martedì 25 ottobre 2011

September lay-out

Some rain...

What a day we had last thursday. We had so much rain falling in a few hours that we haven't seen anything like that before. It started thundering in the morning and when I took the children to school it was all dark and thundering all the time. Outside the school it also started hailing and looked so threatening so I said to the children that they could stay at home today. Daniele wanted to go anyway because he had a test he didn't want to miss. It rained really hard. As most newer houses here, we have rooms also in the basement and have had dirt water twice already in our bedrooms. I can now say that we are very lucky we had had problems before and therefore had installed pumps and a return valve, because they saved us this time and this time it would have been much, much worse. When I noticed that the rain water soon would get inside, I called Armando, who was at a course this morning and said that he couldn't get home because all the streets were flooded, but he explained me how to use our extra pump. So there I stood out in the rain trying to connect all the hoses, cords and plugs and get this pump to work. Finally it worked and this little pump saved us from getting more than just a few centimeters of rain water in our bedrooms. Carlotta sat on the stairs inside whining because she gets scared when I'm panicking and Sofia helped me with what she could. I was soaked to my underwear.
At two a clock it had stopped raining and I went by car to get Daniele from school because all the streets were full of water. There were lakes outside the school and lots of children hadn't gone to school today or had gone home earlier today. Later I heard that people in all Rome, and especially in our area, had had really terrible problems with dirt water in their houses and a man from Sri Lanka who lived in the basement had drowned in his house. Terrible!
This was our garden after the rain. The danger was over and Carlotta thought it looked funny with all that water.
And this was outside the school.

mercoledì 19 ottobre 2011

End of summer barbeque

We had a barbeque in our garden with our friends we hadn't seen for months - last time I think we met them all at Sofia's confirmation in May. Summer is ending also here in Rome, so it was a good occasion to have a barbeque. It was nice to sit out in the sunshine, but in the evening we had to give up and go inside to have a cup of warm tee! We had a nice day. Sofia also had one of her riding friends sleeping over at our place, so she stayed for the barbeque. My friends' husbands are much more handy than mine and my children are very grateful to them as they repaired all their bicycle tires. The boys all went out with the bicycles, the girls played games and we chatted, ate and drank wine out in the garden.

martedì 11 ottobre 2011

Sofia 11 years

Sofia celebrated her 11th birthday in the best way she could imagine - at the riding school's restaurant with her best riding friends. Us parents often take a separate table at these birthday parties and spend the evening there as well and also this time we had a nice table of rider's parents and another one with noicy riders and their brothers and sisters. They eat and then go out jumping obstacles at the riding field. She got lots of nice horsey presents - horse books, a fleece jacket for horse riding, a bag, etc. After the party she had one of her friends sleeping over.