Italy, Siblings, and Knots, Oh My!

We have a thing with Italy going right now at my house. We're reading aloud a wonderful memoir of a boy growing up in the Abruzzo region of Italy (pretty much right in the middle of the country, up in the mountains) in the 1950s. When we was four years old he was sent off to live with his kindly and fairly well-off uncle, who was a priest, and although he missed his immediate family, he had some wonderful and funny adventures, mostly of his own making. At times he is deliciously naughty in funny ways, and he always seems to pay an appropriate price for his misdeeds. The kids eat up the stories of trouble he gets into. 

So now we're eating Italian cheese and listening to Italian language tapes and looking at Italian art and just generally speaking with fake Italian accents whenever we can get away with it. In one chaprter, the boy, Mario, takes art lessons from an old man in a nearby village. This teacher shows him how to combine things like plants and rocks and bugs with resin and oil to make brilliantly-colored paints. We are determined to try this ourselves. We know of a couple of places to look for tree sap, so next time we have a free day we're going to hit a known sap source and see what we can come up with. 

I've also been reading Cheaper by Dozen, which is a fabulous read-aloud. This book was also part of the inspiration for the Italian language tapes, plus A also wrote out flashcards for all the squares up to 25 x 25, in a nod to the Gilbreth family. A, who is already disappointed with the size of our family, is now feeling even more deprived at having only one sibling. Rather than talk my ear off about it, as she has in the past, now she just sighs when I put down the book, and with a trembling lip, asks: "If the parents of any of our friends die, can we at least adopt them?"

M is trying his hand a knot-tying tonight, which somehow seems like a natural progression from paper airplanes (don't ask me why). I tried to set him up with knitting, but it didn't really grab him. He found a page of knots in a dictionary, and tonight we found some printable instructions for a bunch of knots. He took the instructions and some string upstairs to bed with him, so we'll see in the morning if he could make any sense out them.