Dolly Goes For a Ride

Posted by beth on October 6, 2009

So I live with a toddler, which is sometimes annoying and messy, mostly when she’s sleepy and fighting it. But most of the time, she’s pretty cool. At the moment, she’s really into Band-Aids, so usually around or after dinnertime, she’ll go to the bathroom and get one to put on somebody’s invisible boo-boo. She takes it out of the wrapper and gets it all ready, and then she puts it on someone’s finger or arm or face – wherever the “boo-boo” is. Then she shows it to whoever else is around and says, “_______’s gonna feel all better,” drawing out, with compassionate emphasis, the “all better.” It’s very sweet.

She also talks CONSTANTLY, and I don’t know if that’s just what toddlers do or if some do it and others don’t. If you’ve had toddlers, maybe you can tell me because some day, I’d like to have kids, and I need to know what I need to prepare for here. Is there any way you can train them to process things internally?

On an only VERY loosely-related note, a funny thing happened yesterday. As you know, Carla and Joe moved into their house right before I got here, and they’ve been unpacking everything ever since, so the boxes have been piling up in the basement. Well, they called to have the boxes picked up, and the guys were supposed to come this afternoon while Carla was at work, so I was going to stay here and wait for them.

They came, got the boxes, and left, and then about ten minutes later, the bell rang again, and this time it was the police. And here, let me explain something about the fortress in which I live. There’s like a ten-foot-tall iron gate surrounding the whole joint, and it opens two different ways. There’s a big part that slides open with a remote control, and there’s a smaller, just standard doorway-sized gate that swings open with a key. Or you can buzz it open from inside the house. So when people come over to the house unannounced, they have to buzz from outside the gate, and you can pick up a phone inside and talk to them. When the police arrived, I went out to the gate to talk to them because they were only speaking Italian, and the only two words I could understand over the phone were “ma’am” and “street.” Not that I’d be able to understand Italian better outside the house, but you know, with body language and all, face-to-face is just easier.

So I went out, and there’s the police with a dolly left by the box-moving guys out on the street. And I wanted to explain whose it was, but they didn’t speak English, so I just said, “I don’t speak Italian,” and then I indicated that the dolly was not mine, and they put it in their car and took off.

I guess if I’d been thinking, I could have brought it back inside the gate in the hopes that the movers would come back for it, but now that I’m thinking about it more, that might have invited questions from the police that I wouldn’t have been able to answer, so I think I did the right thing.

Well…

A few minutes after that, I went to pick up Savka (the toddler–there’s the link to the beginning of the post) from school, and as we were walking home, the movers pulled up on the side of the road to ask me about their dolly. They spoke a little English, so I explained that the “Polizia” had come and taken it away, but there are at least three different kinds of law enforcement officials that I’ve noticed, and I have no idea what the difference is between them all. There’s the Polizia and the Carabinieri and something else that I think is kind of like the highway patrol, so it didn’t really come into play, but the movers wanted to know if the Polizia had come or the Carabinieri, and I had no idea. And they were all, “What color was the car?” Clueless. “Was it blue or white?” No idea.

It reminded me of a scene from some movie that I can’t really remember. All I know is that there’s a bunch of kids waiting for their college acceptance letters, and they’re on the phone with their parents when the letters arrive, and they’re all freaking out asking them if the envelopes are big or small, fat or skinny. If you know what that movie is, do let me know.

Anyhoe, the Carabinieri station was about a block away from where we were, so the two guys who’d gotten out of the truck started walking up that way, and I suppose the driver was going to make a U-turn and go meet them there. I took Savka home and hung up laundry to dry. Then we drew chalk pictures of stick figures in a “park” and watched Barney.