It's officially spring. The days are much longer (the sun is setting around 8 pm now), tables and chairs have appeared on the sidewalks, flowers are everywhere (in pots or vases--nothing's coming up out of the ground), we celebrated Easter. But it's still COLD. Probably in the high 20s or low 30s when I take O to school in the morning, but then it warms up to somewhere in the low 40s which feels practically balmy after all these months. I am super jealous of everyone in warmer climes, whose Instagram photos make everything look so... warm. But I am trying to be positive and am looking forward to many good things coming up. Friends are coming to our place this weekend for a long overdue visit (these are the Swedish friends with the two daughters; should be interesting to see how O shares his stuff), then other friends from DC who now live in London will be coming at the beginning of May, followed by two big visits from our families over the summer. And somewhere in there, the three of us are renting a tiny 19th-century cottage near a lake for a whole week. As weird as it sounds given that O is 2.5 years old, it will be our first real vacation alone as a family (unless you count the 24 hours we chose to spend in Oxford last December on our way to Christmas in Wales, but I don't). I'm trying not to get too excited about it because there's the very real possibility that the weather will be terrible, or O won't be able to sleep well, or we'll run out of things to do after Day 3. Anyway, I'm still excited and am telling myself it will work out.
And as part of my new resolution to be (uncharacteristically) more positive, I thought I should record some things I'm actually feeling good about. If this kind of thing makes you gag (as it usually does for me), then feel free to click away now to dogs balancing stupid things on their heads or whatever else it is that people look at on the internet besides the obvious.
Ok, I'm feeling good about:
Making french toast for breakfast on the weekends. I've vowed to start a new tradition of making a "fun" cooked breakfast once at least every other weekend, but realized that french toast was the only thing I really knew how to make without a mix. (Other than bacon and eggs, but O won't eat it.) But last weekend we went to a mega supermarket that had an American aisle, which means I'm now the proud owner of some sketchy-looking American pancake mix.
Owen's preschool. I had my doubts, but it seems like he's finally really happy there. I've seen him light up when he sees his favorite teacher and he's very sweet with all of them, and it's definitely teaching him skills that would be difficult for me to provide him with. S and I even decided to turn down an offer of a place at an English school that looked pretty amazing, because we didn't think it was amazing enough to justify taking him away from a place he likes and putting him through the transition all over again.
Learning Swedish. I can actually see the progress I've made, which is really encouraging. There hasn't been a crazy huge leap, but I understand more when I try to read the newspaper and I definitely catch more words on the radio and tv than I used to (but listening comprehension is still super hard for me). I can also communicate in broken Swedish with the one teacher in O's group who doesn't know English or Spanish, and when he first started I really couldn't make myself understood with her at all. I still find it very difficult, but it doesn't feel quite so impossible.
Doing fun things around Stockholm with my husband and kid. Sometimes this is just going to the playground a couple of blocks away. Sometimes it's going to a part of the city we've never seen before. Sometimes it's all about going back to Skansen because they constantly have new things there, like all the Easter activities. (By the way, Easter here? Totally reminds me of Halloween. Tons of candy, kids dressed up in costumes and face paint, vaguely creepy decorations of twigs with feathers stuck on them, a game that involves smashing eggs.)
What am I not feeling so good about? The difficulty of finding a job. I've decided it only makes sense now to look for a job starting this fall since the summer is going to be quite packed with visitors and our own travels, so we'll see how that goes. And by then my Swedish should be better, so hopefully that will help, too.
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