The excitement never ends around here! Last night Lydia lost her first tooth, and she was delighted, mostly because she knew it meant money. At first I’d been going to give her 10 crowns (about a dollar), but then I realized there’s been quite a lot of inflation since I was a kid, so I upped the bounty to 20 crowns. She promptly took herself to the store downtown and bought a package of bokmärke, which she has lately taken to collecting and putting in an album. It seems to be the equivalent to the sticker-collecting I did when I was a little girl growing up in the States. There’s a rather stiff competition among the little girls in the neighborhood to compile the best album.

Although her cold is better, Lydia was home from school again today because she had an appointment at the children’s clinic this morning for a checkup. It’s been almost six months since she started the epilepsy medication, and twice-yearly checks are part of the treatment. To Lydia’s great relief, no blood test was necessary today (but she did get the numbing cream put on the inside of her arm–the antecubital fossa, if I’m not mistaken … all those Kay Scarpetta novels have taught me a thing or two–just in case). Anyway, she got a clean bill of health and all that. Oh yeah, she weighs 61.6 pounds and is 4’1″ tall.

While we were at the doctor’s office, we took the opportunity to have them check out Tage’s finger. The nurse said it looked pretty bad (see my photoblog if you want to see a picture), but just to keep an eye on it. She said it might happen that we would need to take him in to have a doctor take off the nail if it got infected or something, but other than that it should be fine. He doesn’t seem much affected by the injury. He’s a little more careful with it than he might normally be, but it’s barely slowed him down.

Oh, one more thing: we finally got our washing machine this afternoon. It was supposed to be delivered last Thursday or Friday, but when we still hadn’t heard from them yesterday afternoon, Olof called the store to ask about it. Apparently they hadn’t remembered that we’d scheduled a delivery and were wondering why we didn’t come and pick up our washer! We have it now, though, and I’m going to be a clothes-washing fool once we get it up and running!