Sea-glass hunting with friends between Coney Island and Brighton Beach

Amazing how you can hop on a subway in the humid and sticky streets of Manhattan and end up on a boardwalk with the breeze and the seagull squeaking around...
 And amazing what the time and the patience of the Ocean can do!

Brooklyn Summer

Living in Italy (where hey, we do not have fire hydrant!) I always saw this in movies, and comic strips, but never got a chance to try it... until last week, at the magic age of 32.

And... Whoa!
It's quite fun!

An improvised water park right in front of the house...

Feeling thirsty...

"Hey, I got an idea!..."

 "Well, let me show you how you do it..."

I also discovered that it is LEGAL to open a fire hidrant if it has the "sprinkler cap" ... Now the city looks full of opportunity to refresh myself :)

Night Travelling

Yesterday night I rolled and rolled and rolled on the bed.
So many things in my head. A lot of thoughts were chasing each other, there was a good amount of hope... and a pinch of fear.
I dreamed too but I forgot what.
And when I woke up... I was up-side-down.
I traveled on the spot, like an old style clock.
180 degrees in one night.
I got  in the same place, but with a different perspective.

Later today I just remembered this video, that I really love (I love stop motion in general!):



I wander if I flied in our sheets too :)

vacation time!

I got a full week of vacation (next Monday I will be back at school for the Summer Camp) and in these days I:

 - Played turist! Strolled around at museums and parks, walked a lot... and had tons of picnics with Leo!

 - Enjoyed friends! The good thing of being on vacation is that you can catch up with everybody! You get the time to call Italy, you are free to meet your friend at her for lunch break, you can stay up late, see concerts at night and enjoy music... it's like having a day made of 48 hours!?

- Shoot photos and read books... probably too many...

- Got some good gelato, and pizza... and found a great ricotta shop close by!

- Met some new friends... Amazing how beautiful people may stumble in your life in unexpected ways :)
 
- Discovered a mistake in the Dear Birth Mother Letter that we printed and sent to the agency... one month ago! Now we got 200 copies with a repetition in the text. 2 letters already got sent so some possible birth mother, and we will probably have to re-order and re-pay the printing & shipping... (facepalm).
 
 - Wasted Spent time on the "dark side of the internet", watching silly videos and funny pictures, discovering blogs and websites... and this one, that I liked it a lot, even if it's a little bit bittersweet:




And you? What are you doing with your jelly beans?

A jump in the 20' at Governors Island

So here it's how we celebrated our multiple anniversaries:
- Sushi night
- Red Roses surprise
- ... and dance! We went at the Governors Island Jazz Party, surrounded by people that took the dress-up process reeeally seriously!!

 

Our costumes were way less sophisticated:

 

... But we had so much fun dancing and rolling around on the dance floor!

There will be another Jazz party at Governors Island this August... Guess who is going again?!
:-D

Celebration Time!

It's anniversary week!

In the 9th of June, 9 years ago (9 YEARS AGO?! Seriously?!), we met by accident along the street and walked together under a warm summer sky, chatting and laughing. We kept going back and forth from my house to your house (luckily we lived 3 blocks apart, ah!) until dawn arrived and I finally went up to my apartment, feeling exhausted, happy and a little bit sad.
That night we didn't exchanged phone numbers, we didn't tell each other "let's meet again". That night we didn't kiss, we didn't even hug... But that night is when it started, and we both felt it.
(The next day you found my phone number on the white pages... I suppose walking each other back and forth in front of our houses helped a little with the research... and invited me to see a terrible movie, but that's another story!)

On the 11th of June, 6 years ago, we got married in our city council. I was too nervous, I don't remember the ceremony, but I do remember the party. We celebrated with a picnic in the park, our friends brought guitars and music, my dad pulled out from the canteen a flask of his home-made red Barbera wine, your family baked a dozen of cakes shaped like harts... and we danced barefoot in the grass.
It definitely wasn't the Italian"traditional wedding celebration"... but still, I wouldn't change a thing :)

And I love  that, to celebrate our anniversary, this weekend we will go dancing barefoot in the grass again.
May we keep dancing, mì amor!

Wednesday = Brooklyn Botanical Garden!

For this summer, Wednesday is officially our "picnic night".

So today we grabbed our pasta, packed our chocolate (you can't have a picnic without chocolate, it would be terribly unprofessional!) and caught a spot to listen to some free live music, smell some amazing beautiful roses... and get a pic at some original/silly/weird... hats!

It looked like a party at the Mad Hatter Garden!

 The children created their personal hats, and they held a little parade around the cherry esplanade...

 Some just created some amazing pieces of wearable art.

 Roses and hats... It was like jumping right into a page of Alice in Wonderland...
We loove the Brooklyn Botanical Garden!!

Spring is in the air...

Because nothing screams spring more than a sunny late afternoon in the park!

Sketchbook Project!

Do you like doodling? You usually sketch squiggly and silly faces while talking on the phone? You like to catch your thoughts and dreams on paper?
Then you may consider getting into the Sketchbook Project for the Free Art Library!
It's  a traveling collection of sketchbooks where you can find the drawings and the words of thousand of strangers, normal-average-crazy people like me and you... And if you want you can put your personal one in the collection!

The main home of the sketchbooks, where they rest in shelves between one travel and the other around the country, it's Brooklyn!

We  went there yesterday...

And we spent a big chunk of our rainy afternoon browsing through pages... Some were simple, other were so intricate! Some were funny, other desperate, many were really beautiful and original...  and many were very personal and intimate.
It's amazing how many things can fit in a tiny book, and how much you can personalize it!

Here are some of my favorite ones...

watercolors, treads, paint, pop ups... wow!

 

I loved the sketchbooks with presents and secret messages...

It was like having a glimpse at the life of hundreds strangers... We read thoughts, we found photos, drawings, quotations, pieces of memories...

Simple, sweet and minimal, with photos and quotations...

   

                                                 

A looking-through Sketchbook!

     

     
 
The library card it's free, and many of the books are "digitalized", so you can find them and read them online.
Also, every time you request a sketchbook you get an extra one, a "surprise" randomly selected for you.

The authors are encouraged to personalize the cover and the book as much as they want... they can paint over it, cut it, add more pages... as long as it can fit in the bookshelf.

A 3D Dictionary of simple things.  This was amazin

Although my writing and my drawings always disappoint me, I am thinking of starting a sketchbook and get on board with the project...  wanna join me?!


... Maybe my sketchbook and your sketchbook will keep each other company along the road!

NYC walls

One of the things that I love of this city is that it can be stressful, it can be loud, it can be crazy... but it will never be boring!You can walk on the same street every day, and you will always notice something different...

... Even the walls are always changing!

I LOVE the subway map building!

More than zombies what terrifies me are subway's rats!!

..

WE ARE ONLINE!

Ok, we know it, the journey it's still long and we have a long way ahead, but...
But today we can't stop dancing, and it feels like the whole planet is dancing with us :)


:)

Our DBML Letters

When our package of Dear birth Mother Letters arrived we realized they were missing the signature.

We sat down with a black sharpie, and we had our diva moment signing them all by hand :)The thing is both me and Leo are left handed, and Leo's writing is... Well, particular? Peculiar? Weird?
So he got a little bit worried, and he made some tests on a piece of paper:





... And after this, we discover the importance of a calligraphy class :-P

 

24th of March and we got our home visit done!
We love our sweet home but, honestly, we can get quite messy, here!
So we cleaned, and decorated for one week, and since spring is here we even got some plants.

Our new kitchen plants enjoying the view of Brooklyn... the basil looks great! :)

The studio, with our collection of picture books

Bedroom's plants, enjoying the view of Manhattan

  (I don't know why, but I don't have picture of the dining room!)

We discovered soon that we probably went above and beyond, and many of the precautions we took were not necessary:

Bars and protections at the widows = unnecessary
Smoke detectors and CO2 detectors = necessary
Locker for medicines =  necessary
Baby proofed cabinets (for soaps, detergents and other chemical products)  = unnecessary (she said we didn't need it right now, but only in the future)
The crazy cleaning = waaay unnecessary! (but now the house feels so pretty!).

Next step: the social worker will send us a copy of her home study, then she will file it to the director of the adoption agency... and then all the paper work aspect will be over (for a while, al least!).

The last thing to do before going online are the brochures, the Dear Birthmother Letter.
We are STILL working on our DBL, the text is done and approved by the agency (they had to cut so much, we realized how hard it is to describe honestly yourself, you relationship, your family, your hopes, and dreams...  in only 950 words!). We are still picking pictures and templates... and a part of me feel uncomfortable and  embarrassed, since it really looks like we have to  sell and promote ourselves, the same way you would do it for a car sale or a property (I was and I will never be good at it!). On the other hand the DBL is the only way a Birth Mom can get a glimpse of the prospective adoptive parents...  So we better get through, and try to be as honest as possible...

 We don't want to be overstressed by deadlines, we don't want to run, we are taking our time to go through this process and probably many people will do it way faster than us... but my wish is to be online by the middle of May.

There, I wrote it!
Now let's see what will happen!

Alice

January 13, it took us a while, but... we got all our paperworks done!
Biographies,
Questionnaires,
Interracial workshop.
Book readings,
Medical records,
Birth and Marriage certificates (all the way from Italy... a pain in the butt!)
Child abuse clearance,
Finger prints,
Profile...

Now, if all our papers are ok the next step is to scrub our house like maniacs, waiting for the home visit!