I'm going to state the obvious: learning a new language is hard.
I think we are at a plateau in terms of our Italian skills. During the first month, we were forced to pick up a lot of Italian all at once (for survival), but since now we speak enough to get by, we do not improve as much as we have so far.
This fact defeats me to a certain degree, but I am ready to challenge myself to try harder and learn Italian because to be honest, not being able to understand anything they say is really annoying!!