between two countries is that you get to savour some of the best things twice. Take this week for example—we celebrated Father’s Day yesterday (according to the Italian calendar), and are having Mother’s Day on Sunday (according to the British calendar). The we get a re-run of both on May 10 (Italian Mother’s Day) and June 21 (British Father’s Day).
We also get to enjoy the onset of Spring on different dates. Sure, technically it starts on March 21 in both countries. But in Italy, many trees are already in bloom by then. In the UK, the real spring starts ever so slightly later.
Since we were in Milan yesterday and the trees outside our window are already covered in green shoots, we had a Father’s Day and start of Spring party. We had a fresh Spring menu (rocket, tomato and pine nut salad with Parmesan shavings, steak, asparagus with bacon and goat’s cheese and fairy cakes) and made some pretty Spring decorations.
Nicco and I made a Spring garland with egg shapes and lots of flowers and birds (Sam, if you happen to be looking, this is most emphatically not the garland I am making for you—I’ll give you a sneak peek later in the week). It does rather have two personalities—my eggs have soft colours and torn edges, Nicco’s are coloured in bright orange and green and have sharply cut images—but it was great fun to make. Except that I made the huge mistake of getting out my ribbon and lace stash to add a couple of small scraps to the outermost eggs. Nicco really got into the vintage trimmings spirit and chopped and glued my rare, precious lace all over the place. Lesson learned—hide expensive supplies until the children go to bed.
I really wanted to take a picture of the fairy cakes too because they were really cute, but they got eaten before I managed to take a single snap. I guess we’ll have to make some more…purely for visual enjoyment purposes, of course!
PS: we didn’t forget the Father’s Day portion of the celebration, and papa got feted and declared the best papa in the household. But I didn’t manage to finish my little present for him, so I am not posting any detail because the man is known to check this blog from time to time.
