La Famiglia Ambrosio: Il Nonno e Lo Zio a Rimini

We survived our first 5 days in Italy. I really should say, we survived the flights getting here. Wowzers. Traveling with a toddler is WORK. Seriously. Being a parent of a toddler on a 10 hour flight is worthy of some kind of medal. Considering we were trapped in a crowded tube for such a long time, Matteo really did well. He is only 20 months, so we saved ourselves $1000 dollars and didn't buy him a ticket. He sat/slept on our laps and actually wasn't too restless. We walked around a bit, we put him in the baby bjorn and walked around a bit. He watched some videos on our tablet and read some books. He slept about 3 hours and when we arrived in Frankfurt, he was fine. Actually, I think he was a little stunned. We had an hour layover and we had to go through the passport check, change terminals, which meant going through security again. I strapped him in the baby bjorn so I could just run as fast as I could and so I think he was confused by the sprinting and bouncing up and down as we literally raced to catch our flight. Sadly, we missed it and had to wait 3 hours for the next flight. Matteo really was great through all the chaos. Considering he only slept 3 hours through the night, he happily ran around a bit, played with some toys I brought and enjoyed people watching. When we finally arrived in Venice, he crashed in the carseat and slept all the way to Rimini, a three hour drive.

When we arrived in Rimini, he was greeted by Il Nonno (Fabio's dad), Ada (Fabio's dad's wife) and Zio Ugo (Fabio's brother) and Zia Valentina (Fabio's brother's longtime girlfriend). He went to all of them willingly, smiling and playing with them and basking in the attention. They thought he was the cutest thing, kissing him relentlessly and trying to get him to say "nonno," which he did and has been saying it about 1000 times a day since that first day.

We spent 2 days in Rimini. We ate a few 5 course meals together, visited a mall (it rained the whole time we were there) ate some gelato and visited a toy store and bought lots of books and toys. This boy is definitely loved and spoiled!

The Ambrosio men, including Matteo's cousin dog, Toki.