Weekend Home

We get out of town about once a month.  Then three weekends home til a long weekend or school trip.  I like when we travel and get out of Viterbo, stretch a bit, drive (ride) a bit, and I like when we have home weekends.  Sometimes I struggle with relaxing as much as I would back at home in Waltham because, well, we're here, and I want to take advantage of being here.  I could take a bus to Bagnaia to a beautiful park or go out to the terme or head to a mountain.  But I could also relax here at home, read a little, take a nap.

Saturday Daniel and I struck out with both a gym (he was going to help me sign up to swim where he does) and a flea market (he and Hannah need winter jackets, and we heard there are good deals here) -- both closed for national holiday, December 8, Feast of the Immaculate Conception, which I tried to explain to Hannah tonight when she told me that she needed to write three sentences in Italian about Madonna. 
Me: Say she's the mother of Jesus, we celebrate her in May, and she was born with no sin. 
Hannah: What? 
Me: Do you know what a sin is?
Hannah: No.

Hannah is seven.  Sin had been drilled into me by age 7.  I remember the image -- did I make it up or did a teacher draw it on the board for us? -- of a circle of white with one black mark on it: that was original sin.  Then we did bad things like fight with a sibling or tell a lie and then we'd get more black marks.  Of course, once we went to Confession, the black marks would go away and our souls would be pure again, though I was never sure whether the original sin mark stayed.  I was both in awe that Hannah didn't know any of this the way I did at her age and thinking, I so do not want to explain all this to her now.  So I did a terrible parenting job and told her, I was taught that a sin is when you do a bad thing, and we're all born with a sin when we're born.  Except Mary wasn't, and that's why there was a holiday for her yesterday....then I went for a walk with Daniel and Mary and never checked Hannah's homework.

But Saturday.  Hannah and I stopped in at a sports store to buy a needle for the pump to pump up the kids' soccer ball.  When we asked whether they had ago per pompa, I got a quizzical look (because I learned later from Daniel, I should have said a hard g...alas), another customer (who happens to be Daniel's boss) translated that we wanted to pump up our soccer ball, and the employee happily took our ball and pumped it up in less than a minute.  I asked him, "Possiamo portare altri?" since Sebastian's new soccer ball was still as flat as it was upon delivery from amazon last week.  He answered, "Certo!"

We headed down to the giant and Valle Faule, the grassy spot with the replica of the awakening.  Daniel and I sat.  The kids went to the top of a hill and rolled down.  Just rolled, never directly down.  They would start down the hill, but then end up parallel with the hill, trying to roll with their bodies vertical.  But sometimes they got up some speed for five or six rolls straight down before they had to propel themselves some more.  I sat there looking at them, just watching, feeling like, Ah, this is a Saturday.  This feels like home.  One kid got a little cut from a piece of glass or a rock.  Another kid got dog poop on a pant leg.  Someone else needed water.

Yep.  This feels like home.