Today we made time to celebrate Valentines day. It turns out that Barbara's secret mission last week was actually to buy me a Valentines gift, a new pair of cargo pants. Despite all the wonderful flowers you have sent us, I got her some very pretty roses.
Valeria dropped by with a food parcel from Molinari's, famous traditional San Francisco Italian food. She brought us some of their famous hand made Ravioli. mmm mmm mmm.
Barbara cooked one her special meals and we celebrated a dinner together despite a few interruptions.
We have had a few delicious food parcels dropped off from our friends and we enjoy each one of them. Barbara's body can demand food suddenly as a result of the breast feeding and it is great to have something ready to eat.
The bambini are not sleeping so much and in a 4 hour period we are lucky to get 30 mins to do something else. As we get back into the flow of work, it is taking a toll.
We are learning how to manage time. Feeding both at once if possible and consolidating essential chores. We are told we have three months of this until they can sleep through the night. It's going to be a long journey to summer.
We have been watching the British series "behind the seems" where a group of 20 something's go to India to work in the sweat shops and cotton fields that fuel the garment industry. They earn about 60c per hour ($5/day) and have to rent a place to live.
We have every modern convenience, from heating and food to bathrooms with running hot water, an unknown luxury in working India. I cannot imagine how hard it must be to raise children without these things.
I wanted to thank one of the nurses at the hospital, so I used Valentines day to take her some roses from Nico and Luca. If she did not have a Valentines bouquet before, she does now... and from two men. Judging by the smile on her face, I don't think she cared too much if they were only two weeks old.
I took the trouble to express our particular thanks for her healing work. In this culture, and particularly in a hospital built on the practice of medical science, there is not much validation for a real healer.
What was particularly interesting was her story of how she got assigned to us. Some of the nurses could not understand my explanations of the importance of being with the children in their first hours outside the womb, so they asked Vesna to try and figure out what we were talking about. She got it immediately and, and even offered more advise about keeping the children with us when we sleep.
We were told in the newborns class that it is not a good idea to sleep with babies because you can roll over and crush them. Vesna disputed this and said that mothers are acutely aware of where their babies are even when sleeping. She said that the reports of women crushing their babies are from women that went to sleep drunk.
She explained how to teach them to accept the breast even after the easy flow of the bottle and gave me my first lesson in introducing them to milk with a syringe and a tiny tube attached to my finger for them to suck on.
The weekends are when I take a look at the items on the "honey do" list stuck to the fridge. We have agreed that she will not bug me about anything if I do at least one item per weekend. This weekend it was a shelf.
A shelf sounds simple enough unless it comes from Ikea. This $45 item came with instructions, a bag of hardware and four pieces of wood. After a half hour of assembling the $2 worth of components (is there any industry that has a higher markup than furniture?) I had to locate the studs in the wall to hang the shelf. What a pain this "simple" task became
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