Losing my marbles

It's been a long summer and we still have another 5 1/2 weeks to go before Giulia starts back at St. George's and we start homeschooling Paloma. This season in the hospitality biz has been weird thanks to the weak dollar. Many of our colleagues in the budget sector are closing shop and/or selling. A lot of people are worried - us included - about this coming winter. We're due to celebrate the 10th anniversary of The Beehive in May 2009 and we're just hoping we get a chance to see it. Because of the uncertainty, Steve does not want to spend any money unnecessarily. This is the man who will completely take apart a blender, toaster, computer, washing machine, air-conditioning unit - whatever, just so he doesn't have to replace it. And more often than not, he fixes it.

So because of this fear of a long, hard winter, we've put holiday plans on hold and have been hunkering down in Rome which is a difficult place to be with three bored little kids. At the beginning of July, we did spend one week in our beloved Puglia (Valle d'Itria area) that was much too short and now we've been here. We've spent an afternoon seaside in Tarquinia - the beach scene here is little to be desired, but it was so nice to have fresh air and be near the sea. Steve takes the girls to the Villa Borghese when he can and the girls have tried (and hated) a day at a centro estivo (summer day camp) at the zoo. For the most part they have been bickering and fighting and feeling bored and I've been slowly losing my mind at the sound of three children who aren't getting along.

I've lately had such an urge to do things with them that I used to do as a kid. Unfortunately, Rome isn't set up for softball or badminton so I decided to try another direction. I loved playing marbles as a kid - jacks too and hopscotch, two square and all those summertime games that you could literally wile away hours and hours doing. We've been playing a lot of card games together - and Steve and I even have a summertime ritual now of gin and tonic with a lovely wedge of lime in the evening and crazy eights before bed.

I thought it would be fun to teach the girls how to play marbles (biglie in Italian), but as I started to make my way from one toy store to the next to the next, I realized how much I was living in a time warp. Today's kids don't want to play marbles - or perhaps not that they don't want to, but as shopkeepers told me, if it doesn't run on a battery or can be downloaded from the internet or played on a Game Boy - there's just no demand, so they don't carry them. I kept running into dead ends, but I was on a mission and I refused to think that I was going to have order them on-line. Finally, someone suggested that I try a cartolibreria - the stores here in Italy that sell paper products, office, school and arts & crafts supplies and wrapping paper. After going to a few of them and being looked at with pity, I discovered one on via Nemorense that sold wooden versions of different board games and lo & behold - marbles!

I'm looking forward to showing the girls how to play, but considering how long it took me to find these I don't think we'll be playing for keeps.