How did 2018 go so fast?

It’s been a long time since I wrote here. Sure, there was the Christmas greeting and the advent calendar, but I think it was back in august 2017 I made a real update. And there have been happening things since.

First; I’ve been busy, like really busy, having three kids isn’t good on the spare time account (or any other account for that matter). Second; sitting at the computer writing stuff isn’t easy when three kids want to use said computer when I use it. Third; my computer is sick, it needs a safety override to start and if I run any program that runs it warm (like most games, sketch-up and such) it shuts down. This resulting in only really necessary things being done on the computer. Blogging wasn’t one of them I suppose. Actually I just recently realised that I hadn’t transferred pictures form my phones and camera to the computer (and the subsequent backup’s thereof). If I had lost my phone I would have lost all pictures from January to November. That would have been sad.

This year has been really nice though. Last year (2017) we were learning to be a family of five. Learning to deal with a sick child and just cope. Dealing with broken cars and the hassle of getting a new one. Having a broken heating system, and disappearing plumbers. Just not a year to enjoy.

This year was so much better. It was decided that our little one didn’t need surgery. Work was good. Life was much more balanced. We had low expectations and got good results. The new car exceeded our expectations. We got our heating system fixed after more than a year of living with it only partially working.

We also got some other good things going.

First: Our garden.

Even though there was (is) an epic drought in Sweden, we had a wonderful garden this year. We also got our greenhouse done last winter. This resulting in us getting our own cucumbers, tomatoes (they would have grown outside too), chillies, paprika, water-melons and some other things that usually doesn’t grow here.

Our garden with the greenhouse in the back.

The garden provided us with abundance of mangold, carrots, potatoes, onions, beetroots and herbs. We also had squash, corn, strawberries, salad, cabbage and broccoli, just not as much. And we actually took care of most of it. We still enjoy our own carrots (and they will last some time still), beetroots, potatoes and onions. We have some frozen mangold and herbs left too.

Our apples were also in abundance, we couldn’t take care of them all. But there will be apples for a long time still. Plums and cherries were also plenty, we have made some marmalades and chutneys with them. The blackberries didn’t really like the drought though, and we didn’t water them, we got some but not that many.

And the best part; almost no mowing of the lawn and snails.

Second: Our kids.

Our kids enjoy each other. We get time to do other things, while they are playing. Our daughter is now in school for real, learning new things every day in first grade. Our sons are still at home with us.

We are not burdened with our youngest’s condition any more, as he doesn’t have any symptoms and doesn’t need medication now. He is still monitored though, once every half year there are some tests to be made, and once a year an ultrasound. For you that doesn’t know more: He was diagnosed with gall-stones when he was just a little over 3 months old. About the same time we ordered our new car. It took a few days till they found out what it was. Then some more to figure out what to do. First medication and later surgery. The surgery was to be done in Stockholm but was postponed many times. About one year ago we were told that his values were good enough to not do surgery, but they will monitor him, if it comes back.

Our kids at the Zoo playing with water

And he is a talker. We aren’t used to that. Both our daughter and our older son didn’t really make sense before they were almost three. But he astonishes us with his speech.

Maybe I should have put our kids first…

Thirdly: Our house.

Last spring, (you see the pattern) we lost pressure in our heating system. Like there was a leak somewhere. The problem was just we didn’t find any leak. So we hired a plumber. He didn’t find any leak either. But when he tested the system there wasn’t any leak any more. A few months later (after summer was over) the pressure disappeared again. And the plumber too… So we called a different one. And he didn’t come when he said he would. So I added a few taps to get our heating system working in parts of the house. So we had central heating in our bedroom, storage, hall and laundry/shower-room. The rest of the building had to rely on small electric furnaces and our wood furnace in the living room. It was cold in the mornings.

A few months later the plumber did come and they didn’t find the leak either. Now it was leaking after testing though. He said he would figure something out after new-year. And he disappeared again. Later he told us he couldn’t help us. So we called our insurance again and they referred us to him… Luckily they had a backup. Now a third plumber came, and they performed the same inspection as the previous ones and didn’t find anything. They also dyed the water in the pipes green to see if there was any green water somewhere, but no. They did know a guy though that could test the system with gas (no not the American kind) and he pressurised our system and found that the leak was probably below the newer (1994) part of the house. He couldn’t tell what pipe it was, there were two going that way, so he recommended us to reroute the pipes going under the new part of the house. So we asked the previous plumber for a price. And it was hefty. So we asked a different plumber (one that had repaired a radiator right after we moved in) and it was a bit better. So we went with that guy. And he fixed it. In the middle of the summer we had heating again. And we tested it, as good as one can test a heating system on a day with 30° C outside.

We did have a minor leak later but only affecting our hall and laundry/shower-room, this we had fixed by our guy just before Christmas.

We always had a slow pressure decrees in our heating system, but I thought it was due to a faulty valve in the boiler room, but it was probably just the pre-stages of the big leak. Now we don’t have that problem anymore.

The truck with the insulation pumping into our house.

We also got some extra insulation under our roof, so now we have a much nicer climate on the upper floor.

Fourth: Our cars.

We have two cars, like we’ve had all the time we have lived here. Last year we needed a new one, because our old had an accident. So we did some calculations and realised that a new electric car would cost us about the same as a used ICE. We are very pleased with our ZOE, not just the new-car feel but mainly the running costs. We have been driving it a bit more than we thought we would. Basically it’s our first car now and our Megane is just if the ZOE is busy or we need the bigger trunk or roof-rails for shopping. Sadly neither has a hook for trailers, but we might get one some time. I just hope we can keep the Megan alive until we can afford a second electric. In a couple of years there should be a few more to choose from.

Charging our ZOE in Germany

In spring we did a trip to Germany. We decided to use the ZOE, it would be so much cheaper and we need plenty of stops anyway. It went really well. I guess that it won’t be as cheap in the future though, more than half of the charging posts didn’t charge for the electricity. We learned that using charging posts is easy in Germany and Denmark, in the Netherlands you need to do some planning first, but thanks to Tesla (and a free and open destination charger) we got to our destination there too.

Fifth: The summer.

This last one is with a bit of ambivalence. It was a great summer, I love the high temperatures and sunny days. I’m not as happy about the drought it brought. We still have much less water in the lake than usually, maybe 80 cm lower than it normally is in December, even if it has risen maybe 20 cm from its lowest. Our lawn stopped growing, except for some weeds. It wasn’t entirely yellow though, probably because of the proximity of the lake. We got some good time at the sea too, both the Baltic and the Westcoast.

Sand castle at the beach

Looking back on this year is good. Looking forward is exiting. I will be home with the kids while Susanna has a new job (that she will find soon I hope). It will be different then the last times. There will be strict daily routines, the oldest has to be at school in the morning and picked up afterwards. There will be many more activities during the weekdays for the boys. But I think it will work well.

Spring is coming

I just wanted to share some pictures of the flowers of our garden at this time of year. (Sorry for the bad quality of some of the pictures).

It started early, here some of the first, these Snowdrops came already in the beginning of February.

Snowdrops without snow

Just a few days later it looked like this instead:

Snowdrops with snow

They are still in bloom, and we have plenty of them around our place.

Then there was this little yellow thing. Our neighbour have many of them, we just have this one: (I have no clue what it is).

Yellow little thing

This lonely Crocus showed up in the beginning of this week:

Crocus one

There are more coming, but most of them I dug up clearing for the expansion of our vegetable garden. Susanna replanted them later and now they are growing in the round flowerbed, not really blooming yet.

Yesterday these two started just next to our house: I really like the colour of them.

Crocus two and three

Then we have these little ones, they are blooming a little now and then. I don’t know their name either. There was one in January and I saw one late last year, must be a special resilient kind.

Resilient little thing

Last weekend my brother and I took the kids on the lake. There was no wind at all.

Mirror lake

I also managed to make a selfie; it’s kind of crammed on the canoe, but it was fun.

Canoe selfie

Now I’m just hoping it gets a bit warmer soon.

Sugar wedding

Today six years ago she said yes! I did too and we were wed. Time really flies. She is really something, wonderful to live with, great to have by my side. I’m so happy and lucky that it is us.

So the sixth wedding day is the sugar wedding, at least in Sweden or the English tradition. I like that.

Susanna

Here she is.

We celebrated today by going to the movies and tea after without our kids. It’s the first time we have done something like this since our son was born.

Winter is here

Yesterday it started snowing while we were driving to Malmö. As we went back the roads had transformed to a slippery white adventure. Lucky us we had put on the winter tires in the morning. (Na, I had checked the weather report and it said something about snow coming).

I just love snow. It makes life just a little bit better. Especially in November as it is so dark otherwise.

Our daughter and I made a snow-family the first night:Snowfamily

A close up of the snow-lamp in the background:

Snow-light

Today was filled with outdoor activities. First of all had the driveway to be cleared from snow. That took a while, luckily I wasn’t alone on that. Here is the before:

Snowed in car

And this was the result:

Cleared front yard

Our house looks so nice in the snow.

Our house in snow

You might notice something different in the picture, last weekend we had great help from a friend of ours and Johannes parents taking down the birch-tree just next to the house.

Here it is after it was cut down:

The fallen birch

And here is the house from the field without the tree:

Our house from the field

Thank you so much for all the help.

I’ve also been doing things with the play-house, first I made all the corner-boards, but they still have to be painted in this picture:

The play-house

To paint them I moved them into the shed:

Helping hand

I had great help holding the boards and tools from my son. Now some of them are back up, but as I can’t paint them all at once and now the cold came there are still some waiting to get done.

As the snow stayed I also built a snow-igloo for our daughter this afternoon. It’s kind of hard work playing in the snow. Here she sits inside enjoying the candle I put in as light:

Snow-igloo

That’s all for now; Enjoy the snow and drive safe.

My legs hurt

I did it. Today everything was right. Our son didn’t sleep before it was too short for him to sleep before we have to pick up his sister from preschool. It was dry outside and I was in the mood. So I packed our son in the trailer for the bicycle and off we went, to pick up his sister by bicycle.

I had checked the route and it gave me a hint that it wouldn’t be easy. Back and forth along the small backroads, I won’t take the main road, it’s not safe. It should be about 8 km, and more than 50 meters up and down. It turned out to be a bit longer and the last part the wind came straight against me.

Our daughter was happy that I picked her up with the bicycle. Her brother slept on the way there. On the way home I had some time to make pictures.

We live in an electricity producing area; there are wind turbines all over the place.

Wind turbines

As I got a bit tired I had to make a few short brakes, just to rest my legs and arms.

Taking a break

Just before we come home I have to lift/drag all of us across this old stone wall. It is hard to imagine that I can get both bicycle and trailer through the shrubs behind the wall, but the path is wide enough.

Crossing of the wall

Doing the pickup this way made the day feel shorter. (A good thing when one has to entertain a 1 and a 4 year old kid). It was fun to actually go somewhere and not just going back and forth along our little road we live at. I just love bicycling.

On the downside I realised in how bad shape I am. Okay, the wind was against me, but 8.5 km in just short of 40 minutes, that’s not good. I will have to do this on a regular basis to get back in to some kind of shape again. It would do me good. So I will try to do it at least once a week, as long as it isn’t raining, I’m comfortable that way and dirt roads just aren’t fun to be on when wet. I won’t do it with too much snow either, who knows how well the snow is cleared off the small backroads.

Now I will try to sleep, my legs are killing me.

Bicycling with kids again

Now I’ve done it (or actually last week some time).

Made the first bicycling trip with our son. One afternoon I crammed both of them into the trailer and bicycled a few round in the neighbourhood. They seemed to enjoy it.

Kids in bicycle trailer

We have to do it more in the future. Someday I might even pick up our daughter from the day care by bicycle. To avoid the big road I will have to take a trip more than three kilometres longer than by car. There is a long term plan to build a bicycle path along the big road, but who knows when that actually will be built.

Wildlife is cruel

One night we forgot to close the screen doors of our outdoor room. As we had been eating in there before we got a little friend helping us to clean up the floor. It was really effective. (Our son is good at eating but he is throwing the leftovers on the floor when he is done, I guess that’s normal for a one year old).

Hedgehog in our outdoor room

I really like the hedgehogs; they are nice animals, to look at from a distance. Don’t want to pluck out spikes after touching them.

Our cats are really nice ones. If I sit on the couch watching television they always come and get cosy. They are still a bit scared of our kids and I think that might be wise if you don’t want your tail to be pulled, especially when it comes to our son. They have decided that the couch is their favourite spot, most of the time (as long as the kids aren’t too close) you’ll find them like this.

Milo and Siam in the couch

When our son is sleeping they actually come and lay beside him sometimes. That is nice. They are gone faster than a lightning when he wakes up though.

They are really good hunters too. They from time to time (now a bit more seldom) come with “gifts” for us. Most of the rodents they catch they eat themselves. But they are a bit picky sometimes, leaving some intestines on the rug as a not so pleasant surprise walking to the shower in the dark in the mornings. Just the other day, (or maybe a week ago) they had left somethings that looked like intestines again, but this time it was no less than 6 mouse foetuses, four of which still in the uterus. I don’t know why they didn’t eat that, but as my brother has had a similar experience before it might be intentional.

They really are a threat to the small animals around our house. We like them to kill the rodents, but sometimes they kill small birds too (and a rabbit) and that isn’t really as nice. My brother saw Siam catch a bird that was trapped in our outdoor room. I just saw him walk away with the bird in his mouth. There still was one other bird in the outdoor room, panicking of course, so I opened a window and let it out before it would have been the next victim of the feline killing machines.

Some reflections on the first weeks

I have been home with the kids for almost two weeks now and I think things are going good so far. Most times I went shopping with only our son, but yesterday we went all three of us. That’s more of a challenge, but with the arrangement below it went really nice. Except for the last 5 minutes when our son fell asleep. Not the best place to fall asleep. He did wake up as soon as we left the store and didn’t sleep until late in the afternoon.

Our daughter and son in the shopingcart at the store

Sleeping during the daytime is a bit of a challenge too (for our son, or maybe for me getting him to sleep). It seems like it is easier for him to get to peace than it was for our daughter though. So far he has slept a while every day. The best time is when our daughter is at preschool, right after lunch. Then I will have some time to fix things here without having him to watch out for. It is also good as he then will be tired in the evening when we want him to sleep. Some days that’s just not possible, luckily our daughter can amuse herself long enough for me to get him to rest the days she is at home or when he didn’t sleep before we picked her up again.

We have had a great harvest of plums this year. (Last year we didn’t realize that we had a plumtree until the one plum fell down). This has resulted in a bunch of cakes like this one.

Plum cake

We did some other things with the plums too, like chutney and compote, really nice. The blackberries are still in the process of being harvested, so far we have made some jam, but the plan is to make sorbet out of some we already have gathered.

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.

Summer is a short thing,

even if it’s eight weeks long.

Collage with picutres of the Summer of 2014

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!