Bringing up baby.....in Italy

My husband is Italian and we very early on decided to live in Italy, one of the reasons being that we wanted to bring up our children over here. That does not mean, however, that we have decided to bring him up as solely Italian. He is and will remain half English. We've done the research, weighed up the pros and cons and decided that our home will be an English speaking domain and everything else beyond our four walls Italian. (I recently spoke to my step-cousin at a family wedding about this very subject. She married a French man and lives over there and they chose to renounce all forms of English and speak only French. Ten years on and they both regret the decision. Their kids couldn't speak to anyone in the extended family and indeed seemed positively disgusted whenever anyone tried to chat to them.) Tommy, my son, starts asilo nido (nursery) in a couple of months and that will give a kick start to the bits of Italian he's picked up from his nonni.

Apart from the language aspect, the biggest difference I've noticed between English and Italian babies is the way they're dressed. Italian babies are cocooned, dressed much, much more warmly than an English mum would ever do. I have seen young babies in an Italian August wrapped in blankets and wearing hats. This, of course, is a personal choice, and I'd never dream of saying anything to my Italian mum friends whose babies are wrapped up in seventeen layers because a window has been opened. However, this does not stop them, and complete strangers I might add, from telling me off when my son hasn't got his jacket on as well as his jumper, t-shirt and body. My theory is that if I'm not cold, he shouldn't be cold. If I'm sweating, he's probably feeling it a bit as well. A slight breeze is not going to make him ill. Actually, in Lancashire (and possibly all over the UK, I'm not sure) a good walk in a fresh breeze is thought to do you good, not send you to bed with a cold. These mums over here, though, look at me like the devil-mum whenever we go out and there's a bit of his flesh uncovered. The other day, a bright, blue-skied autumn