Sarah in Illinois left these questions in a comment last week, and rather than let the answers get buried back there, I figured I might as well address them in an honest-to-goodness post!

I’m curious how the transition to life in Sweden was for you and Lydia. Did you speak any Swedish, and have you become fluent in the language? I expect it was much easier for Lydia to pick up the language. Do your Swedish-born babies speak any English? Just curious!

It’s gotten to be so long ago now that my memory is a little fuzzy, but I think the transition to life in Sweden went mostly pretty smoothly.  Lydia was so young–4½–that she really didn’t understand the difference between one country and another.  The hardest thing for both of us, I think, was missing my mom.  We were used to seeing her every day, and suddenly we didn’t see her at all, ever.  That was difficult to explain to Lydia, and it was rough on all of us.

Otherwise, though, things were very, very good. No longer was I a struggling single mother with a full plate of worries;  instead I found myself living in comparative luxury, and I’m not ashamed to say that I took to it like a duck to water.  We weren’t–and aren’t–wealthy, but there are relatively few money worries (and when a worry does crop up, I’m not the one who deals with it;  I keep my pretty little head busy with cookie recipes and the like, and let my man concern himself with all the other stuff).  I don’t mean to suggest that financial security is the solution to all life’s ills, but as anyone who’s ever seriously had to worry about money can tell you, money stress will wear you down like nothing else.

The language was, and probably still is, the biggest hurdle to my fully adapting to Swedish culture.  Once I started seriously entertaining the idea of making the move, I began teaching myself Swedish and I learned enough that by the time I arrived in Stockholm I could read enough to get myself around without too much trouble.  After I had been living here for eight or nine months, I started taking Swedish classes and I had picked up enough in that time that I was able to skip the first two levels and start in the third.  I continued with those classes for a few months, until we moved up north to where we live now, and by that time I guess I was approaching functional fluency.

Until Lydia started school when she was six, my Swedish skills were better than hers, but as soon as she was immersed in the language she picked it up with lightning speed.  During kindergarten and first grade she had a couple of sessions per week of extra Swedish tutoring, but by the end of first grade she was fully fluent.  Within a couple of years after that, she was truly speaking like a native and I had started asking her to translate TV commercials for me.  By the time she was nine or ten, her Swedish was indistinguishable from that of her Swedish-born peers.

We speak English at home, Olof included, which means that all of our kids have English as their first language.  They are, of course, exposed to Swedish from birth, so it’s not quite a “foreign” language for them, but for the first few years their English is markedly superior to their Swedish.  Tage started attending pre-school when he was four, and Petra when she was three, and in that environment they became truly bilingual.  I’m not a good judge myself, but Olof says that both of them speak Swedish like natives.

As for me, my Swedish is obviously far from native-like.  I suppose I could be considered fluent, but I confess that it’s still a struggle for me.  I read the language fine, and I understand probably 85-95% of what I hear, but speaking can be challenging for me.  My vocabulary isn’t at all what I feel it should be after my having lived in Sweden as long as I have, and I can’t seem to shake a certain self-consciousness about my pronunciation.  That said, however, I do speak Swedish exclusively to the Swedes in my life, with only a handful of exceptions, and I don’t get any complaints from them about my speech.

I think my own biggest problem with Swedish is that I feel as though the “real me” is lost a bit in translation — I used to tell Olof that his family must think I’m either really rude, really stupid, or really boring, because I don’t join in a Swedish conversation the same way that I would in an English conversation.  For that reason, I was delighted to discover that many of them read my blog (Hi, all!  🙂 ) — if nothing else, it’s given them the chance to see that I do actually have a personality.