Things I Love about you, Samina Elisa Rossi.

When Sofia was very little, I spent much of my free-ish time pondering things about her. Examining her every move, my every feeling, all details I loved and hated and in between about Motherhood. But that was then, this is now. In my present day, with two, time to ponder has been halved (thirded? fourthed?) so, much as the cliche goes, we're behind on Samina's baby book and, as 2013 would have it be, I am behind on my blogging about her.

And so, I decided to write this...

Things I Love about Samina Elisa Rossi:

1. That smile. That electric smile (which has now been paired with a classy Princess-like hand wave) makes people fall in love with you, and instantly. It is, some days, the reason I get up in the morning.

2. That laugh. Some might think this goes together with number 1, but that's because they don't know you and don't know your contagious laugh deserves a number of its own.

3. The way you take everyone and everything in. You and your sister are world class observers, and observing you observe is my new favorite past-time. And, as you do it, you mutter little things under your breath, like "baa" and "whappaga", and it's like you're commenting on what you're seeing. I'll bet you are, and I'll bet if we could understand you, we'd all be getting a little talking to.

4. You are so sweet and cuddly. Andrea and I decided that this time around we weren't going to be so strict with the sleep arrangements. And so began the co-sleeping. And, want to know a secret? Some nights, as you fall asleep clutching my nose, I hear your sweet breathing and a little pang remembers it won't last forever. I am officially one of *those* moms.

5. Motherhood sucks sometimes (many times, for different reasons), I'm not gonna lie. But you? You bring peace to this house, to us, to me. Any three of the rest of us can be angry or self-righteous about any number of the latest wrongdoings on someone else's part, but then you pull yourself up and wave, or yell out something incomprehensible, or talk to your plastic giraffe, and all is forgotten for the moment. Which is no small feat, mind you.

6. Your little hands. They pick things up. Many times, one of your hands (and its nails, ouch) holds fiercely onto one of our necks while the other hand's thumb relaxes in your mouth. They examine, they caress, they wave, they play, they hold a piece of bread as you learn to feed yourself.

7. Your spirit. You have quite a little personality, my dear Samina. Yes, you are the peacemaker in the family. You bring people together, you love nothing more than having your family all together, you sing yourself songs. But you also know your rights, and you are not afraid to claim them. Girls' got chutzpah - don't let her cherubic demeanor fool you.

And so, my dear Sammy (Sammy Davis, as your papa' calls you on occasion), thanks for being part of the family. We love you and are so happy you're here with us. Don't let the lack of baby book confuse you (papa's working on it!).


p.s. and lucky number 8: the entire time I wrote this post, you entertained yourself with a toy on the floor in front of me. Bless your heart, little girl, bless your heart.

Samina's First 50 Foods

I am fully aware that this post will be of little interest to anyone but myself and Andrea, but I decided to use this blog as a..well...log!

1. pasta with olive oil
2. capocollo
3. blackberries
4. lettuce
5. bread
6. prosciutto (crudo)
7. banana
8. broccoli
9. breaded chicken
10. prosciutto (cotto)
11. tomato
12. meatballs
13. olive
14. fish
15. cucumber
16. egg
17. zucchini
18. ricotta
19. parmigiano
20. asparagus
21. green beans
22. porcini mushrooms
23. cheese pizza
24. peaches
25. pork steak
26. pineapple
27. kiwi
28. shrimp
29. strawberries
30. arugula
31. stracchino cheese
32. farro
33. potato gnocchi
34. peas
35. liver
36. onion
37. orange
38. apple
39. blueberries
40. sweet potato
41. black truffle
42. 'fiordilatte' gelato
43. banana gelato
44. plum crostata
45. tofu
46. rice
47. malt yogurt
48. soy sauce
49. lemon
50. saffron

Community

Yesterday, we went to a birthday party for one of Sofia's little friends. And when the cake came out, I noticed something fascinating: all of the parents and grandparents in the room were smiling - ear to ear, genuine cheesy grins. Some of them, including myself, for a little girl they hardly knew.

One of the greatest gifts parenting gives you - should you choose to accept it - is Community. I think of my early days of Motherhood and the importance - no, the *essentiality* - of other moms in my life. And that has held true over the past 3 years. I have found genuine friends through my daughter. People who laugh and cry with me along the ebb and flow of daily life. People who have come to care for and cherish my daughters as if they were blood relatives. My go-to community with any parenting doubts, as we dredge together through the confusing waters of pre-school and potty training and what to do on a rainy day in Perugia.

These days, I often find myself citing the old "It takes a village" because, yeah, well, it does. I am even more aware of it now, with little Samina in our lives. Like when we are all at the park (as we almost always are), and someone stealthily grabs her from me so I can sit still for a minute, or when I turn around to find that someone else has dried Sofia's tears before I even had time to notice she was crying.

We parents do often seem smug from the outside, I am well aware of it. We often seem like one of those pompous clubs which requires the worst kind of hazing to become a part of. But that's from the outside. We are really just a bunch of lost, confused, disheveled souls feeling so incredibly fortunate to have found we are not stranded on a desert island. So relieved to cut the boredom of toddlerhood with the laughter of a fellow parent, so aflutter at the notion that there is someone else who might actually be interested that your little kid finally pooped in a public toilet or stopped his war on vegetables or will only wear pink to pre-school.

And so, as I looked around that raucous birthday party room, with what seemed like 1,000 tiny little voices belting out "Happy Birthdayyyyyyy to youuuuu," it was hard not to feel the pride. Pride resonating from the 1,000 parents of those 1,000 tiny little voices, as they saw the birthday girl's eyes grow wide and her electric smile turn to blow out those 3 little pink candles. The community. It had gathered around one of its families and bear hugged it, with the strength that only common experience can provide.

Oversharing

As many of you may well have noticed, I like to share. Pictures, stories, anecdotes, information, links, opinions. All of them, all out there. I am pretty much an open book, and most days I'm fine with that. But, yeah, some days I do feel like a bit of a circus freak.

See, I was sorta just born this way: an oversharer. I look at those people who are dark and mysterious and I literally ask myself how they do it. Some of them, I note in wonderment, don't even *try* to be that way - they aren't even calculating being cryptic. THEY JUST ARE. I know. Total madness, from over here in Shareytown, where everybody knows your name.

People seem to like me this way, for the most part - or at least that's what they tell me. To the Italians, I am very "American," sharing every last detail of my life over our first cup of caffe' (and urging them to do the same). They use words to describe me like solare (sunny) and simpatica (nice). 

To the Americans, I am Good Ol' Jodi. Bridging the gap in my eclectic world of friends with a smile, a joke and some sort of narrative.

These are pretty great ways to be viewed in the world. I realize that, and I do cherish it. I am shy in many things but, over the years, I've learned that sharing myself and my thoughts is not something I mind doing anymore. It helps me connect with people; it gives them a sense of comfort, I think, knowing I am putting myself out there. They in turn open up to me more easily and fully and, poof, a friendship is formed. Empathy is achieved.

The bad side is obvious. The more I talk about me, the more I make myself open to criticism, or just plain opinions. Which I know is the natural part of discourse. It would be highly arrogant of me to think I could just put myself out there and people would simply tell me how wonderful my thoughts are. But, sometimes, the criticism is unexpected and painful, or keeps me up at night because it reveals a side of a situation I had thoroughly missed. Or, worse, it makes me see an aspect of myself I had heretofore completely overlooked. One that, perhaps, was best left secret, overturned under a large boulder-sized rock, as long as we both shall have lived.

Truth is, though, I don't think I am going to change anytime soon. I like connecting with people (this blog post being, ironically, Exhibit A). As much as I spent most of my high school years just wishing I were one of those enigmatic girls who seemed to flow through the hallways naturally raising eyebrows. I am who I am, in all my blabbering glory.

p.s. In doing some research for this post, I discovered that Webster's New World Dictionary announced 'overshare' as 2008's Word of the Year! Validation!

Beyond Baby Blues

I suffered from Postpartum Depression after Sofia's birth.

This is something I have only recently felt ok enough to admit to the masses. It took me a long time to admit it to myself, then to Andrea, then to my closest friends and then, now, to you, the world at large.

Postpartum Depression, popularly referred to as PPD, is a bitch. It goes beyond that first-time mom, totally normal feeling of "Holy shit, I'm really *in* this now." PPD makes it hard to breathe, because you feel suffocated, suddenly, by your own life. It is obviously different for everyone but, in my case, it made me resent everyone and everything - myself included. Or, maybe I should say, myself especially. 


I feel like I need to be careful writing this, because Sofia might someday read it and feel, somehow, that it was her fault I had this problem. And so, before I go any further, let me stress to her and to other moms and to all of you out there that PPD is first and foremost a hormonal imbalance. In fact, most moms who figure out they have it cure it with anti-depressants. I did not. Not because I am against them - quite the opposite - but because shrinks are pretty hard to come by here in Italy, where PPD is still a taboo topic. I just never felt strong enough to ask for help or figure out how to get it. And so I battled through it alone - with poor old Andrea at my side, never knowing what words out of his mouth might make me bite his head off (pretty much all of them...feeling backed into a corner, I frequently lashed out).

PPD brought me to depths I'd never been before. I remember once, in the very early days, my mother-in-law saying conversationally "Now that you have one of your own, can you believe those women who kill their own children?" And my heart sunk. Actually, it went and right broke in half, my poor heart, because my answer was too shameful, too horrible for any mother to actually think, and so I kept it to myself: "Yes. Yes, I can." Sofia was never at risk, mind you; luckily, I never felt that sting of violence other PPD moms might. But, suddenly, I *understood* them in a way I never thought I would and never would have wanted to. Which was such a dark realization, and so difficult to really allow myself to feel. Because I did love my daughter. I did. But, in the beginning, I loved her from afar. While someone else was holding her, if she was asleep, or in my dreams, on those rare nights I was able to rest my weary mind.

Me in the beginning, enduring.

 I'm not sure I can pinpoint the exact moment I felt my PPD had passed and I was in the clear. I am absolutely certain it lasted Sofia's first 6 months, pretty positive it went on well past her first birthday. But it's all a blur now. Maybe it stopped when we finally got to sleeping through the night (that sounds about right, actually, but that was at 2 years...). Somehow I'd gotten through it without medication. Somehow, I found myself willing and able to leave the house alone with her and do all sorts of Mommy-daughter things that filled me with joy, not anxiety.

Anyway. That's all history now; history I'd just as soon not dwell on.  But I decided to write this post because there are a lot of new (or 2nd-time) moms in my life right now, and I just read an article that made me think of them, and made me think of that dark and by-now-hazy time in my early parenting days. (This link here: http://www.postpartumprogress.com/the-symptoms-of-postpartum-depression-anxiety-in-plain-mama-english.) It may seem cliche', but it's true, and from my heart: if I can save just one other mom from silently enduring the guilt of Postpartum Depression, it might have made it all worth it to have survived it myself.

The Parent Trap

One day our children will be grown up, and we will laugh at how many times Sofia got sick because of her hand-in-her-mouth addiction, or how Samina was already so strong at 4 months that putting her diaper on without her rolling over mid-changing was an absolute impossibility. How I never have the time to shower more regularly than every 3-4 days (true story). How Andrea had a physical therapy or massage therapy appointment every day of the week for various body parts because these past 3 years with Sofia and his lack of time for exercise suddenly turned him into an 80-something-year-old.

But, right now, we're not really laughing.

Our own parents, family friends with older children, the old granny who stops us on the street to stroke Samina's chubby feet, they all say it: time goes so fast, enjoy it!

There are so many unfair ironies in life that surround me daily, and this is perhaps one of the greatest. Like the old saying "Youth is wasted on the Young," I often think that "Parenting is wasted on the Parents." We're too tired to appreciate it - too stressed, too busy trying to keep life going, that we can't see the sunshine through the clouds. Or, if we can, it's because we're out of the house so much, busy with work and the outer world, that those 10 minutes we can capture putting them to sleep are sacred.

It's a constant toss up for us poor parents: if we have the time to spend with them, they often suck so much energy out of us, we just dream of time hurrying the heck up, getting them to sleep so we can have a second to ourselves. Or, the alternative, if we work so much that we never get to see them, all we want is more time, more memories, and we beg time to slow the heck down.

This constant toss-up is hard going because, minus those sweet seconds of the day when your kid smiles up at you and says "I love you, too, Mommy!", parenting often equals Guilt. Or, at least in this house it does. The amount of times I kick myself in the pants for too-harsh words spoken in exhaustion.... How my heart hurts when I realize I've thrown an opportunity at bonding away because I just couldn't stand another round of "Sofia plays doctor" or another read of "Clifford the Big Red Dog."

Sometimes I go to bed convinced that I am too selfish a person to be a good parent. To me, being a good mother has always meant putting yourself last...but, the more deep I get into this parenting game, the more I realize that I don't *want* to come last. Sometimes I don't want to leave the last piece of chicken for Sofia, I don't want to give up my seat on the couch so she can put her doll to sleep there. And then I want to smack myself, and I wonder "Are some parents just born with it? Or is this selflessness learned over decades?"

Am I too selfish? Can I really claim it's "unconditional" love if sometimes all I want to do is run away for a few days? Am I ever going to get to a point where this all comes easily to me? Where Andrea and I stop asking ourselves why it seems like *everyone* else is doing a better job than we are?

And, mainly, I feel sad at the realization that there is a very, very fine gap - only those with the keenest, most open heart can feel it - between the days when we can laugh about the past, and the days when we will long for the past. And I know. I *know* that I don't want to be sulking in guilt so hard that I miss that.

School daze

We did it. We got through the first day of preschool. And by "we" I, of course, mean "me." Mommy got through the first day of preschool.

Though, not without a heavy heart -- which was unexpected, being as I've been waiting for school to start for, oh, about 2 months now. And, the more I thought about why I had a heavy heart, the more I realized it wasn't because of the classic "my baby is growing up" syndrome, but because I know. I know that the road lying ahead of her - as much as it will also be filled with new friends and experiences and sights and sounds - will be filled with self-doubt and apprehension, disappointment and anxiety. And seeing her standing amid those other little 3-to-5 year olds in her required pink-checked smock, she just looked so...small. So vulnerable.

Andrea and I stayed for about 15 minutes with her. Then, when we saw other parents were leaving and saw that Sofia had warmed up slightly to one of her teachers, we explained to her that we were leaving and that we would be back in a couple hours to pick her up. She wasn't happy, but she took her teacher's hand and turned toward the other kids. Turned toward her new world.

And then, I cried as we walked home. Of course.

When we went to pick her up, her teacher said she had cried at first (later, Sofia told me she was crying and calling out for me but I didn't come...way to break my heart, kid), but then she did great. We only left her for 2 hours; tomorrow we'll leave her a little longer and progressively longer on Friday, then starting Monday we'll hopefully be in full gear.

She didn't feel like talking about school when we picked her up, but then she did tell us that a little girl named Camilla came to talk to her. They had pizza for a snack and her teachers' names are Chiara and Monia. And, finally, she declared off-hand that she didn't want to go to school for too much time tomorrow....I guess that's better than her saying she didn't want to go at all?