Ciao, Baby. The fine folks at the Christian Science Monitor brought along this internationally focused at-home dad story about a group of Italian househusbands. The piece makes much from the fact that there is growing acceptance of at-home dads in a place that has been known for a certain macho culture. But the most stunning bit was the news that their at-home dad group has 4,000 members. Not bad for a country with a population one-fifth the size of the U.S.

So I started hunting for information about this group, which the Monitor says goes bythe "Association of Househusbands." Thank goodness for Google ... I managed, after some effort, to track down the homepage. Makes for interesting reading. (See the page here. See it translated (thanks, Google!) here. Please note that the translation is far from perfect, to comedic effect. The group's name, according to Google's translation, is the Association of Homely Men. Not quite what we are looking for ...)

Between the screwy translation and untranslated parts, I haven't given the entire site the once-over I'd like to (for example, I've yet to figure out if I can get an "Associazione Uomini Casalinghi" t-shirt or apron). But I'd love to see it. As I've daydreamed before in this space, I'd love to see an organization with some real numbers in the U.S., so I going to try to figure out how these Italian guys pulled it off. I can't think of a U.S. resource -- not the Yahoo! groups, not the meetup.com SAHD page, not Peter Baylies's newsletter -- that's even reached more than a few hundred dads.