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1st of Advent
Advent Calendar
Much needed break
This autumn has been crazy. We all have been under a lot of stress here at home and I’ve been working much and traveling with work too.
Anyhow…
sometime this summer we decided we need a break this autumn. We want to see our friends and family in Stockholm some time again. So we planned to take a week off in November to go there and visit everybody. We had no clue of how hard times were ahead of us.
Then time flew. Like it always does. We hadn’t planned anything real and one weekend when we just realised it was all too much. We need some time as a family, just the four of us. So just before we had planned to book the tickets to Stockholm we decided not to. We started looking for an alternative. Staying home was not an option as there are so many things to do here so I wouldn’t have been a vacation that way.
Last week we did it. We left our little house in Skåne for a smaller house on Lolland, that’s a Danish island not too far away. Five nights away doesn’t seem like much, but it did great! I think the best part of it was that there was no internet there and as we are cheap we didn’t pay for roaming on our phones either. We had all the time together. Except for a few short trips to the village to get groceries, trips that would have been so much longer and trickier taking the kids along.
We played games. Sat in front of the fireplace. Enjoyed each other’s company. Relaxed in the bubblepool and sauna, no really it was relaxing, even the time my three year old was in it with me. Made some simple food, it tasted great. Got fresh bread from the baker a few mornings. Had a walk on the beach. Made a trip to the zoo and to Germany.
Not everything was perfect. I wish we hadn’t gotten colds, except Susanna, she was spared. I wish we had started cleaning out the place an hour earlier this morning. We made it out before the owner came though. I wish I had understood how the fire stove worked, now it was a bit of an ordeal to get it burning. (Maybe the wood was a bit too wet).
In total it was great! I always have said that the best time for vacation is in November. Even staying in this area of ever grey weather is better with a break than just chugging along. Just have a break. I warmly recommend it and my family does it too.
Sorry all of you friends in Stockholm that would have loved to see us. Most of you didn’t know what you missed as we hadn’t made appointments yet. There will be another time. We just don’t know when.
Sometimes I’m crazy
Sometimes I do crazy things. Like today. I biked to work. All the way. It ended up being 58 km. I took a wrong turn at least twice. The entire trip took me 2 hours and 45 minutes. Not too bad as I haven’t biked much this last year. Now I only have to get the bicycle back home.
I love biking to work. It’s so liberating. I get to enjoy the great outdoors in the morning. Sunrise is a wonderful thing. Today it was hidden in the clouds, but the clouds left and the sun started to shine.
I just live too far from work to do it on a regular basis. I won’t bike when the weather is bad or if I already biked once that week. It would just take too much of my free time. But if I do it twice a month I should be satisfied.
Now the bike will get some new parts, a bunch of the gears just don’t work anymore and the chain is stretched. Then it will be an even more pleasurable experience.
Summer is a short thing,
even if it’s eight weeks long.
Somehow this summer has passed really fast. Sure summer isn’t really over yet but as I this week started work after the vacation/parental leave it somehow feels like it. It has been an exciting summer. So many things have happened. Still it also has been a slow summer, not doing even one overnight trip, only staying at home. (Except for the few nights when we were at the hospital for Gabriel’s birth in the beginning).
Ah, there you have the name of our son too: Gabriel. We had a hard time to decide, so it ended with us drawing sticks. We had two names, equally nice, but both of us had a different one as favourite. But if we get another son some day we have a name for him.
Most of the summer has been about taking care of our kids and getting food on the table. A few other things have been made though.
I fixed the lawn-tractor. It wasn’t that hard and now cutting the grass isn’t hard labour but fun labour. I think I’m becoming more of a mechanic as I live here, I kind of like fixings things.
I built some mosquito-nets for our bedroom and work-room and with the help of dad the guest room too. (My parents wanted to sleep there and it was warm so a mosquito-net was not a luxury). The one for the work-room I like the most, as it is a door.
We have made it to the beach twice. Once as a family and once with my parents but without Susanna and our son as a day on the beach isn’t the best thing for a new-born. We did go for a swim in our local lake a few times too, it’s just a five minutes’ walk so it really isn’t a big deal.
Our garden isn’t really giving that much produce, we haven’t really taken care of it as we should. But still; we have potatoes; we will have carrots and some beans. Three of our apple-trees have apples, so we will have apples too, (actually I baked an apple-cake with apples from one of the trees yesterday that we had at work today). Our blackberry-bush is having plenty of berries and they ripen over a long time, it now has given us a few portions with ice-cream and a pie, but there is much more on the bush. The only downside with the blackberries is that they have so many thorns and that makes picking them a bit painful. (We haven’t taken care of it the right way this spring).
We have spent some time with family and relatives. My parents have visited twice, Susanna’s a few more times, and we visited Susanna’s parents too (Susanna and the kids stayed over there one night even). We had a few friends visiting, been to the zoo in Höör with friends and have visited friends for a few hours, so it has been things going on even if we had to time it with our sons feeding, leaving us less punctual than usual.
Now I’m back at work. This first week has been calm, as most people still are on vacation. It is fun though; I’m working on a project where I will simulate railway traffic and I really enjoy that.
Now it’s weekend!
And he was born!
Happiness is a rose
Poff is due soon
In the beginning of the year I wrote about the fact that we are expecting our second child. This time the working name is Poff. Poff is due on the 8th of June, or at least somewhere around that day.
Last Wednesday we went to a second ultrasound. We have a few of those booked due to the fact that Susanna has gotten pregnancy diabetes again. She had it while we were waiting for our daughter too. This time, as we live in a different part of Sweden now, they tested her much earlier for diabetes. Susanna wants to have the child at a certain hospital. So she made up her mind to treat her diabetes with food, rather than with insulin. The hospital where she wants to have our baby doesn’t take women that are treated with insulin.
So now she is eating a very strict diet, basically a LCHF diet. It’s hard. Especially at the holidays like Christmas and Easter right now. She can’t really eat any of the sweet stuff. And she doesn’t. I’m so proud of her.
It does rub of at me too. Most days she doesn’t make different food for me. I don’t mind it at all. I do miss the pasta and rice, but it’s not hard like I expected it. And it does me good.
Here is a picture of Poff:
We are now really getting our house in order. During the last week I have started putting up our paintings on the walls. We haven’t had them up since we left Stockholm. (Okay, we had a few up where there already were nails on the walls in Höör but most of them were stacked away). The house becomes so much more homey with paintings.
The garden is also getting into place. A few weeks ago my parents were here and they helped me build a sandbox for our daughter. The sand we had delivered. It came in a really old truck.
The sand truck:
I have also been digging up a little garden. I don’t know if we will grow much this year. I have started some tomatoes; they will be a bit late though. Susanna wants to grow a few more vegetables. One day in the future we hope to have most of our vegetables during the summer from our garden. That was one of the reasons that we wanted a big plot like we have.
The trees are now starting to get leafs. We have one little tree just by our house that blossomed with small white flowers. We are not quite sure what kind of tree it is but it has long pointy thorns too. Most trees on our plot are birches; we do have a few apple trees, a bunch of cherry trees some beeches, a chestnut tree, some oak trees and some shrubs we don’t really know what they are yet. Oh, and we do have two small spruce trees, they will become Christmas trees as they don’t really fit on our plot.
I’m so happy we have this place. I really love working in the garden. I love hearing all the birds in the morning, especially when I go for my morning run. I love the sunsets from our balcony. The fireplace in the living room. My lovely wife, our daughter and Poff that soon will join us.
We have some wildlife here too. Most are rabbits and moles. We do have a lot of birds. The pheasants are strutting around. Kites roaming the sky in search for some small rodent. Gees living on the field. All the small birds that live around the house. One morning as I ran my round a badger crossed my path. And last weekend, as Susanna and I went to bed far too late we saw deer buck just outside the window. We have rabbits too, but I’m more ambivalent about them as they might make it hard to grow our vegetables.
The full moon the other night: 
Spring!
Today was a nice and warm day. It is so nice walking back to the train station from work when the temperature is 12°C, birds are singing and the wind is from the back.
Then I saw something that made me really happy:
The first spring leafs. I’m so happy to see them. This is so much earlier than I’m used to from Stockholm. The last couple of days Facebook was been swamped with pictures of snow. Sure we haven’t had super spring weather here either, but it didn’t get cold, only windy and some rain.
This is something I have been looking forward to moving to Skåne!
2013 pictures are sorted out
I finally did it, added captions to my pictures from 2013. I had chosen them a long time ago, but somehow I have not found the time to actually finish the collection. While I was at it my internet webhost decided to discontinue the software I was using to run my webpage, so I had to migrate it to a new platform. Hope you like the new style.
Enough with the rambling: To the pictures!
Here is a little preview:
In July we got the keys to the apartment. Johannes flew down to pick them up and prepare the place for the move.
Snowman and snow house
Winter has arrived. With snow. That’s fun.
Our daughter thinks so too. Today we spent a few hours outside in the snow. First I fixed some things at the shed and garage then I built a snowman. A few days ago my dad shared some pictures with us from my childhood, reminding me of the time we built snow houses back then. So I thought I might try to build one too.
As the snow was the sticky kind today it was easy to roll big balls and construct the building. Our daughter made smaller balls that we fitted to the house too.
Here is the result.
The snowman
The snow house
Winter here is something different. A couple of weeks ago Susanna and me went to the cinema in Lund. On the way home we ran into some serious snow-drifts. They were really deep and all across the motorway making it hard to drive. Before we came to our exit we caught up with the snowploughs, so they had just cleared the snow and it was already back again. And all this while there was barley any snow on the ground.
Today as I drove to the store in Stehag I passed some snowdrifts (today it wasn’t windy like the day we went to Lund) that were more than one meter high. I doubt that the road was passable when the snow came.
2014 – A year to remember?
2013 was an amazing year. As it started I didn’t know what it would hold for us. I had a few expectations, but they are dwarfed by what actually happened.
(See my post from the 10th of January last year: http://blog.wolfmaier.se/wolfie217/2013/01/10/new-year-what-will-you-bring/)
Here are the points that I thought of as certain last year:
“
- I will go back to work. (Just the date is not decided yet).
- Our daughter will turn two. (She actually turns 16 months today).
- We will travel to Skåne a few times, the first trip to see my cousin in law become a priest in the Church of Sweden.
- Our daughter will learn so many more things.
“
Little did I know then that some of the things on the list would be bigger, more altering than I thought.
We had already been thinking of making the move when I wrote this, but nothing was planned. So now to what actually happened:
- I did go back to work, just not the work I used to go to. I’m doing so many new things. I’m having great new colleagues. It’s in a new town.
- Our daughter turned two and is easier and easier to understand. She even talks in two languages some times.
- We travelled to Skåne many times. Now we travel to Stockholm. First we travelled to look for houses, then to get the key to our apartment. After that the direction changed and we travel to Stockholm to visit family and friends.
- Our daughter is still learning so many things.
But the biggest things that happen were not thought of:
We made the move, leaving our home in Stockholm for a new one in Skåne, first in Höör, then in our house in Gamla Bo.
- I got a new job. A great job at Ramböll in Malmö.
- We bought a house on the country side.
- We are expecting a little Poff to join us in 2014. Poff being the working name of our next kid.
This leads me up to the headline question: 2014 – A year to remember?
It definitely will be. We will have our second kid; that is really big. We have been looking forward to have at least one more kid, but as things dragged along it wasn’t easy for me at least. I wanted the kids to be closer in age. One just has no say in how fast things go. Now there won’t be too long between them, just a little less than three years and that is fine, it was just longer than I hoped for.
I don’t know how our daughter will react to Poff arriving but I think she will become a great big sister. She already talks about the little little baby living in mom.
I do know that Poff will be born into a nice home.
By the way, Poff comes from the fact that at some point a friend of ours called Susanna and me Piff and Puff, as the chipmunks in Donald duck. Our daughter had the working name of Paff before she was borne.
Now we just have to get the home in order. We have had my parents here for Christmas and New Year and they have helped us a great deal, making our home liveable. There are still plenty of things to be done until some real ordinary life will show up, many boxes to be unpacked, lamps fixed (they have to stay at the apartment until it is clean; we keep it until the last of January). Curtains and pictures on the walls might take a longer time.
Owning a house is much more an ongoing project than renting a place. The list of what is to do will grow faster than we can check things off.
Back to the question, now a few points to remember from 2014 that we already know:
- A trip to Zambia.
- Poff being born.
- The first summer in our house.
There will probably be a few more things. It won’t be an ordinary year. It will just not be the life changer that 2013 has been.
(And we do have a guest room).
