Ready to fly to Norway on a rainy early morning. 

Festa della Repubblica al Monte dei Cappuccini

Last week we decided to make use of a Friday at home with the kids, courtesy of an Italian national holiday, to tear the kids away from their ipads for a couple of hours and take them on a long uphill hike to the top a small hill from which one can get a panoramic view of the city - and on a good day, a great view of the Alps too, but this was not that kind of day.  The hike is not that long really (Google tells me it is a 700m walk from the nearest bus stop) but I told the kids it would be, in order to limit the amount of complaints I would receive later.

I think that the most tiring part of the trip was waiting for buses on a day with reduced service, but the uphill walk still drew the most vocal moans. Fortunately it wasn't sunny and in fact it rained a bit on our way up, which I took as a good thing, but not everyone agreed.

On a good note, the older brothers did try to encourage their sister. I overheard them telling a story of how we were all on a mission to defeat the Wizard of Steepness on top of the hill. 

Here you can see the happy hikers admiring the view before tackling the last few meters of our ascent.

And this is where the Wizard of Steepness lives, apparently.

A disappointing panoramic view I tried to capture with my phone,

and here are the victorious heros celebrating the downfall of the Wizard.

We spent a short time looking at view and keeping the kids alive and all in one piece,

and then we headed down on a different path,

to end our walk at the Church of the Great Mother of God (where the kids tried to crash someone's wedding).

This is where we should have declared victory and just gone home, but hubris led us to want to top it all off with ice cream from Fiorio.

There was seriously good mango ice cream, according to one of our testers,

but was it good enough to justify missing the last bus running on schedule?

After that we had to spend about an hour waiting around the bus stop. It turned out that a march in the center of the city had unexpectedly disrupted the bus routes. The pictures below might deceive you into thinking that the kids waited stoically for the bus without causing trouble, but that is most definitely not what they did.

Still, the long wait allowed me to take a few more pictures, and I am especially happy with this series of snaps of Lila sitting on her special pyramid (this is how I sold it to her when she refused to sit on an uncomfortable stone after I was too tired to keep carrying her).

This is my Lila!

And so evening fell on our poorly timed attempt to return home,

but since we were waiting for the bus right in front of a rosticceria I at least grabbed the chance to buy a roasted chicken (pollo allo spiedo), which made for a satisfying dinner when we finally made it back home.

Rohan discovers a new favorite breakfast

Fette biscottate e marmellata: la nuova colazione preferita di Rohan!

We Are (Almost) Back!

Hello, my loyal readers! (Si`, mamma, mi riferisco proprio a te.)

I have often thought that I would like to revive the blog, but then I never did, mostly because whenever I think about all the stuff that I haven't talked about, and the pictures that I still would like to share, but that require a backstory that I have not written, my system crashes. I like to read convoluted stories, sometimes, but I like to write things in the right order - or else, it seems, I just don't write at all. 

I also worry about oversharing, now that my children are older, but I will talk about this some other time. I will say that my policy has always been to not write anything that I wouldn't want my children to read at some point, so that is something I will still try to do.

What tipped the balance toward giving the blog another try, in the last few weeks, was a combination of small events: some friends visited us here in Torino and they kept a travel journal on facebook, which made me instantly jealous of the memories that they will be able to preserve (I would, however, not want to share my family memories on Facebook, but that just reflect something about the composition of my particular group of Facebook friends); in the same days, I tried to take advantage of a discount to print out Le Avventure Di Due Fratellini, and in the process I had to go through some of the posts that I wrote so long ago, which resulted in a feeling of frustration when my English didn't flow so smoothly, but also made me grateful that I did take the time to record some quite hectic but very precious times in our lives; and last, Rajiv just turned ten years old (yikes!), so obviously time moves much faster when you don't write stuff down.

In summary, I am now convinced that I must urgently start blogging again, except that I can't, because I just received communication (after more than a month of waiting) that Rajiv's exam to certify his passage from primary school to middle school, will actually take place, and from the email that I received the whole things sounds a bit scarier than I had envisioned it. So now I need to freak out, make plans, practice exam etiquette with Rajiv, prepare some kind of portfolio to show the committee, write a professional-looking fifth grade curriculum, and more things that I just wrote down in my freshly-developed Exam Master Plan.

The long stories I was planning to save for posterity will have to wait, but I might still post a few photos to get back into the habit, so stay tuned-ish..

An improvised Harry Potter costume for Halloween

Let me please stress *improvised* :)

A family tradition?

Last Sunday: Lila, two years old, wearing mamma's shoes (and holding mamma's dirty socks in her hands...) and ready to go!

Update

We are back in India. All sort of chickenpox-related troubles have been sweeping through this house but we are all fine now. We are battling toddler constipation with potty books and we spend most of the remaining time talking with the boys about Angry Birds and the Star Wars movies that they have never seen (and won't see any time soon). Maybe I will manage to post some more photos of our trip to Italy at some point.