ultrasounds and dog shit

we had our doctor's appointment yesterday for the final ultrasound. dr grimaldi said everything is perfect! if luca were to be born today, he would be able to survive without any (or much) medical assistance. so that's fantastic news... he's head down, ready to make his journey into our world, weighing in approximately at 2.5 kilos (5.5 pounds), his lungs are working well, bladder was full and he had 133 beats per minute. the video is not wonderful this time. but if you look at the head turning video, his head in the foreground (so that his mouth is on the top). from the profile still from the last ultrasound aubrey thinks he had my profile, but from this one i think he's got aubrey's nose and she says he's got my lips. who knows????? and better, who cares, we'll find out soon enough what he looks like... all we know is he WONT look like giovanni.

last night we had dinner with our neighbor sally from upstairs. she's an american flight attendent living in rome for 4 years. i've known her since she moved in, but this was the first time we hung out. we had a great time, and were out for a good 6 hours. we had dinner at tonino's (my favorite restaurant ever) and then mojitos and caiparinas at giovannis and then passed the rest of the evening in the chiesa nuova. we also think we saw mars. anyway, we had fantastic conversation, and definitely will hang out with her again in the future. the only problem is that she's only in rome for 2 weeks or so, then gone for a month...

we also found out some interesting things about the people in the building, like the old woman we see across the courtyard is NOT enzo's wife. she doesn't even live in our building. and here we thought enzo and his brother luciano who live together (next door) left the poor old woman home alone, while they were at the beach all summer. we cursed them out so much! plus we never saw her in the hallways, and figured she wasn't allowed to leave the building. we had a whole story for her, but we had a great laugh when we realized we weren't even close to the mark.

the other day we saw an interesting thing. let me start by saying i used to call our street, vicolo della campanella (alleyway of the little bell), vicolo della merda dei cani (alleyway of dog shit). it was really getting out of hand for a while last summer. this summer it's a different story. the other day we saw a guy on a white motorino with a vacuum attached to the back of it. he was cleaning the dog shit up. it was amazing. aside from the fact that the motorino was white and he had a white helmet and looked like a stormtrooper ridding the streets of rome from the nightmare that the dog shit has become, it was just funny to see the vaccuum! and how would you put that on your resume? shit vacuumer? defication removal? it was a strange thing, i thought anyway. i wish we had thought to take a picture of that.

tomorrow i'm getting a web cam and might be able to put some live images on the website as well. we'll see if it works.

in the meantime, the weather is SO perfect this week. nice breeze, and really fall-esque temperatures. aubrey is beside herself with happiness. which means so am i!