First of all, I want to thank you all for the overwhelming response to yesterday’s post about the Rome Temple Groundbreaking. I appreciated so much the kind comments and the many emails about how our experience touched you. I’ve also given mormonwoman.org permission to repost it today, so you can hop on over there for a visit if you’d like. I want to give a warm welcome to all the new readers who’ve just found Casteluzzo. And I thought today I would give you a little background on our family, our journey to Italy, and how this blog came to be.
… Read more family
Rome Temple Groundbreaking
Last night, along with thousands of members of the L.D.S. Church throughout Italy, we saw the official Groundbreaking of the Rome, Italy Temple. Yes, the Prophet, President Monson, was in Italy this week. He broke ground for the Temple in company with Church leaders from all over Italy (including our own beloved Branch President), Giuseppe Ciardi, the vice-mayor of Rome, and Lucio Malan, a senator from Piemonte, who also happens to be Valdese. Why is that important to us? The Valdese (Waldensians in English) are the small Protestant group in the Alps of Northern Italy to whom Lorenzo Snow and a few other missionaries brought the Restored Gospel in the mid-19th century.
… Read more The Firm
So, we weren’t a very good fit for the whole Corporate America thing. I guess maybe we should have tried somewhere less brutal than Southern California. We just weren’t into the hour commute (both ways!), the fierce competition with colleagues, and the boss who told Tony, “I know you’re into your family. I want someone who’s into his job” (translation: you need to take your work home every evening and weekend if you value your job).
Fast forward to this summer, when we were in Ireland, doing contract work. Out of the blue, the fantastic Italian mayor who granted Tony Italian citizenship (yes, that’s included in the job description of a mayor in Italy) contacted us and said he wanted to fly Tony to Italy to interview for a job in his company.… Read more
Frodo Lives! Or at least Grishnakh and Ugluk do. In fact, they live at my house.
They call it “Orkin.” I hear them speaking it when they think I’m not listening (or is it when they think I am listening and they have secrets from me? That’s what my parents did with Spanish when I was a child). I never quite believed those parents who claimed their children had a special private language. I guess I have to believe them now. I happened to be reading the Lord of the Rings to Axa and Dominique at naptime when we got to Florence. And we were just at the part in The Two Towers where Merry and Pippin are captured by orcs, so there was a lot of the language of Mordor floating around.… Read more
Credi solo a quello che ti dice il cuore
Axa no longer goes to asilo (preschool), as of today. Too bad the only person to whom I can say, “I told you so,” is myself. I knew it was a long shot, considering what I know about school and her personality. As long as it wasn’t doing any harm, I was O.K. with her going, as long as it actually did help her to learn Italian. There’s nothing else I could see that she could learn better at asilo than at home. And now we’ve seen that it’s not even a good place for her to learn Italian. Surprise! Things were just not working out.… Read more
My Children Eat Vegetables
On Saturday I was making dinner while Dominique (my three-year-old) sat at the table, eating his snack. He looked over and saw that I was preparing brussels sprouts. His remark? I kid you not: “Brussels Sprouts. Hooray!” He must have continued to think about it for longer than the typical three-year-old attention span, because a few minutes later he added, “Those brussels sprouts are going to be so yummy!”
My day was made.
… Read more How do YOU say you?
For me, one of the most fascinating things about language consists in the different variations in grammatical “person” that different cultures find necessary. For example, in Tagalog, there are two different ways to say “we.” One of them includes the person spoken to, and the other excludes him. I still haven’t nailed down what exactly is the reason they need this distinction beyond the ability for subtle social snubs, but it’s obviously important to them. Arabic doesn’t include that funny “we,” but it has a plethora of what (to me) seem unnecessary persons. For example, between singular and plural there is a special verbal form called the dual, which is used to talk about two people.… Read more
Mountains Beyond Mountains
Today I did my periodic shuffle through the lone sock bag. The verdict: ten matches and 26 singles. It is possible that our family may have too many different types of socks. We’ve gotten nearly all of them as gifts, though, so I can’t complain. But my children (and occasionally myself) are sometimes known to run about wearing mismatched socks.
Being so peripatetic has its poignancies. There’s something to miss about everywhere we’ve lived. The thing I miss about Florence is the constant unspoken but keenly felt internal nudge to dress yourself up so you can walk out on the streets and do your part to make the city a little more beautiful.… Read more
First Day of School
So. School. Axa’s first day at asilo (preschool/kindergarten) was yesterday. I had very mixed feelings about it. I never went to school myself, nor did I ever anticipate or picture sending my child to school. Yet, here it is. She enjoyed it, although she was quite nervous, and obviously didn’t understand much, since the entire reason we’re sending her is to learn Italian. The school itself is quite impressive. I never went school-shopping in La Jolla or Carmel Valley, but I imagine that an upscale preschool in one of those neighborhoods would probably look a lot like this, although admittedly without that extra Italian flair for style and detail.… Read more
Casteluzzo Academy
My first Charlotte Mason term during October-December of last year was not what I would term a great success. Perhaps I was overambitious. But that’s not such a bad thing. I learned some important lessons about nearly every subject we attempted. We began a new term this week, and I’m quite pleased with the results so far.
We’ve worked out family scriptures quite well. Raj quietly looks at pictures in the Friend magazine with Daddy while I read aloud two or three verses from the Book of Mormon. Before we start, I ask a brief question to recall what we read yesterday, and one of us answers with a short recap.… Read more