At just over 20 months, there are next to no traces left of the tiny baby the Bean once was. Most of the "essential" kit that filled our flat has been packed away. Gone are the days when he could be persuaded to sleep with just some milk, some rocking, some songs. No longer is he all gummy smiles and dribble bibs.

Yet some things remain. His beloved milk bottles, which no sippy will ever be a match for in the comfort stakes. The stack of pink muslins on the end of the sofa, now just as good for dealing with a toddler's first (failed!) attempts at peeing in a potty as they once were with the results of a very poorly tummy. And this:

We're Going on a Bear Hunt has fascinated the Bean since he was just a couple of months old. First by googly-eyed and captivating Michael Rosen's own rendition of it. Then by the book itself, which he started chucking at our heads as soon as he was old enough to speed-crawl up to the bookshelf and choose a parent-waking missile. 

These days he's a little more civilised about it, though only just. He knows no books shall be read during mealtimes, exactly - mum and dad's multi-tasking skills do not extend to that - but patience is a tough task for a toddler. As soon as the cutlery hits the plate and the last mouthful has been swallowed, he's there, reminding us of our everyday parental duties.

There he was one morning this week, the old favourite in hand. He climbed onto M-Big's lap, all impish and enthusiastic and determined. Brush aside your breadcrumbs, Daddy, there is swishy-swashing to be done. 

Despite having read this book at least a hundred times (7 times in a row, on one occasion), it's impossible not to enjoy it. Impossible to resist making the mud extra squerchy and the snowstorm extra fierce. Just to see the look on his face.

It’s that time of year again: my twitter and facebook feeds are full of pictures of perky preschool kids in their glad rags and updates by very emotional parents… We still have at least one year to go until the Bean walks through the school gates for the first time, so here at P&P Towers we’re not plotting where to get cheap uniforms just yet.

All this school-related social media activity did, however, bring back memories of what it’s like to be on the other side: the teacher. So while you mop up your tears and say a definitive goodbye to the baby days, here is what the teachers will be hoping you remember. 

1. Home is not school, and vice versa

Home: one-on-one attention aplenty with people who have tended to the child's every whim since birth. 
School: 10, 20 or even 30 other children need to be kept fed, watered and educated by one or two poor souls.

They cannot be the same. Different environment, different rules, different results. This is why your normally outgoing child may become quiet or vice versa, why they eat their carrots at school but fling them skywards at home, why they cling to your leg like a monkey in the morning but seem reluctant to say goodbye to their friends four hours later. None of this is cause for concern - peer pressure (in the positive sense) is a huge motivator, and in any case your child is simply adapting to the environment.

The only time when you need to talk to the teacher is if there is a sudden, disproportional and persistent onset of undesirable (such as hitting) or worrisome (such as refusing to eat or becoming excessively withdrawn) behaviour. Though a settling-in period is normal, as is letting off steam with an emotional outburst now and then, large and negative changes in behaviour may indicate that something is seriously bothering your child.


2. Your children are more independent than you think they are

I have lost count of the number of children I’ve seen put on their own shoes, feed themselves, or go to the loo unprompted while at school, only to turn into helpless “babies” the second their parents walk through the door. 99% percent of the time the parent simply hasn’t realised just how much their child is capable of. And then that child will happily take full advantage of this ignorance, much to the dismay of the teacher. Especially if it’s a way of getting attention from someone they haven’t seen all day. The teacher’s advice? ALWAYS let them try by themselves first, even when you think they're too young, and only give help when it’s requested.


3. Don’t play the Alpha-parent game

The one who dresses their child in expensive, brand-new clothes for a day of mucking about. The one who gets up at 5am to cut lunch box sandwiches into pretty animal shapes. The one who points out how many gold stars their child has earned this week within earshot of the mum whose kid is climbing the furniture. 

While in theory these things are okay - to have the cash or the time, to feel proud of your child’s achievements - parents are highly competitive animals who are already overly prone to comparing. Endless, destructive comparing. And unfortunately, this comparing and competing usually ends up back on the teacher’s desk in the form of complaints and impossible requests to make things equal. Guess what? We can’t. So take the lazy option and just don’t play the game. 

4. All children are different

Yes, Johnny might be going up a numeracy group before your child does, despite them being the same age. Or the teacher may be spending 5 minutes talking to Sarah’s mum every morning, but not to you. And you might find this unsettling or even hugely unfair.

So while I know you know this, it merits repeating: all children are different. Teachers, therefore, cannot be expected to treat every child in exactly the same way. In fact, you don’t want them to, because children learn best when their individual needs are interests are put first. Because good teachers are the ones who help the slower children to catch up, rather than take the easy option and flaunt the results of already capable pupils.

In any case, your child will almost certainly have other skills that little Johnny doesn’t, and there may be something awful going on in Sarah’s family that you don’t know about. So don’t feel aggrieved or slighted about what is happening to others, but do ask questions about how your own child, the sole focus of your concern, is doing.


5. Work with us, not against us

We have no problem with teaching your child to brush their teeth, pack up their toys or tie their shoelaces. Teaching them life skills is just as much part of our job as it is to teach them their abcs. But for the love of god, don’t neglect to practise these skills at home. Despite home and school being different environments (see point 1), some skills are useful everywhere. In these situations consistency is key, and presenting a united front with the teachers will only benefit everyone in the long run. 

Working with us involves communicating, too. Tell us when you're unhappy or concerned about something rather than suffering in silence or, worse, complaining to another parent who is unlikely to be able to help. Tell us when something big is happening in your child's life: a new sibling, a family crisis, anything that is likely to have an impact on their behaviour. We want you to do these things because at the end of the day our goal is the same: to help raise a child who is happy to learn, to play, to develop. 


6. Don’t be too hard on yourself

Being a parent is hard. Parents are the ones who have to deal with the sugar high after the party, the meltdown when the car is stuck in traffic, the feverish nights before another day at the office. It’s okay to be in a rush in the morning. We will not judge you when you forget the lunch box or the gym kit. It's normal to feel overwhelmed by the changes, to despair at having to say goodbye. Because nobody is immune to the tough days. Not even a former preschool teacher who routinely got twenty-four 2-year-olds to sit on their chairs at the same time, but who is putty in the hands of her own toddler. Who will probably, come to think of it, be unable to stick to any of the above when the time comes to say her own tearful goodbye at the school gates.

A super-sparkly gold star for me last week: work did indeed overwhelm everything and so having a meal plan to take the thinking out of dinner meant I made every dish. Whoop!

The other feat I'm quite proud of is making non-instant polenta. I know. 40 minutes of stirring, wake up the next day with an arm that is too stiff to wash its own armpit, non-instant polenta. But it's worth it, because it was the only way we could have polenta taragna, a local Lombard speciality that includes buckwheat flour in the cornmeal, and which is really hard to find in instant form. The result was utterly creamy goodness on Saturday, and fried cubes from the leftovers on Sunday. Which neither toddler nor, in fact, mum could resist stacking.

This week I shall be having another attempt at fresh porcini. I won't be letting them go to waste this time - tomorrow morning will be spent cleaning, slicing and freezing the best part of a kilo! Some of them have already found their way straight into tonight's beanotto (a risotto-inspired stew of white beans and mushrooms, finished off with lemon juice and mascarpone. It's is delicious, and by one of my biggest blog crushes, Green Kitchen Stories).

Have a tasty week, and don't forget to have a look at the rest of the fabulous meal plans linked up to At Home With Mrs M for more family meal inspiration.

Dear World, here is what happens when you buy the cheapest porcini mushrooms on the market:

                                   they turn into a maggot-ridden pile of yuck within two days.

So, so sad. Needless to say, due to this calamity last week's meal plan did not fare well. No mushroom tartlets, no creamy mushroom sauce to go with the polenta. I did, however, achieve one small triumph in the face of so many fails. This pretty and very delicious beetroot & quartirolo quiche.

This week it's all about the Big Easy, because I'll be flapping about under a gigantic workload for most of the time.

A tasty and hopefully manageable week to all (an most of all to me...)!

It’s not that I’m not happy to get back to my own home, my own things, my own bed. It’s not that I want to pack my bags again. It’s not that I think things would necessarily be better if we moved closer.

But the missing after the visits. It hurts.

After the intensity of sharing every waking moment of every day, of needing to confer with five, ten or even twenty other people before lunch can be had, of grumbling together over coffee at breakfast and watching B-movies while putting up a united front against the mosquitoes at night. After 5 weeks of always-accompanied, the suddenly-alone again is novel for about a day. Then the missing hits, becomes all-consuming.

For a few days, maybe a week or two if it’s really bad, life consists of nothing else. Normal rhythms are still out of reach. The toddler is grumpy and disoriented, the husband rather quiet. Mum eyeballs the laundry, knowing it needs just as much attention as dinner and the dirty floors and the sofa full of post-travel debris. The mind knows work clients won’t wait forever and  it would be better to “just get on with it”, here. But the heart is really elsewhere.

It tries to deflect the missing onto the small things, the things that serve as reminders of what’s gone. The Brazilian flip-flop mug, the English tea and biscuits. Make yet more rice and beans, as though we haven’t just spent two weeks eating… rice and beans.

Skype calls every day instead of every week, seeing the missing in their eyes too. Not being able to explain to the Bean that they’re not “back” just because they’re on the screen. It hurts.

But get on with it we must, we will. Our lives here are shouting louder for attention than even the toddler can, and anyway, more visits are already in the pipeline. We learn to live with the missing, we accept it as an ordinary part of a life lived abroad. It’s the price we pay. 

My Brazil isn’t football. It’s not icy-cold beer and girls in tiny bikinis on a sweltering beach in Rio. It’s not tropical rainforests or daredevil adventures on the Rio Grande.

My Brazil is Sao Paulo’s looming skyscrapers, kamikaze traffic and dense smog.

My Brazil is a jet lag-enveloped fog, chased away only with sweetcorn cake and coffee.

It’s deserted beaches in winter, never cold, often wet, but always stunning.

My Brazil is flowers, flowers, flowers. Never have you seen a “winter” so colourful and luscious.

It’s a retro-lover’s paradise: turquoise VW Beetles, big yellow fridges, and an Olivetti typewriter in the ladies’ room, in a bar. Where else?

It’s watching a toddler take all the travels into his stride, find toys in the most unlikely places, and leave behind any last traces of babyhood. We now talk of BIG sand, BIG water, BIG airplanes and tiny-tiny p’wenta (polenta) fritters.

Above all, my Brazil is family: huge, thrilled, bustling.

Until next time.

Aaaand we're back! Well, sort of. Our bodies are still somewhere over the mid-Atlantic and our souls are probably even further back, missing the family and the beaches of Brazil. But the mind is being slowly dragged back, kicking and screaming, to the impatient clients, the piles and PILES of laundry, the conundrum of where to get yet more clothes and shoes to fit a toddler who seems to have ballooned in every direction over the summer. Sigh.

Perhaps the best way to get both body and soul to catch up with the realities of everyday life is through lovely, healthy food. We're in a good place, here in Milan. We might not have beaches or papayas as big as your head growing on our doorstep, but at the weekly market I did find these:

Fresh porcini mushrooms. Another few weeks and the season will be over for another year, so I bought a huge bag and I've been scouring the internet on how to best keep them. Some of them will be turned into this yummy-sounding sauce, and I think I'll slice and freeze the rest raw. If you have any good porcini recipes, I'm all ears!!!

Otherwise, it's as many vegetables, pulses and grains as we can cram in this week, to offset all the holiday indulgence of the past 6 weeks...

Yeah. I think we're just about back :-)

You jet lagged. Kids jet lagged. You and Kids jet lagged. Whichever way you look at it, travel across time zones with small children in tow is no picnic. However, with our family spread all over the globe, it’s something the P&Pers have had to get used to, littlest included. So for better or worse, we’ve learned to pack in an hour, make airports fun, and cope with the dreaded jet lag. It’s our strategies for the latter than I’d like to share with you today.

I’m going on the assumption that jet lag is indeed about the house, along with stubbornly still-packed suitcases and take-away dinner cartons. Because you could have done something awfully clever and dedicated like move your kids’ bedtimes by 30 minutes each day until they got the destination time zone, before you even set off. But no, I’m going to assume that, like me, you weren’t that organised and have arrived well and truly floored.

1. Let everyone sleep when they want to
I know that the traditional advice for getting over jet lag is to force yourself to stay awake during the day, but I don’t think that’s realistic when you are also meant to be looking after Littles. As far as I’m concerned, the same principle as that of the newborn days applies: sleep when they sleep. Because for the first 2 to 3 days, you never know when they’ll be wide awake and want entertaining. The kids are also likely to be very, very tired from the excitement of the journey, so it makes no sense to keep them awake when their bodies and brains desperately need rest.

2. Have meals at the correct time
Often, neither adults nor children get enough sleep and food during long-distance travel, so it’s normal for everyone to be starving for the first day after arrival. This makes it much easier to adapt to the destination time zone’s mealtimes than bedtimes. In fact, some studies have shown that not eating at all during travel, and then eating the correct meal immediately upon arrival (so, for example, eating lunch if you arrive at/around lunch time) is much more effective in resetting your body clock than trying to tinker with sleep patterns. Although getting your children to abstain from food for the duration of a journey probably isn’t a good idea (can you imagine the toddler  wrath of a missed snack!?), I do think it’s possible to use their extra hunger-levels to your advantage.

3. Don’t. Make. Plans.
For the first three days, you are going to feel awful. You are going to want to sleep during the day and be wide a-bloody-wake at 3AM. So why would you make any plans?? Instead, just take it easy for at least 48 hours and accept that everyone and everything else can wait. No-one (but you, possibly) will care if the suitcases are not unpacked, or if the floor isn’t clean. If there are people at your destination waiting (clamouring) to see you, ask them to come to you rather than you go to see them. And while you’re at it, explain you are dead on your feet and might just need to pop to bed for an hour, lovely as it is to catch up… They’ll understand.
If you have to go back to work immediately (ouch), try to avoid scheduling meetings or deadlines for the first few days, and have a to-do list ready before you leave so you don’t have to think too much when you get back.

4. Get help
If you can, get someone to take the children off your hands for at least a few hours on the first day, or make you dinner, or do the shopping for you. If this isn’t an option, try to plan ahead before you leave to make your life on arrival as simple as possible. Freeze some dinners or find out in advance where you are going to get your first few meals from, and have clean outfits for two days ready. Don’t return to a pile of dishes in the sink and no milk in the fridge at midnight…

5. Get out
One of the worst things about travelling by plane is being cooped up in a small space for hours. Add the over-enthusiastic and utterly unhealthy air conditioning, and you arrive feeling not only disoriented but also decidedly stale. The great outdoors is the perfect antidote so even if the temptation is to crawl onto the sofa, get out there. No matter what the weather. In fact, the windier the better, to blow out all the aches, pains and cobwebs. And if it’s the middle of the night and everyone is awake anyway? (Provided you know you’ll be safe) just head out for a torch-lit walk - the kids will love it. Then come back and feel naturally tired, rather than “I’ve just sat in a metal box for 10 hours and am going a little loopy” kind of tired.

6. Be patient
No matter how bad, jet lag usually begins to wear off after three days. So hang in there and make the most of the fact that everyone, even the normally-hyperactive toddler is a bit dopey, a bit snoozy, a bit cuddly… And if you end up having to watch cartoons with them at four in the morning, snuggled up under a blanket, is that really so bad?