Silly Teachers in Rome

They make you write very neatly. They make you color very neatly, even if you are a person in preschool. And they don't even have kindergarten in Rome. We have an English class but all we are doing is "the tree," "the mushroom." "the grass," "the leaves." And we have a religion class. They teach you stuff like "God made the Earth." I like school a lot because you have recess and a lot of other fun stuff. Fun stuff like "non tocare per terra" ["Don't touch the ground"--a game the kids like to play at recess].

Pony riding lessons in Rome

There is a ranch in Rome that has ponies and "horses."It is a huge ranch. And there are some cows and dogs that live on the ranch, and some goats, roosters, chickens, pigs, bunnies and ducks.
[Top: Entrance to the Roma River Ranch, a little bit of Americana along the shores of the Tiber. Below: Playing with a horse at the ranch]
[Admiring the farm animals at the Roma River Ranch with Michele]
There are also lessons for bigger kids that get to ride on real horses but they are better than Lulu (Lucia) and me because they are older. We ride ponies. I had my first lesson on Tuesday because the other Tuesdays were rainy [and the lessons were canceled].
[Brushing the ponies down before a ride]

Before that we went on Saturday and they did not have enough ponies so we walked with them along the river.
[Below: Accompanying the ponies and riders alongside the Tiber River]
[Video below: Daniela and Michele talking to the cow.] The following week we saw them milk the cow.

Happy Birthday

[Below: Danielle's Halloween-themed 7th birthday was yesterday in the rectory of our neighborhood church, Santa Maria of Trastevere]

It was my birthday party yesterday. It was very fun. A lot of people were witches. There were also a lot of skeletons.
The party was mostly full of boys and the boys were going crazy. They were going crazy by running around and chasing each other. I ran around. I chased Candy Ghost and I got chased a little bit by a couple kids. [Below: Candy Ghost getting swarmed by the kids snatching the candies taped to his sheet].

I ate a lot of candies--I ate eyeballs, and spider legs and especially candy corns [sent to us by our wonderful Evanston neighbor Gayle]. There was a lot of food to eat. There was a spider game and we didn't get to play it. I got to do the pinata and I got lots of candy (mmmmmmm!)
We got to do face paint [Below: Loyola University Rome student, Claire, was our face painter]
[Below: video of Danielle blowing out the candles on her cake]


The end of the party was really fun. And after it was finished, there was a lot to do. We cleaned up a lot of stuff. [Below: A picture of us trudging home with our party gear after the party.]