i need to do laundry

playing 'hide and go seek'....

 world's unhappiest clown

Note: these photos were taken a while ago and have little to do with the rest of this post

HEY THERE WOW

Because I’m low on funds and I hate myself, I picked up an extra job babysitting/teaching English to another two year old named Marianna.  She loves butterflies, play-doh, and hugging your legs in public.  Unlike Edoardo, who spitefully throws spoons at my face and cries at the sound of my voice in the morning, Marianna and I were fast friends.  She wears stripes with polka dots, insists we build only pink puzzles and corrects her mother when she stacks her dolls in the wrong order.  A world-class diva.  Within fifteen minutes of meeting each other we were holding hands.  She only spoke two words in the three hours I was with her the other day, “si” and “yaya”, a creative interpretation of her own name, but I know that if she had a proper vocabulary she would have been badmouthing Kristen Stewart and giving me advice about dating in my early twenties.  I’ve already asked her to be part of my wedding.

I admit that I may be looking upon Marianna through rose-colored diamond-studded glasses, but it’s Edoardo’s fault.  The kid is a nightmare.  I obviously adore him, I mean he’s got curly hair and giggles every time he says “grandpa”, but he’s been nothing short of a horror this week.  My friend Peter recently showed me the website http://reasonsmysoniscrying.tumblr.com/, so consider the following a tribute.  Yesterday Edoardo cried for the following reasons:

He woke up
I wouldn’t let him go to school without shoes on

Papa said goodbye
The bus was too crowded so he couldn’t see the doors open and close

He had to wash his hands because he insisted on touching every street sign on the way home
He couldn't find mom

He couldn’t fall asleep in 0 seconds

He woke up again
He still could not find mom

I wouldn’t let him keep his shit in his pants
He wasn't allowed to eat his body lotion

I made him use soap in the shower
The television froze

His fish wasn’t pasta

Twice this week he screamed himself to sleep, tossing every item out of his crib until he collapsed from tear-induced exhaustion.  Both times I sat there in the dark throughout the entire fit, completely helpless.  I’ve never felt such a deep and sincere sadness while twinkle twinkle little star played softly out of a baby blue bear’s ass. 

Now that I’m working roughly 50 hours a week, nearly all of my free time is spent on the computer.  I’m absolutely ashamed of myself, but I just don’t have the energy to explore much more than the gelato shop near my apartment. I’ve never been fatter, or more educated on illegal movie downloading.  If you haven’t seen the documentary Dear Zachary, you should.  To be fair, my excessive internet-ing has been due in part to my being sick.  You can thank flu-ridden Edoardo for sneezing into my mouth, laughing, and then coughing in my eyes.  Though I’m feeling better today, I’m still suffering from slimy coughs and tasteless cereal.

For the sake of my sanity, I went out a couple nights ago with a few lovely au pairs I had never met before.  At this point going to bars with strangers is my only form of social interaction (aside from whenever I accidentally clip people's feet with Edoardo's stroller), which is fine with me, because I’ve found that 9/10 times I’ll end up conversing with somebody who’s definitely cooler than me. They’re usually philanthropists, optimistic cancer survivors and iPhone App creators.  We wandered our way into a sticky nameless bar, and after two hours of genuinely fun conversation, we realized that we had yet to speak of anything other than the children we look after.  We were a collection of 20-year-old expats in lipstick that had nothing better to talk about than their kids.  Like four comfortable-in-their-own-body moms treating themselves to Sunday brunch.  The same moms that drive us mad gabbing about “the cute way Johnny pronounces ‘yellow’” and how tragic it was that “Cindy didn’t make the All-Star soccer team this year”.  These women took the time to curl their hair and put on sweaters without Mac and Cheese stains because goddammit they deserve it.  After a long look in the mirror, I've come to realize that all I need is a car with too many miles on it and an obsession with crime scene investigation shows and I'm my mother.

I knew this would happen.

Love,
Kay

P.S.  The Colosseum is okay.  I couldn’t understand anything my tour guide said, so I don't know how, why, or when it was built and what it was actually used for, but I plan on figuring all that out on the Google.  He may as well have been Charlie Brown’s schoolteacher teaching us about Poptart construction I learned nothing.  The Palatine guide, however, renewed my faith in overpriced “Tourist Special Offer For You!” packages.  He was an Australian silver fox, one of those obviously-passionate-about-his-job types, squatting under bushes and pointing his finger in the distance.  Waltzing around those ruins was one of the greatest hours of my life, and although he enunciated every word, I still walked away with no new knowledge, because I spent the entire tour imagining how happy the two of us would be together far away from Rome, sipping coconut milk in string bikinis on Bora Bora beaches.  So.  Happy.