Sometimes I'm just plain bored as a stay-at-home mom. Am I allowed to admit that? I wake up in the morning and dread the moment my husband shuts the door behind him and goes to work. The bed needs to be made. My son smells faintly of a dirty diaper. My dog looks at me with eyes that beg for a long walk outside. And my hair is greasy. I need to take a shower ...More »

We have been living in Brussels now for almost five months. Mr. Big Eyes has two teeth, and he grunts like The Cookie Monster when expressing appreciation or recognition of something. My husband and I still have all our teeth despite our daily intakes of Pierre Marcolini chocolate. Unlike Mr. Big Eyes, we don’t grunt anymore since, after much elbow and pommes frites grease, the number of boxes we have to unpack has dramatically diminished. ...More »

I used to measure the success of my days on whether a source had returned my phone call or my boss actually lit up if I pitched an alluring idea to him for a feature. These days, if Mr. Big Eyes has an hour-long nap and manages to fall asleep before eight o'clock, I feel as if my editor has just told me my piece landed on page one. Now that Mr. Big Eyes is ...More »

Every day I take my dog and my baby for a walk, sometimes two, in my new neighborhood. I had been told that multi-tasking is fundamental to surviving as a new mom. But not many of my friends have much advice on how to make walking dog and baby together any easier. My dog's name is Brie, named after the French cheese NOT the character of Desparate Housewives. She's most relieved that she's finally living ...More »

Arrivederci, Roma. Bonjour, Brussels. I've moved. Left behind the chaos of Italy for the efficiency of Belgium. Abandoned un vero cappucino for a watery cafe' au lait. Rolling my "rs" is now secondary to drowning them. And I have a new, scarey job, too, with a major title. I'm a mother. Una mamma. Une maman. And my boss' name is Luca. He's three and a half months old, and his smile makes me ...More »

She pulled up every day after school in her rusty, brown Maverick with a plastic figurine of St. Jude dangling from her rearview mirror. Always the first to arrive and a half-hour early, she was one of few babysitters in a long line of mothers picking up their kids from school. But Helen was the only seventy-two-year-old babysitter in the parking lot. We liked to think she was our grandmother, even though genealogy charts proved ...More »

I grew up in upstate New York where we always had two cats and two dogs, a motley crew of males and females. It drives me crazy whenever I walk my dog in Rome and have to fend off the furrowed brows of other dog owners who hold back their panting pups from mine with diffident questioning: "E' maschio o femmina?" I've never seen this is the States. Perhaps I hung out in the wrong ...More »

As a child, I wasn’t allowed to open a gift unless I had promised my parents that a thank-you note would follow. My mother used to sit near the Christmas tree with a yellow legal note pad on her lap and a pencil in hand. Before beginning the family rip-a-thon, I’d have to tell her whose gift I was about to open. She’d later present each of us with our list of people to thank ...More »

In Italy, they say that rubbing a pregnant woman's tummy brings good luck. Just like rubbing St. Peter's marbled foot at the Vatican or the wild boar's bronzed snout in Florence. My tummy, whose trespassers have usually just been my husband or my doctor, is now out there for all of Rome to pat. I never imagined the strange sensation of having a body part open for grabs to people whose hands you've never ...More »

Last week, Il Corriere della Sera, one of Italy's leading daily newspaper, reported that this year's fashion shows in Milan would debut models with curves. Forget heroin chic (as Chanel, Burberry and H&M seem to doing in giving Kate Moss the boot). Plus sizes, as they're so delightfully termed in America, are hitting the catwalk. This summer, New Yorkers talked proudly about the advertisements plastered on city billboards and buses for "Dove" body cream that ...More »