For the past year-and-a-half or so I’ve been blaming my sporadic, embarrassingly short blog entries on the fact that I have a baby, which means that it’s simply impossible for me to write lengthy, interesting posts on a regular basis. Lately, though, I’ve been reading blogs by a few brand-new moms who are not only… Read More Words’ worth

We’re having some sort of heat wave here — the temperatures have been around 10°C for the past couple of days. Yes, that’s ten degrees above zero. It’s positively balmy. Actually, it’s not as nice as it might be because the high temperatures are turning our mountains of accumulated snow into a sloppy, slushy mess,… Read More Saturday

I’ve had a fairly productive day today. On the internet front, I finished up my editing work for the upcoming issue of Mosaic Minds and updated the kids’ pages (Lydia and Tage) so that they’re finally current — the last two pages of Lydia’s pictures and the last four of Tage’s are new. I also… Read More Tidbits

We’ve all had a cold and the past few days have been miserable. Poor little Tage has had the worst of it, I think, if for no other reason than that he can’t tell us how he’s feeling or do anything to make himself feel better. I’m not always so good at guessing what it… Read More Wednesday

Lydia got a last-minute invitation to a birthday party this afternoon, so Olof and Tage and I made a quick trip to town just before noon to pick up a present. When we pulled into the Rusta parking lot, there was a station wagon with the hatchback open and a metal gate corralling in some… Read More Golden Day

I feel like some sort of super-mom right now. I’m supposed to take Valentine’s Day treats to Lydia’s after-school program at three o’clock this afternoon, and here it is not quite ten in the morning, and I have everything finished and ready to go. Ordinarily I’m a very last-minute kind of person, so I’m pretty… Read More V-Day

Lydia’s parent-teacher conference was this afternoon. Both Olof and I had been going to go, but Tage fell asleep not long before we would have had to leave and I decided to go by myself and leave Tage and Olof at home. I met with Lydia’s fritids leader, Kent (who was her teacher last year),… Read More School days

I know so many people, in real life and online, who are pregnant and I’m having a serious case of baby fever. We plan to have at least one more child, and there’s a big part of me that really, really wants to start trying now. Tage would be a little over two years old… Read More Feeling torn

We got a paper yesterday from Migrationsverket (the immigration agency), and we finally have an appointment for our permit renewal interviews. We’ve been waiting since June, when our permits expired, for them to schedule us for an appointment. Talk about backlog! Anyway, we’ll be going down to Umeå on the 26th, and I’m hoping it… Read More Mail news

Have you ever seen mold on a banana? Maybe I’ve led a sheltered life, but up until this morning every banana I’d ever seen had been entirely mold-free. Sure, I’ve seen totally soft, dark brown, overripe bananas, and I’ve even seen shriveled-up, dried-out, way-too-old bananas, but a moldy banana was a new one to me.… Read More When good fruit goes bad