Mother's Day

As in Australia, it was Mother's Dday in parts of Europe yesterday, including the land of spaghetti. It was also a day of quiet celebration having moved into our new place a week ago. Everything is just about in order, just need to buy a rug, but in the meantime I'm happy to shuffle around in my socks.

Mother's Day means you call your mother. My mother arrived in Venice on Saturday, in the company of my father of course, for the start of their 40 day cruise around Europe. I called her very briefly, and had a strange convoluted conversation as they were on a ferry in the canals of Venice. I then tried to call the other two mothers in my life, my sisters. Left an answering machine message for one, and spoke to Tania while fighting to be heard above the din of traffic and children screaming in the concrete playground nearby.

The other delightful surprise of the day was receiving a sweet Mother's Day SMS from Maddie, our AFS daughter from Austria, who we hosted until January of this year for a few months. You don't necessarily need to give birth to them to be a mother!!

We had Gi's mother and sister over for dinner. It was nice but I have no idea what they think of our new place - they didn't really say. Probably too small, too old, too much in the middle of the real Naples for them. It doesn't matter really. Four hours, antipasto, pasta with chick peas followed by indulgent pastry sweets (I don't like them, too sweet, which is kind of lucky otherwise I'd roll out of town) was more than enough. They even brought the dog!

I'll post photos of our place this week. Oh, and please forgive the size of the birthday blog. Gi reckons it ends on a bad note, when in fact I've left out most of the screaming and hysteria that ended the day after my birthday. I'll leave it to your imaginations.