To Blog or Not To Blog...

Hey, tooth fairy!

Overthinking what is blogworthy (is that even a word?) has kept me away from writing. Things have happened, really. I've just not written about them.
So here's my Top Ten Things I Could Have Blogged About but just didn't.


1) Five days after leaving Singapore to travel home to Verona for the summer holidays, Eliot gets pneumonia. What are the odds? Actually pretty good considering that this time last year she got salmonella and needed to be hospitalized.

2) About a week after Eliot recovers, I too get pneumonia and need to be hospitalized for 4 days. My fever is so persistent that Italian doctors contemplate putting me in isolation because I have just come from Singapore. Good times.

3) Pneumonia-related topics: why antibiotics cost so much more in Singapore than they do in Italy, how food in Italian hospitals looks very tasty (though I am not well enough to eat it)...

4) The copious amount of reading done while recuperating from said pneumonia on a terrace with my two kids reading next to me (ironically the best part of my holiday).

5) My compulsive reading of Bill Bryson, Anna Quindlen, Kingsley Amis, David Foster Wallace, and Hilary Mantel. Alexander's choice of Bill Bryson and Dan Brown, Eliot's of Winx and Pop Pixie.

6) Once back in Singapore, the school nurse at Alexander's school desperately trying to contact me, on the very day I lose my phone in a taxi, because she suspects Alexander has broken his shoulder in PE. Luckily no fracture but on the day he's supposed to return to school, after recovery, he wakes up with 40 degree fever and tonsillitis!

7) Eliot's first day of school. Interesting.

8) Alexander's first day of school. Even more interesting.

9) On how amazing the essay: "Why I write," by Simon Schama in the Sunday Arts and Leisure section of the Financial Times. And why reading it makes me want to never write another word.

10) Or my personal favorite: on Eliot losing a tooth. Not because it is her first (though as far as topics in this blog go it certainly would qualify), but because of her decision to not put it immediately under the pillow but to hide it from the tooth fairy because "Alexander hasn't seen it yet."