"I must make amends"

The promise was approximately a post per week, but now we seem to be down to less than one per month!

We've realised that those of you that still come to this page for updates deserve some compensation, so we've prepared a feast of photos (click or go to the gallery page) for you to gorge into pictures of the two kids having fun here and there and this way catch up with what we've been up to in the last 6 or 7 weekends.

(By the way, we've also updated the little boxes on the left column...)

Summarizing... 

After the trip to the cliffs and Michele's birthday party at the beginning of September, we lent GrannyChiara to Auntie Marta for a few days (super-sister/aunt took her to a Beatles journey through Liverpool!) and when she came back to us we had a day out together in London, with two main targets: the Natural History Museum and Tower Bridge (up to the top!); they were both great visits, though the dinosaurs were "on holiday" (halls closed for renovation), but we still wondered at the huge skeleton in the main hall and the rest of the museum was fascinating all the same (especially the big mammals, blue whale topping them all).

Before the autumn set in, we went Gruffalo-hunting! There are several forests in the UK with Gruffalo-themed paths and one is not far from here, near Cambridge, so we had a wonderful afternoon walking in search of the characters of that amazing story and we were delighted also by the music-trail: a series of incredible instruments available for kids and adults. We finished the day with a bow&arrow shooting sessions for children and mum.

After a month in England, at last we kept our word and took the kids to one of European children's dream place, a park near Windsor with amazing works made up of little bricks... can you guess? Thanks Maeve&John&Jack&MaryJo for the contribution. Mattia had already been both there and at the "original", in Billund, Denmark, but he was thrilled once again and Elena couldn't resist the charm of the astounding sculptures either; it was so good that we somehow managed not to be bothered by the crowd and the endless queueing.

We planned to stop by them on our way to Ware from Ireland, but the journey was already too long; then we found ourselves busy with lots of trips every weekend, but finally, in mid October we paid a long overdue visit to our Italian friends in Staines, west of London, who have just been blessed by the arrival of child-number-3, Elia. After a good time at their place for lunch, they took us to a very nice park for playtime and a lovely walk, before going back to their house again for dinner: we really enjoyed their company!

Michele and Sam's school is about 2.5 miles (yes, still that Imperial mindset...) or 4 km from the college, but Michele has become such a good cyclist, especially with his "new" bike (an old one we found at the college and fixed), that we never use the car: 4 days by bike (Sam on dad's one) and 1 on foot. The nicest part of all this is that there's another bicycle-lover dad at the college, with a small baby, Rosie Mae, and a girl, Olivia, in the same class as Sam, so with this new very good friends we often cycle together or meet along the road, and every Monday we walk together, either with him or with his crazy but super-fit wife, a swim wonder who kept swimming (and quite seriously) till the very morning when their third child, Titus James Lee, was born, last Sunday.

We wash the two rascals regularly with the shower in our flat, but sometimes we treat them to a bath in a bathroom available for all students on our floor, and as you can see from the pictures they love it!

We live quite close to Stansted Airport, so especially during last sunny September we kept seeing planes flying over our heads while playing on the lawn of the college; they are still quite low, as they've just taken off, so it's really a good show and Mattia for a few days got into a plane-watching craze, or better a plane-shooting mania, luckily with a camera!

At the end of September Mattia and Elena started their course, which is the reason for the blog's long silence: our morning lessons, taking the kids around (school&sport), staying with them in the afternoons and then trying to study in the evenings, plus other various bits of college life and some life-saving exercise for both mummy and daddy, keep us quite busy.

Soon we'll tell you more about the serious stuff of our time here, in the meantime enjoy the fun side of it!