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

Three days without the children. I had plans, great plans. I would finish off all the articles due this week, bring myself ahead with the stuff due next week, lay the ground for my pet business project and even enter a couple of crafting challenges.

Ha. I should have known better. The commute, which I had forgotten all about in the last few months, turned my short consultancy day in the office into ten good hours out and about. Add to this errands to run, the laundry that was piling up and needed doing, shopping for groceries, catching up with the post, going to the bank…and I have barely had time to finish the pieces due in this week.

Which means that next week I’ll have to work on whatever pieces are due, and that my pet project and crafting remain a chimera.

Oh well, at least I got to snap a fuzzy but lovely picture of Caterina trying to figure out where her mummy’s voice was coming from (the answer is IChat, but she wouldn’t understand).

Caterina and her papa

Phew! My schedule is getting even more crazy now that Niccolo is off nursery school. good thing we are about to decamp to the seaside where the nonni can help take care of him and Caterina. Or maybe not—I have just remembered that there will be two more preschoolers (my nephews) with us during the week, and said preschoolers plus another baby (my niece) at the weekend. So my life may well end up being even more hectic.

This sustained craziness obviously means I have little time to do anything beyond work and childcare (unless you include working with Nicco on some crafts—we are in the midst of making a tree-shaped seasons booklet).  I did, however, find enough time to take a few pictures of our family’s eyes, which prove beyond doubt that Nicco has my eyes through and through and Caterina hasher father’s eyes. I had obviously noticed this, but seeing the similarity in picture is shocking. You can barely tell my eye from Nicco’s (OK, mine is the one with the wrinkles around it).

Nicco’s eye


My eye


Manfredi’s eye



Caterina’s eye

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!

Time for stealth. Nicco and I have embarked on a secret project. Manfredi’s birthday is coming up in a month and we are making a little memory booklet for him.

We began it yesterday. I cut the base pages, folded them and glued them into a booklet, while Nicco made a wax crayon and a pencil drawing. The idea now is to paint each base page, then add the collages, photographs, drawings, perhaps even poetry. Whatever takes our fancy, really.

The biggest challenge for me is to keep it suitably masculine in both imagery and colours. I realised just how much I use pretty ‘girly’ flowers and butterflies when I worked on a patterned paper for the book today and found myself somewhat short of collage elements.

The first steps of the booklet: Nicco’s drawing and mypatterned paper

I ended up using mostly old letters, stamps and newspaper cuttings, and I am not sure I like the end result. Still, it is a beginning, and I have a full month ahead of me to perfect it. This is going to be both stretching and fun. Let’s just hope Manfredi likes it!

Ohh, I am so happy. I have handed in all my articles and now I can rest and play while I wait for the baby to be born. Over the last few days, I honestly thought I’d never be able to relax like this. I didn’t even get (too) angry at the news that my long-awaited parcel with a bunch of Stampington magazine is delayed at customs (whyever for?) and won’t be delivered until tomorrow.

And look! I even managed to sneak in a collage. The prompt was 4×4 Friday’s families theme. It was the perfect opportunity to do something with one of the many lovely pictures of my grandmother with her sisters and their mother. I love those photos because they are a snapshot of everyday life—reading the papers, chatting, studying, sewing—and yet everyone looks so incredibly happy. You really get the feeling it was a loving, contented family.

My grandmother Nina, her sister Pia and their mother Chiarina reading the newspaper

It didn’t last of course. My great-grandmother passed away not too long after the pictures were taken, one of the sisters moved away to follow her husband, another bore a tragic loss. Which makes it all the more important for me to capture that moment of pure joy and shared love.

Purple seems to be cropping up rather often in online challenges. After the purple and gold combo for Mixed Media Monday a couple of weeks ago, Wednesday Stamper is now running a purple challenge.

This time, however, inspiration struck a lot closer to home than the improbable collage of dancer-turned-empress Theodora, which I made for Mixed Media Monday.

Somehow, purple’s imperial connection made me think of my great-great-grandmother Caterina, a woman so formidable her own family called her Caterina the Great, after the Russian empress.

Caterina the great

She didn’t have the easiest of personalities. An aristocrat, she had a hard time adapting to a world where titles meant increasingly little. She once confided to a friend that “a man who is not a noble does not look like a man to me.” She also sent away a hapless postman who had dared tried to make a delivery to Mrs Caterina (rather than Lady Caterina) saying: “There is no Mrs Caterina here—there never was and never will be.”

Her children had a healthy dose of respect for her, and if they occasionally forgot to treat her with due deference, Caterina was quick to put them in their place. Once, she met her son, my great-grandfather Raffaele Alfredo, in the street. He made the dreadful mistake of not taking off his hat when he approached her.

“What is your hat still doing on your head?” she chastised him.

“But mama, you take your hat off to a lady, and you are just my mother,” he said.

“And what is your mother—a dog?” she replied.

So here is my little tribute to Caterina, who had the pride and demeanour of an empress, if not the title. Well, this, and the fact that my soon-to-be-born daughter will be named Caterina after her.