Well, the snow didn’t last long. It melted in yesterday’s rain, but not before we managed to make a snowman and have a good, old-fashioned snowball fight.

And, best of all, it ushered that ‘Christmas is coming’ feeling. We haven’t decorated yet, which is unusual, because I like to have everything in place on December 1, but then this year I really seem to be trying (and failing) to catch up with myself—the Christmas pudding is steaming just now, and I usually have it ready by mid November. That said, the plan is to decorate between today and tomorrow, and we are starting to feel very festive. Or at least, I am, and am trying to make sure the rest of the family catches the Christmas bug.

Which neatly brings me to my Christmas spirit afterschooling plan. This month, I am selecting festive readings for Nicco, and mingling them with stuff on the Victorian era. That’s because we have the endearingly quirky (some would say outright bonkers) habit of celebrating a Victorian Christmas in this household. We started it in 2004, the year Nicco was born. We never spend Christmas at home, as we are either at my parents’ or at Manfredi’s, an we thought it would be fun for him, as he grew older, to have some memories of Christmas at home and some family traditions to call his own. And since the Victorians were the first to celebrate Christmas as we know it, we decided to have it Victorian style. We have Victorian food, eat plum (read: Christmas) pudding and indulge in Victorian customs (such as carols) which both Manfredi and I have come to appreciate during our married life but which are not common in either of our families of origin. No presents though—those are saved for the proper Christmas.

I must admit my family are somewhat critical of what they see as ‘too many Christmases’ because they believe it ruins the expectation and the atmosphere on the day. But it is also true that Manfredi and I, perhaps because we both left home when quite young, have a different approach to life and different traditions from our families of origin and it is our own traditions that we want to pass onto our children. Until now, Nicco was too young to really understand what was going on with our Victorian Christmas. We’ll see how it goes this year and then re-evaluate whether to continue or stop it.

While we do it, though, I want to enjoy it to the full. And that means reading the books that bring on the Christmas cheer. I haven’t drawn up a complete list yet, but I here are some ideas off the top of my head:

Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester

Celia Thaxter’s Little Piccola

Charles Dickens’ Christmas Stories

Clement C. Moore’s Twas the Night before Christmas

Maud Lindsay’s The Christmas Cake

I also came across Pearl S. Buck’s Christmas Day in the Morning, which is a real tear jerker for me, but I think Nicco is still a bit too small for it (though if it helped get him out of bed in the morning…what a blessing that would be!).

Meanwhile, here’s someone who is already feeling Christmassy..

Caterina in her Christmas outfit

Well, we just about had time to eat the turkey (chicken, really) before winter came. We woke up to a White (rather than Black) Friday this morning, and the snow has been keeping up all day.

Perhaps it’s because I am energised by cold weather but I love it. It has immediately woken up the Christmas spirit in me (not that it takes much to wake it up, but still) and I am positively raring to start baking cookies, decking the halls, wrapping the presents…

Mind you, before I get down to doing any of that—especially the wrapping—I actually have to *make* the presents, and that’s where I am lagging slightly behind. As in, I haven’t done anything yet. I have been sidetracked with my digital Christmas scrapbooking kit, which is now nearly finished, and with finding a good e-download selling programme, which I have now found.

The good thing, though, is that I can use the papers and stuff from the kit to make cards and at least some of the presents (the paper-based ones). It’s just a question of finding the time to do it all…

On this cold, crisp November day, I am grateful for Niccolo, Caterina, my husband, my parents, my wider family. I am grateful that we are healthy and have all we need. And most of all I am grateful because, despite work woes, gnawing parenting worries, and an unsettling sense of insecurity for the world’s financial and terrorism crises, we are managing to stay happy and have a laugh (well, most of the times, anyway).

On my table today:

fois gras with brioche

pumpkin soup with prosciutto

chicken with chestnut and bacon stuffing

spicy sweet potatoes

apple pie with vanilla ice cream

and the infamous, mutant cornucopia…

Someone asked me how I afterschool—so here comes. Because Nicco already spends plenty of time in school, I don’t do any workbooks or seatwork with him. I don’t want to bore him to tears and run the risk of burning him out. Instead, we curl up on the sofa with a bunch of good books.

But wait, afterschooling is a bit different from plain old reading. I sneakily choose books to fit a loose curriculum which I draw up every month. So, for example, because we are celebrating Thanksgiving this month, the ‘curriculum’ touches upon America, its discovery (with stories about Thorvald the Viking, Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci), the arrival of the pilgrims (with a couple of stories on the first Thanksgiving) and the meaning of giving thanks and being grateful about what we have (with a bunch of moral tales).

After I read aloud the story, we look up places on our inflatable globe, watch the odd video clip on Youtube if there are any relevant ones, and most of all talk about what happened—what would you have done in Columbus’ place when his crew lost hope, for example, or were the children right or wrong in climbing on the barn’s roof in the Visit. Sometimes we play games that are linked to the book, sometimes Nicco tries to read some of the book’s words, and often we end up cooking something we read about.

That’s the essence of it, with the odd bit of counting, addition and subtraction thrown in (Nicco loves questions like: “If you have seven and I give you three more, how many do you have?” He also loves asking me questions, usually about numbes that, for him, are enormous: “If you have fifty and I give you a hundred, how many do you have?”). Oh, and we craft—drawing, painting, mucking about with play dough or clay…we do it all.

Of course, when I see he just wants to play, I back off from afterschooling. But he really loves reading and we tend to go through at least one story every afternoon. I bet he doesn’t even realise it is some form of schooling…

We must be the only non-American family to celebrate Thanksgiving this side of the pond. This is partly because we are partial to holidays and like to celebrate as many as we can, and partly to honour Manfredi’s American relatives (I am thinking of you, Georgeann).

So we are busy getting ready for it. The food is there (in my mind, that is—the actual cooking will be a two-day job between Wednesday and Thursday) and the decorations are coming along nicely, especially now that Niccolo got involved. We made a Thanksgiving tree and shaped a horn of plenty out of DAS paste (when I say shaped, I mean sort of shaped—the horn got given some extraordinary ridges which make it look like a stegosaurus with no head).

The horn got painted today, and Nicco was adamant he wanted it to be blue, red and yellow. I could show him pictures of brown horns till the cows came home—he still wanted it multicolour, and in random patches please. Our mutant horn is drying now, and should be ready to be filled tomorrow with chestnuts, walnuts, pomegranades and grenadillas (not quite the traditional thing, I know, but they are a lovely shade of orange).

We’ll finger paint some turkeys next and turn them into place cards. I was hoping to find some more ideas in Five in a Row’s Thanksgiving ebook, which I downloaded today, but they had a Thanksgiving tree and a bread cornucopia, both of which we have sort of done.  Shame (although there are a couple of yummy recipes in there too, so I didn’t completely waste $6).

We are also reading up a lot on Thanksgiving, now that Niccolo is old enough to understand and enjoy what the celebration is all about. I have found loads of old, copyright-free stories to enjoy. Favourites so far are: The First Thanksgiving Day (from Wiggin and Smith’s Story Hour), The Visit (from Lindsay’s More Mother Stories) and The Spirit of the Corn (from Jenkins Oldcott’s Good Stories for Great Holidays).

Tonight we’ll start on Louisa May Alcott’s An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving. It’s long, and Nicco is probably too young for it, but we’ll see if Alcott works her literary magic on him.

P.S.: the Christmas kit is coming along nicely. I am looking for a decent e-sales solution now, and hopefully will be in business soon!

I am a city girl and usually happy with my lot. I like to have the buzz of the city around me, the shops, the services, the ease of life. But today, on my homeschooling quest, I stumbled upon this lovely blog: http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Dell/. And I was seized by the desperate need to live in a place like that: where the leaves turn golden and red (and not sickly yellow); where a nature walk means spotting a squirrel on a tree or a fox by the entrance door (and not cockroaches and rats scurrying in the Tube’s tunnels); and where children are so beautiful, well-dressed and even better photographed (and not like some other children I know, who always look like little monkeys).

OK, if I had to settle for just one thing, the pictures would be it. Why do her children look so beautifully elegant and poised in a picture, while mine look like this?

Oh my goodness. I can’t believe it has been more than a month since I last posted. Nearly two months really. I have been buried under a vast amount of work from which I am only now managing to emerge. So much for my end of summer optimism that, when Niccolo resumed school, I’d be able to blog, craft and be otherwise free.

Instead, I got more work, more work and even more work. Which is good for my finances, but not so good for my sanity. So my strategic decision is to try and keep the workload lighter and manageable until the New Year. This will give me time to make all the Christmas presents (I am already panicking), reduce my stress levels beyond red alert, and hopefully give some shape to my still nebulous plans for this blog and my crafty business.

And look after the kids, of course. The only non-work-related thing I have done over the course of the last two months has been to after-school Niccolo. I have been experimenting massively to try and nurture his curiosity, encourage his budding reading skills and generally keep him busy. The end result is my very own literature-based afterschooling curriculum, which mixes elements of Five in a row, Sonlight, Charlotte Mason and Old Fashioned Christian Education with some crafts and lots of hands on activities thrown in. And if you have no idea of what I am talking about, is probably because you don’t have a child of schooling age.

So far, so good. Niccolo seems to enjoy it, although he doesn’t much like the copyright-free books I am getting off the Internet (which on the other hand I like because they are free, thus allowing me to cover virtually any topic he expresses an interest in at zero cost).  His reading is progressing apace, he seems to have a good grasp of basic arithmetic (he figured that two plus three equals five, and is genuinely obsessed with comparing sizes—of countries in particular) and his general knowledge of the world is expanding to a point that I consider almost scary—just a few days ago, after reading a story where a house goes up in smoke, he enquired about the levels of fire resistance of various materials. He started off with the obvious ones—wood, metal, cement—and ended up with: ‘How about carbon fibre?’

And he is definitely using his brain. He was trying to determine the biggest of numbers and, when I explained to him that numbers are infinite, he thought for a while then decreed that “so numbers come back where they begin—like a circle which doesn’t begin or doesn’t end.” For a four year old, it is not too bad a way to represent the concept of infinity.

Alas, his behaviour isn’t improving to the same degree. He is still headstrong and argumentative, although introducing a basic star chart seems to have made him ever so slightly more compliant. I console myself thinking he will make a good lawyer some day…

Meanwhile, Caterina has dramatically improved her gross motor skills—to the point that she is now a danger to herself. She has learned to propel herself on the baby chair (by pushing against the floor with her feet) and figured that if she grabs the side of her cradle with both hands, she can lift herself up. Both cradle and baby chair have quickly been retired after she took these exploits to an extreme and tried to get out of them head first.

Whoo-hoo, school has started! That means more time for me to work, do some creative stuff and plan my big idea. I have been playing with the scheme in my head for quite a while now, but haven’t really had much time to do anything practical with it. But if I pull it off, it will be fun, because it will put together my love of words with my passion for crafting. I couldn’t ask for more.

Oh well, still a lot of work to be done though, and since I am Procrastination Queen, I have spent the last half an hour or so looking at the holiday pictures. Some of them are really fun (often in a horrid kind of way) and I can’t wait to scrapbook them all. until then, here is a snapshot of what we did last summer (after all, it is almost over. Today, it feels definitely autumnal over here).

The little Indiana Jones


getting the knack of swimming


Disco divo


Beach babe


Playing great-great-great-great-grandmother’s piano


With my great aunt


Taking the waters in Milan


At home in London


Mummy and papa photographed by Niccolo


New recruit


Relaxing at home


at hever castle, watching the joust


Fun at Hever castle


Baby pirate at Eurodisney


My two pirates

Phew! It has been an intense month, a whirlwind of Paris, Disneyland, London, Legoland, new museums and old parks, Milan, now Florence. We have travelled, eaten, taken rides, grown (some of us vertically, others horizontally), had an inordinate amount of fun…and worked and planned. To avoid depriving the children of my presence during their waking hours, I worked from 6am to 9am which, considering Caterina is still waking up at night every two or three nights, means that I am shattered and need a holiday after the holidays. It also means that I had virtually no time to scrapbook, collage, paint, read or do anything else anything beyond some basic backgrounds I did on a couple of afternoons when Niccolo decided to paint.But I have plans, big plans, and they are finally taking shape behind the scenes. I have to say a huge thank you to my ever supportive writer friend Leslie and to Andrea Singarella who, instead of sending me packing for having emailed her completely out of the blue to ask for moral support, was extremely encouraging and kind. If customs duties weren’t so crippling for items coming in from the US, I’d buy her entire stock tomorrow because 1. it is great and 2. she is great.Now, Nicco’s school resumes in ten days, and that’s when I’ll start making things happen. So watch this space…. 

Gosh I don’t think I have ever worked so much in my entire life. Day and night, night and day, trying to bring myself ahead, and all for the sake of a few days off next week. We are heading to Paris and Eurodisney, and I most definitely will not be able to do anything there. A few nights, while I was working on my laptop in bed, words dancing in my head, Caterina sleeping in her cradle next to me, I wondered whether it was worth all this effort.

But you know what? I think it will. Nicco is so excited at the idea of going to Paris. We have read a few Madeleine’s stories, re-read Laurence Anholt’s Degas and the Little Dancer, planned to see it (and Mona Lisa) at the Louvre, and talked about the chocolate shops and ice cream parlours we’ll hit.

Faced with this, what does it matter if I am tired, sleepy and headachy? After all, it’s nothing a good croissant can’t cure.