First Birthday

Well, Valentina is one year old. Unbelievable. What is EVEN MORE unbelievable is that she is STILL not eating solid food or drinking anything, including breastmilk, from a bottle. Or sippy cup. Or plastic cup. We heard from the lady at our bank that her daughter didn't eat any solid foods until 18 months. Ouch.

She is fairly on schedule with everything else though. Lots of words, including "ciao, ciao" and "gak". She says that a lot. We thought it meant "duck" or "quack" but now we think it either means "grandma" or "kijk" (which is "look" in Dutch).

Although that is sort of a joke because Davide speaks Italian to her, not Dutch.

Definitely a lot of fast crawling and wants to stand up holding onto the furniture ALL the time.

We are loving life in Merano: beautiful mountains, great weather, completely pedestrian town, about a two minute walk to Nonna and Nonno's house, marvelous Terme baths.

What more can you ask for? Come visit!!!

Crash

What a day...!

I'll come back on this one soon.......

We're moving to Merano

On Mai 1st we'll be moving to Merano (South Tirol) in the north of Italy on the border with Austria. On the photo above you see the building we rented. The upper floor on the corner with terrace overlooks the cathedral square and the old medieval shopping street.
It's quiet and pedestrian, across the street of my parents's house, facing the cathedral and overlooking the mountains. it's really gorgeous.

We couldn't stand Firenze anymore with Valentina. It is loud, dirty, there are no green parks or nice walks to do with her. Of course it's a beautiful historical city with beautiful monuments, markets, wine and food.

Merano and South Tirol has too beautiful monuments mainly in the form of castles, beautiful wines and pretty good food too. Maybe the atmosphere and the culture is not so italian but Verona is just over an hour drive. Venice and Milano just over two and a half hours drive.

That's to start with the news. More soon...

Landline and address

Just to be sure everyone who needs it has our home phone number.

(+39)055.468-4661 is our land line
(+39)320.118-4619 is Lorenzo's Italian mobile

Address:
Via Lorenzo il Magnifico 54
50129 Firenze - Italy

Tonight we'll have Thanksgiving dinner with a few American couples here in Firenze, just to start networking a bit.

Wednesday I drive to the Netherlands to see Davide and to bring back our own wines. Cassie and Valentina will spend part of the week I'm away in Merano at my mom's and next week Marcus and Sandy are visiting from S. Diego.

We've had quite a few visitors so far and we're happy it has been going on. Please come see us in Tuscany as we might eventually move to Lombardy or somewhere else next year.

Greetings!

Weekend in Stresa and Milano

We just came back from spending three nights in Stresa, on Lake Maggiore.

We had to go to Milano to close our wedding list (sic!). We still want to thank here all the friends that contributed to the presents and all who came to our wedding last year.

We wanted to imagine how it would feel to live on Lago Maggiore in case I would accept work in Milano. We thought it could be worth the commute to have a beautiful place for Valentina (and Davide...) to grow up and go to school.
We'll see and decide.

We also drove to Como. Como's historic center seemed a very nice place to live. Nice atmosphere, nice shops and buildings. A very nice cathedral close to the lake. Another option to think of.
Next visit we want to visit Monza, just outside Milano.

Milano was also a chance to see friends again; we had a nice dinner with Giuse, Lollo and Maria Luisa.
I must say I was positively impressed by "my city" this time. It seemed cleaner and more livable. It really made me start reconsidering all the negative things I always say about this city.
The polluted air stays though...helaas.

Talk soon about my job opportunities. Ciao!

Exploring Tuscany

We are finally settling in here in Florence. Besides almost daily trips to Carabe (the Sicilian gelato guy who had everyone deliriously licking ice cream off their fingers at our wedding), we have taken weekend day trips to Siena, Volterra, San Gimignano, Fiesole, Arezzo and Forte dei Marmi. Since all of those places have amazing gelato as well, we also joined the Virgin Active gym down the Arno.

Valentina is drooling like a crazy girl. We are optimistically attributing that to teething, although Lorenzo's mom said he had to wear a bib 24/7 until he was like two years old. Hoping it isn't genetic.

She is also experimenting with her high notes, as you can see from the video on this page. She did about a week straight of what we Americans call raspberries, or officially, "bilabial trills" . We were trying not to crack up and get her all excited by responding when she practiced in the middle of the night. Hard when you hear the sound floating out of the darkness at 5 AM. Pppfffttt.... pppfffttt.... pppfffttt. She seems to have perfected them and now has moved on to high pitched squeaking (see video). For those of you interested in linguistic development, according to Dr. Sears website: "Before a baby can form words, he has to master moving his mouth, tongue, and lips together," says Michael Schwartz, M.D., a pediatrician at ABC Pediatrics in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Blowing raspberries helps him coordinate this movement. WHO KNEW?

Davide spent his Herfstvakantie with us. We had a great time showing him Florence and surrounding towns. Our last night together, we stopped at the little walled Borgo of Monteriggioni and then had dinner in San Gimignano. There was a dance performance in the main square with fire dancers and even fire eaters. Valentina (apparently unimpressed) fell asleep during the performance, but the rest of us really enjoyed it!!

We had a recent stream of visitors...Desiree and Dimitri down from Breda; Martin, Caroline and the girls from Amsterdam and Heike here from Merano for work. We had a great time and encourage more visitors!!

Our personal Dolphin

Super squeaks from Valentina...