2012 {Annual Holiday Letter}

I meant for this to be a Christmas letter to accompany our Christmas card we sent out (if you didn't get one, sorry, we don't have your address!) but I didn't get around to it until now, so I guess it's a New Year's letter. And I think you could read back in my blog posts and get a pretty good idea of what we were all up to this year. But here is a quick recap anyways!

 

Steve and I had our 10-year wedding anniversary in January and celebrated with a trip to Hawaii for the whole family plus my parents! We stayed in my Grandparent's condo in Kona on the Big Island and my parents served as our tour guides and babysitters. It was a great trip filled with delicious island food, snorkeling, swimming, shopping, volcano viewing, deep sea fishing, and beautiful beach sunsets. A few days after returning home from our wonderful vacation, we found out the Air Force was sending us to Aviano Air Base in Italy, so.....

 

Obviously our biggest change this year was that we moved from Goodyear, Arizona to Grizzo, Italy! Italy is great! We love the food and wine and gelato. I love hearing the language spoken and learning to make Italian food. The traveling is amazing and the area we live in (northeast corner) is stunning with a backdrop of Dolomites mountains (foothills of the alps). Since we arrived in July, we've been able to travel to Lake Como, Tuscany and to Austria for skiing, as well as a day trip and a date night to Venice (one hour away by train). Living in Europe is an opportunity we never thought we'd get again and we are doing our best to balance traveling and sightseeing with keeping the kids entertained. It's a challenged for sure but we are determined to maximize the fun in our 3 years here because we won't get this chance again!  

 Steve is assigned to the 555th FS, Triple Nickel. He spends long hours at work and is stilling flying the F16. This is an operational base (as opposed to a training base like Luke) so the guys stay busy with lots of TDYs and deployments. Steve spent a week in Israel in November and will hopefully go back at few times in 2013. When he's not working, he spends most of his free time playing with Brian and just generally wrapped around the finger of Emily. When she's not available for cuddles, he plots how best to keep the boys and other vicious things away from her.

As for me, just keeping the house and kids going takes most of my time, but I manage to squeeze in some blogging (obviously) and sewing/crafting and volunteer in Brian's kindergarten class. I've also taken an Italian cooking class and hope to do it again soon. I've cut way back on my flight suit purse business and only accept the occasional order from friends now so I'm dedicating this year to learning some more Italian and getting caught up on our family scrapbooks.

Brian turns 6 in January and we are busy planning an Angry Birds themed bowling party. He wants to invite everyone he's ever known so most likely you are invited! He graduated from preschool in May and started Kindergarten on base in September. We had a hard time deciding where to send him for school: Italian school or American school on base. After 4 months of school, I know we made the right decision as he loves his class and teachers and new friends and is learning to read and write and loves Art, PE and Spanish. He still loves all things transportation but has also added the Power Rangers TV show and the Angry Birds game to his list of favorites this year. 

Emily turned 2 in April and has come into her own personality this year. She is sassy and funny and demanding but also sweet and cuddly. She really doesn't have terrible twos tantrums, her worst habit is screaming if she's not getting her way. (That might be the 1% of genes she got from me). She loves baby dolls and princess things but mostly wants to play with brother's toys. She also wants to go to school like brother, so in the fall she will head off to "Asilo," Italian preschool (pending the results of potty training soon).

 

For 2013, we are looking forward to some more traveling. Nothing is set up yet but the kids and I will try to join Steve on one of his trips to Israel. We'd like to come back to the states once and hopefully drive up to our old stomping grounds in Germany, plus several other trips we haven't thought of yet. We hope this finds everyone doing well and that you are enjoying your holidays. Check back often as I'm vowing once again to keep up with the blog and not get behind on posting our adventures in 2013!

Big Yellow Tractor

Our landlord's son, Claudio, lives in the other half of our house and stays there a few nights a week, but lives and works full time in Venice. Our kids love when Claudio is around because he's always handing out candy and showing them cool things and letting them play with his toys. This particular afternoon he was outside on his riding mower getting up the last of the fall leaves from the yard. The kids took turns riding it with him and one thing lead to another and he broke out his old tractor, put it into first gear, and let Brian drive it around in circles for a solid hour. Brian was smiling ear to ear and Emily enjoyed riding shotgun.

Case di Gingerbread

We had our squadron friends Snakeye and Pam and their kids, B and E, over for dinner one night recently and Brian had been begging to decorate gingerbread houses so I thought this would make for a fun activity for the kids to do together. I couldn't find any of those awesome premade house kits here so I crafted my own out of graham crackers and royal icing, just like my Mom did when we were kids. Each child got a house and a plate of sugar. Fun was had by all! Note to self for next year: Dinner first, then Gingerbread houses.

 

The next day I walked into the kitchen to find my children had worked together to move chairs over to the counter where their houses were on display and were actively eating their houses. No one ate dinner that night either.

Meeting Santa

This was the first year ever that both our kids would sit on Santa's lap. Last year Emily wouldn't do it and the year before that, Brian wouldn't even enter the room where the Jolly Old Elf sat.

 I take Emily to storytime at the base library on tuesday mornings and Santa visited storytime one day. Emily was so excited and was practicing her "Merry Christmas" and various gift list requests. When her turn came, she climbed up and froze. Just absolute Santa-speechlessness. She was overcome. In all her little life, she has never been so choked up. This is our child who has never met a stranger and who can manipulate a smile out of the most grumpy person with one blue-eyed glance, a bounce of her curls, and a soft spoken "ciao, ciao!" Santa is Emily's vocal kryptonite, who knew?!

 A few days later we attended the Ops Group Kids Christmas Party, also know as "Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Come and Get Your Sugar!" Santa arrived in his Humvee (to navigate the numerous sugar land mines for sure) and our kids were first in line for Santa hugs (or maybe they were just checking his pockets for more sugar). We waited our turn in line and finally got our 15 seconds with the big guy....

And of course the only picture with both kids looking and smiling is also the only blurry picture I took, oh well!

Decking the Halls

Seeing as how it's December 26th and all, thought now would be a good time to post pictures from our holiday preparations. Better late than never I guess.

I was freting about where, when, and how we'd get a tree this year as we gave up fake trees a few years back and didn't yet know the Italian Christmas tree supply and demand curve, but it was actually a very easy process. The nursery just down the street from us got a shipment of both cut and live potted trees the first weekend of December, so we walked down the street after borrowing our Landlord's son's wagon and picked a little winner. It's not big (which is good cause it had to fit under our stairs) but it's our little potted tree. The kids were eager this year to help hang ornaments until they learned from experience that this tree has the world's sharpest needles. Seriously, it's painful. I had to wear Steve's work gloves to get the lights and ribbon and ornaments on. Oh and my plan that a potted tree will shed less needles than a cut tree was wrong, very, very wrong!!! 

 Brian's little room tree

Emily's little room tree

Gelato the Elf

 

Shortly after Thanksgiving this year, an Elf on the Shelf came to visit for the first time. In case you don't know, the Elf comes to live with a family, gets it's magic once he or she is named, and uses that magic to fly back to the North Pole every night to report to Santa on the good behavior (or bad behavior) of the children of the family. Every morning the Elf is in a new spot, usually up to some shenanigans. We wanted to give our Elf an Italian name and I was vetoed multiple times on my suggestion of "Fabio" (I'm the only one in this house with a sense of humor!). We settled on "Gelato," which the kids loved. A few days later I said to Brian, "Oh man, we should have named our Elf Biscotti!" And he was all, "Why would we do that? That is so ridiculous!" But Gelato the Elf is totally cool.

 

The kids were very excited every morning to find him in the beginning, then as Mommy's good ideas tapered off and Gelato got boring, they were more interested in their toy advent calendars. And Emily would get very mad if Gelato was found playing with any toys. Poor baby Jesus got stolen out of Gelato's arms a good half-dozen times until she finally hid him. Still not sure where the little guy is! Anyways, here are some of Gelato's best antics.

 Defacing a photo of the kids, got caught by our toy soldier detachment, made himself a house, and a toilet paper greeting

 Making smores, a little message in the mirror, Elves love syrup, Gelato writes a note to Brian after Brian drew a picture and was then upset that it wasn't perfect and threw it into the fireplace burn pile

 Playing with sprinkles, reading with friends, piggyback ride on the Daddy nutcracker, chillin in a stocking

 Ziplining, Gelato took a day to visit our cousins Jake and Alani in AZ so their Elfie visited us one day, getting crazy with stickers, Gelato hid our stockings and put up our "unnerwears" instead--Emily loved this

Gelato and Cousin Grace's Elf in CO exchanged houses one day too, building a Lego Christmas tree, snuggling baby Jesus, chillin with the big guy

 

 

Below: My personal favorite, traffic--waiting for the light to change (but not to get a drink, Shelf Elves only drink syrup, no hard stuff)

Italian Cooking Lessons

If you read this blog regularly, I think we've established that I love Italian food. It really is my favorite food in the whole world. And one of my favorite things to do is cook..............NOT! I actually only do it because I have to. People in my house gotta eat. I'd much rather someone else make me Italian food, but one day we won't have this cushy assignment and there will be no one around to make my Italian food for me, so I figured I'd better learn. An opportunity popped up to take a cooking class with some of the other wives and I rearranged my life to be able to go. The class was super informal and held at this adorable little restaurant, Taverna al Frico in Polcenigo. Silvanna was our instructor and the owner of the restaurant. That's her there on the left, sweet lady. Or at least I think she was, she spoke in Italian and my Italian is still extrememly limited, so as far as I could tell she was nothing but sweet. Luckily, one of the wives speaks fluent Italian and was able to interpret for us (thanks Sia!).

 We learned to make Gnocchi (top right, potato balls) with a simple tomato sauce and Spaghetti alla Carbonara (bottom right), Brian's favorite.

 We made Crespelle or Crepes (top left) and Pasta e Fagioli Soup (top right) and Biscotti (bottom) which are Italian cookies and this particular recipe reminded me of sugar cookies with almond extract. They were yummy!

Here, Silvanna is rolling out the homemade pasta to make Pumpkin Ravioli. It looked like ALOT of work and took way too much elbow grease. Oh and was also made with ingredients impossible to find in the states, so I don't think I will be making the Pumpkin Ravioli but it was neat to see the process. I have tried most of the other recipes and converted the ingredient measurements into units I understand, like cups, and tablespoons, etc. As I get them converted and try them out, I will add them to the blog in case anyone is interested in trying them out too! Hopefully we will do another lesson soon, I could do this every week!

 

Below is a simple recipe for pasta sauce, which I am ashamed to say I've never ever made pasta sauce from scratch, but only because I never knew how easy is it, so I will be making my own from now on! I made this for dinner tonight and served it over store-bought ricotta-spinach torteloni.