Witches and sweets

Halloween has become very important for my children and they had all been waiting for the evening when you can go out to get sweets. This time Daniele went to the cinema with his friends and me and my friends went out with the girls. First a friend of Sofia's came to us and they took a little tour to the neighbours with Carlotta. Then we met up with other friends and they continued trick-or-treating and afterwards we went to a cafe where you got free cornettos for Halloween (croissants with different fillings that Italians eat for breakfast with their cappuccino). Very nice. The day after we had to get up early for our riding lesson and Carlotta was really tired after all this excitement, so we didn't stay out too late. We went trick-or-treating in a residential area where all the houses and gates were very nicely dekorated and people were having Halloween parties and there was a nice athmosphere, but we started a bit late, so many houses already had run out of sweets. Anyway, they got quite a lot of sweets and had a nice evening.

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.

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.

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.

Summer in review

I have done three layouts that resume our summer. Actually also September can be considered a summer month here in Rome, where we still have almost 30 degress during the day, but as schools start in September, I only included the months of June, July and August. I have used ready templates found on the web, but I can't remember where I found them.

Happy candy eaters

The choice of candy in the Finnish super markets is huge compared to the Italian ones. When we leave Finland after our summer holiday I take the children to a super market to buy candy. I usually never buy candy, only when we have a birthday party. Each of them gets a certain amount of money to spend. Daniele wanted to go to a bigger super market this year with even more choice, but I refused to and said that if he wanted to he could go there by bike and I would give him the money. I thought there was quite enough choice in the one where we went last year with all three children choosing, counting how much money they got left and when I thought they finally were ready they quickly had to leave something to take something else instead and so on, until I was quite exhausted. In the end Daniele decided to come with us. This tradition started when I started buying them a candy box in the aero plane when we left Finland. Last summer, I think it was Daniele who asked me if he could buy his candy in Finland instead so he could choose what he wanted to with the same amount of money. Well, here is a lay out showing my happy children with their sweets in front of them.