Christmas is coming!  As tradition here in Italy, today is the day to  set up Christmas trees and decollations at home. Officially, it's a Christian holiday ( Immaculate Conception, which I was not familiar with until a few years ago)  and s chools are off. From the morning m y son helped me decollating our tree near the fireplace.  Then my husband who came home for lunch was shocked to see the tree was almost done. I did not know that it was also their tradition to do it altogether in the family. I told him not to worry as we still had not finished with the lights. So, in the end we inaugurated our Christmas season at home together. Anyway, time flied since my last article. How have you been? For us, it has been an eventful latter half of the year. First of all, we left Bologna and moved into our new home in the historic city center of Ferrara. The building itself was first built in the late 15th Century and is designated as a monument! Due to that it took us a whol...

Hi there. I am writing this post from Bologna, Italy where we moved back from Japan in the mid-summer.  It has been a great year for my son to get to know his Japanese grandparents, family, and friends he made there.  He is shortly turning two years old, and is more attracted than ever to words. So we have much more fun reading books together.  Every page of the books is filled with images that make him a curious boy. He can't help pointing at them and saying "Oh? Ah?" as if to ask "What's this?" In the beginning,  he was just doing this with illustrations, but now he also recognizes letters (both Japanese and English/Italian alphabets) and numbers, asking me how to pronounce them. And guess what, if I were perhaps half asleep and would answer him with the same words to different images, he would immediately raises his voice and says "Ah! Ah!" to warn me.  Do you remember this Miffy's picture book I previously talked about ? He still loves it a...