Week 52 - Waiting for Santa Claus

This is the last post for this year's 52 week's project. It was hard to choose one photo, but I chose Carlotta showing the drawing she made for Santa Claus. She made it while waiting for the evening when Santa usually leaves his sack outside our door. I put two photos because the drawing has two sides.

And these are a few moments of our Christmas.

Week 51 - Visiting Rome

This 52 week's project is slowly  ending and I'm glad I managed to follow it through, althought I always was a bit late with my posts, but this way I have updated my blog at least with one post a week. Next year I'm sure I will do a similar project.
This week Sofia had two days off from school. We have a friend who is a tourist guide. She loves her job and has an incredibly good memory for historical things and details. Her son was in Sofia's class in the elementary school and in the kindergarten. She proposed to take the children to the centre of Rome and go to visit something and we went to the churches of San Giovanni and Santa Maria Maggiore - two of Rome's most important churches. She had lots of interesting things to tell and then we all sat down for twenty minutes to draw a picture of one of the apostles in San Giovanni. We really should take some time to do this more often! Carlotta's school wasn't closed, but I took her with us, because I wouldn't have been able to pick her up at 1 p.m. She appreciated it a lot and said that she could imagine the things Elisabeth was telling about.

On Friday it was the last day at school before the Christmas holidays. As the children get bigger they don't have so much shows at school, but Carlotta's class sang Christmas songs and Sofia's class had a little concert with their music teacher and his other classes. He is a very modern teacher and likes to teach the latest hits to his classes. They take a portable electrick piano to school and have learnt to play for example "Ma cherie", "Whistle", "Se eu te pego" and other hits of this year. I like this approach to music.

Week 50 - Christmas mail

We got Christmas mail from Finland this week. My mother had sent it quite a while ago and this week it finally reached us. There was Finnish chocolate and an advent calendar. Me and the girls saw the package when we came back from school and it made us very happy!

This week I started some serious christmas shopping hoping not to have to stress with it the last days before christmas. On the 13th, the Lucia day, I went to my friend who had invited me and two other Finnish friends for a Christmas brunch. She had made lots of yummie christmas goodies and we had a nice morning chatting in Finnish. On the week-end Sofia had the finals in the Pony Champions Winter Tour in show jumping and she came third, so the week finished nicely if we don't consider the fact that I got a flat tyre on our way home. On Saturday we also were invited to dinner to one of Armando's old school friends. He is married to an Icelandic woman and we used to see each other often before we got children and moved further away from each other. Now we just realized that last time we saw each other was 7 years ago , so let's hope we can meet a bit more often in the future!

Merry Christmas

This was our Christmas card this year.

Week 49 - A Friday evening at home and decorating the tree

It's been really cold this week and it has been raining and hailing. We have been scraping frost from the car windows in the morning, which is not so usual here in Rome. This week on friday evening we all stayed at home, the weather was bad and I was tired and didn't feel like going anywhere in the evening. I often go out eating on Fridays with the children and our friends and Daniele and Sofia were very disappointed that we didn't do it this Friday. But their good mood slowly returned when we had lit the fire, watched a TV series all together and made bruschettas and baked potatoes in the fireplace.

 On Saturday it was the 8th of December and on that day people decorate their Christmas trees here in Italy. We follow the tradition and I try to take some photos for our Christmas cards while we do it.
One of the big issues is who gets to put the star on top of the tree. Daniele felt so grown up so he let Sofia and Carlotta argue and about it this year. After that, in the evening, we had a nice pizza evening with some more mulled wine at our house with our good friends.

Week 48 - Afternoon with friends and mulled wine

Christmas is starting to come into our house. On sunday the 2th of December we invited our Swedish and Finnish friends we hadn't seen for too long a time to drink mulled wine. It's something that belongs to Christmas in the nordic countries. We made Finnish Christmas tarts and they all brought something christmassy like ginger bread or cakes and we had a very nice afternoon. I was glad everyone could make it this time and that I finally organized something. I had thought of organizing a barbeque when we came back from Finland after summer, but every week-end there was something else in the way. Even the bigger girls came. They are 18-19 already, so of course the are indipendent and have their own things to do, but as they wanted to see each other, they came too, which was very nice!

Week 47 -Beautiful Florence

On the last week-end of November we went on a marathon trip again - this time to Florence. It's not so far from Rome and our children had never been there, so it was a good occasion to go there. I had been there lots of years ago before I had any children and didn't even remember how beautiful it was. We were also very lucky with the weather. It was warm and nice the whole week-end. We went there on Friday evening and stayed until Sunday evening.
We rented a flat central enough to be able to walk in to the centre of Florence. On Saturday we walked around in Florence, first together and then Armando went to our flat and we continued and went shopping till we were tired enough to go back to the flat. The marathon was on Sunday and me and the children participated in the 2 km family run. I ran with Carlotta and we made it to the finishing line. Daniele became third in the run. In the afternoon I visited the Uffizi gallery with the children and in the evening we had a nice dinner out with a Armando's marathon friend who lives in Florence. After dinner we drove back to Rome.

Week 46 - the bread machine

We rediscovered our bread machine! It had been standing in our kitchen taking place and gathering dust. I had tried to make bread with it but every time the bread turned out all raw inside and it didn't grow, so I had given up and thought I would keep it to make dough sometimes. Daniele saw the same bread machine at his friend´s house and said they used it a lot and it made such good bread, so he asked them how they did it. It seems I had programmed it badly because when Daniele tried it the bread became just perfect. This week we made a chocolate bread from the bread machine recipe book. No big success, but we have made other sorts of bread and they all are really good. Hurray, we have a working bread machine!

Photo collage of Dublin

Here's a photo collage of our week-end in Dublin before I continue with my 52 weeks posts. Nice memories! Dublin in the end of October:

12/12/12

I saw the idea of twelve photos on the twelfth in a few blogs and on the 12th of December 2012 I decided to do a collage of 12 photos i had taken during the day.
Daniele didn't have any school today. I had decided to go christmas shopping and he wanted to come with me, so we went to a shopping mall and had a nice shopping morning there. I got some presents for the girls and a nice red dress to Carlotta to wear at Christmas. She liked it a lot and wanted to try it on in the evening. At two o'clock we had to be back home as it was time to pick up Sofia from school and at four o´clock Carlotta. She tried a new riding school after school and liked it, so in January maybe she will start riding there. It was very cold and humid in the evening, but fortunately Daniele had lit a nice fire in our fireplace when we came home, so we could warm our cold feet and hands. We made bread in our bread machine and I finally figured out how to take photos with shaped bokeh and had some fun testing it in the evening.

Week 45 - Hobbies

Week 45 was a normal week of everyday life. Daniele had become the captain of his football team. we had our riding lessons and I did some shopping in Decathlon with the girls. The week-end included horse riding for us, running for Armando, football for Daniele and lots of eating and good food for all of us. Saturday evening barbeque at a friend's house and the day after lunch with the same group of persons at another friend's house, after which I felt it would be better to take a pause from all that eating and wine drinking and maybe also from seeing the same group of friends too often. It's a nice group of people, but as with most things, too much at the same time can be too much as everyone of us is so different. 
The photo is of the football captain.

Week 44 - Halloween

The photo of week is again of Carlotta. She was such a sweet little Halloween witch. Unfortunately when it was time to go out trick-or-treating the rain started pouring down, so the best thing to do was to stay at home. We had organized some sleep-overs instead. Daniele spent Halloween at his friend's house. Carlotta at her friend's house together with another good friend from school and Sofia had a friend of hers sleeping over at our house. Me and Sofia first had dinner at our friends' house and later on when it stopped raining the girls went out for some trick-or-treating and we adults took a nice evening walk, too.

Sofia and her friends out for some trick-or-treating to our neighbours before it started raining too much.

Week 43 - Dublin

Trying to catch up with lots of things and one of them is updating my blogs and the 52 weeks project, which has been a good way for me to update at least with one post a week, although I'm always late. Anyway, on week 43 we went to Dublin with another family we don't see too often, so it was a nice opportunity to spend some time with them. Especially Daniele and Oscar who are of the same age got along very well together. When we didn't stroll around in Dublin they spent all their free time in our room playing with Nintendos, Ipods and Ipads.
Now that our children are quite big already, we even left them all in our hotel room one evening for a couple of hours and went out for a beer in a pub near our hotel. They had their cell phones of course, so they could phone us any time they wanted, but it all went just fine. And the beer was good! I'm not a big beer drinker, but the beer I tried, which was called Smithwick's, was really nice. The next evening we went out earlier and Carlotta came with us. Before 9 a clock p.m. children were allowed in the pubs and she very much enjoyed sitting on the high pub chair drinking her sprite in the cozy pub.
The main reason for our trip was Armando's marathon which went very well. The weather was normal autumn weather in Dublin, I think, some rain, some clouds and some sun too, cold compared to Rome, but all in all Ok if you had the right clothes.
Dublin is a nice city and not too big. My children liked the Penneys department store where you could find quite nice clothes at very reasonable prices and where we went shopping while the marathoner was resting.
One of my favourite photos of the week-end is this one with Carlotta in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral. I have lots of photos, so I'll try to make a collage of them later on.