While I was in Boston, Mariah and the Guids went to visit isola d'Elba
with Lilith and her mom Cecilia.

We spent a long weekend in Vienna and barely took any pictures. One of
the highlights was definitely the dinner in the dinosaur room of the
Natural History museum!

We spent the last week of August in the south of France with two
families we knew in San Francisco: one lives in London now, the other
in Paris. Add us Italians to the mix, and it's a big expat fiesta!

I want to write down these four recent Guido Jack stories before we forget them.

Beam me up, Scotty!

At the beginning of June GJ and Mariah spent two weeks in South Carolina while I was in Bologna working. We video-chatted via Skype almost every day, of course.

One day GJ was eating rasberries and jokingly offered me one by bringing it close to the camera (he knows how Skype works pretty well, it was one of the first things he learned in life).

Laughing, I tried to grab it and made a comment about how it's impossible to transfer objects via Skype, at least for now...I told him that maybe when he grew up we could figure out a way to make
tele-transportation possible...

Here's where it gets interesting: Guido Jack thought about it for a moment, and then said: "I know how we can make it work! We need to get those glasses they gave us at the movie theater! Then the rasberry will come out of your screen on your end, then you just have to grab it!"

He was referring to the 3D glasses, of course. I love it, only a kid would say stuff like that. Basically the problem was half-solved, all we needed to figure out was how to grab the 3D image floating in mid-air in front of me.

Love it.

The interesting thing is that the next day, when we got on Skype again, he asked me "did you buy the glasses papa?". I said no, and also that the glasses weren't enough, that teletransportation hadn't been invented yet, but if he went to school and studied hard, maybe he could work on it and figure it out one day. He thought about it some more and said "yes, Ms Marcella said that we'll do that...after we finish the "creatures of the sea" unit"....interesting! Nice school he goes to! :)

So...if GJ wastes his life chasing the dream of teletransporting raspberries over Skype...you can all blame me, you've read it here first.

Next Story: A Joke for the Ages

The summer here is flip-flop-only time for GJ and myself. Mariah bought GJ these sweet little flip-flops in London that have dinosaurs on them, and have a big dinosaur foot hetched in the sole (see picture 1 below)

When GJ noticed that his footprints looked like dinosaur prints, he asked to be brought to a beach, so that he could make some prints, "so that people will find them millions of years from now and think there was a real dinosaur there".

DANG!

Next Story: Mastering Perspective

We went to a big square in Lecce that has a tall belltower on it (picture 2 below). GJ looked at it and said "from up there we look like little ants".

Understanding perspective? Check.

Next Story: Tattoos are Awesome

GJ loves temporary tattoos, band-aids with superheroes on them, etc. He's always liked it when we drew on him, he feels like a super-hero. This summer at the beach he and our friend Monique (who's 25 btw) took a regular ball-point pen and drew all over each other. So that's acceptable here now.

Just five minutes ago I heard GJ go upstairs to his bedroom, then come back down and get really quiet in the living room. After a few minutes he came over and showed me his leg, and said: "I wrote 'Guido Jack loves Softie' since I couldn't find Mr.Softie" (picture 3 below).

How cute is that? Our little sailor with his "I heart mommy" tattoo! ;)

GJ and Mariah spent 2 weeks in South Carolina for a visit with grandpa
Morgan and grandma Mary, a week at the beach with friends, and even a
quick visit to Great-grandma-Jinny in Minneapolis!

We went to see a real "acetaia" in Modena.

The owner has been making balsamic vinegar there for over 70 years.