Dalia and I both approach Halloween with a lukewarm enthusiasm. Neither of us has ever had a long storied tradition with the holiday and would, just as often, see it come and go without too much fuss. Being parents though, we’re realizing that we may need to step up our game for the sake of our kids.
We didn’t manage to think enough ahead to get Aleksander a costume online as the pickings are quite slim in Italy. But, as luck would have it, one of our visitors bought him a Juventus football uniform and there could be no more apt costume for our ball-obsessed toddler than this.
He owned his costume, along with ever present ball, and even though didn’t quite understand what was happening around him, did seem to appreciate the fun and energy of this novel celebration. Hopefully he just stays obsessed with sports forever and mommy and daddy can put him in different uniforms for years to come.
Yesterday we celebrated Aleksander’s second birthday, with balls, balloons and even a half-cone of gelato, more or less the priority order of things he loves in his life. Compared to his first birthday, this year he kinda got it. Maybe not the full birthday concept, but at least the fact that it was a special day for him, perhaps even because of him. We sent him to daycare with party hats, loot bags and a chocolate sprinkle cake, and hoped he mumbled under his breath, when the big moment came: Happy Birthday TO ME!
This second year was a continuation, an advancement, and an even further and deeper acknowledgement of the spectrum of joy and challenges of family life and parenthood. If the first year of parenting is a universal reorientation of lifestyle, life priorities and life goals, the second is a leaning into the commitment that those things represent, and a creeping realization of how much of the journey lies ahead.
Two years of moments, hours, weeks, held together by a thread of joy, exhaustion, love, focus, patience, impatience, development (for all parties), effort, thankfulness, humility, overwhelmedness, laughter, tears, diapers, walks, parks, naps, hurried meals, Tuscan train windows, coughs, colds, fevers, beach days, pyjama snuggles, and a billion other things. Parenthood is an absolute fullness of life, in almost all the conceivable ways.
Aleksander took his first steps just a few days after we returned from his birthday trip to Dubai last year. (He subsequently starting kicking balls at pretty much the same time – an activity that he obsessed over for the entirety of the year). And so this year was one of movement, dynamism, chasing him around and holding his hand. Dalia thrived in the green winter parks of Rome with him – swings, slides, kids, balls. They started new routines together, explored and solidified new skills. By the Spring, our budding toddler was proving to be quite the handful for a full-time mommy so we decided to enroll him into daycare.
Thankfully, Italian daycares are supremely civilized environments. Children sit patiently waiting for their three course lunches while parents fret about absconding from their duties. The ‘asilo’ had a several week integration period and Aleksander settled right in, barely turning back to say goodbye by the end of his first week and making it to snack, lunch and nap sessions with record speed. While freeing up Dalia’s time, we also counted seven bouts of sickness after he started his daycare socialization journey. Feverish infant nights in foreign countries are a particular kind of unpleasantness, especially repeated every other week for the better part of four months. But alas, we all survived and hopefully he started to get and defeat some of the microbugs that will help him better survive in this viral planet in future.
As his time at daycare went on, Aleksander’s communication improved too. Sticking with ‘no!’ for a few months, but also humming Frere Jacques and dancing to the Wheels on the Bus. He’s just started saying yes in the last few weeks and is beginning to surprise us with the most adorable Italian phrases (mama mia, andiam-lo, ga-zye) and greeting most passerbys with an audible ciao! on the streets.
We’re often overwhelmed by love for his cuteness, by longing for him when we’re apart. We proudly smile when he shows his resolute kindness to other children in the playground. And despite our baseline disequilibrium much of the time, are starting to think whether the time might not be right to consider adding a sibling to Aleksander’s life. He would make such a great big brother and we could all expand our world, the world, that much more with this crazy thing called love.
We’ve been amazed and pleasantly surprised at the number of guests we’ve been seeing and hosting this year in Rome. After a quiet first year, with covid still a global concern, this past year has seem travellers from near and far pass through the cobblestones streets and piazzas of Rome.
One of our recent guests was an old friend who I met in my former tour guiding days, Chris White. Chris and I first met on a tumultuous spring break tour in Quebec City in 2000, then really bonded over an epic co-tour of Washington DC in 2004, just before I moved to Korea.
We’ve kept in touch over the years as his family has grown, we’ve both moved here and there, and now as we’ve arrived to Rome. He visited after some working training in Nice and on top of being a stellar friend and guest, took some of the best candid shots of us that we’ve had taken. Usually we just rotate photo duties between ourselves but it was a real joy to get some photos of all three of us taken by a good friend!
Dad In The World 