Butterfly House

Stockholm is melting.  It is 3C today and everything is beginning to thaw out.  What a mess.  However, it still feels pretty cold.  David found a butterfly house for us to visit today.  We had our second successfully bus trip.  The bus stop was at the gates of a beautiful park.  We saw quite a few people sledding and cross country skiing.  The butterfly museum was amazing.  Not only was it 25 C and humid but there were lots of beautiful butterflies and flowers.  It was like being in South Carolina in the summer!  Mixed in were tanks of fish, snails and iguanas.  Birds were flying throughout the butterfly house and there was a large cage with parrots.  Ellie had a great time exploring the different paths and spotting butterflies just like Fancy Nancy. 

Outside it is starting to melt...

My favorite flower!

Stopping for a quick snack.

One of the fish ponds.

Ellie really loved the fish!

Junibacken

It’s above freezing!!!!!  It is scary that I am so excited about that development.   Today was a day for exploring Junibacken.  Junibacken is a children’s museum that was developed around the writing of Astrid Lindgren, the author of Pippi Longstockings and other works for children.  Ellie had a wonderful time playing there.  There are three main areas.  One is a play room with a stage, maze, pirate ship and a miniature town.  In the town you can go in the shops and run the cash register, weigh produce and sale goods.  The pirate ship had a wheel for steering and a slide with lots of places to climb.  This was one of Ellie’s favorite places.   There was also an area that was a model of Villa Villekulla (sp), Pippi’s house.  The third area was probably the best.  While the parents waited in line for the train, kids could run around and play in different “magical” spaces.  Once on the train you were able to see scenes from 6 of Astrid Lindgren series as you heard a narration written by Astrid herself.   It was an amazing adventure. 

Look!  I am taller than the buildings.

A boat my size.

Watch out for the construction crew!

Pretty as a picture!

Pippi's Horse

Game Night

We had quite a relaxing day.  David was off, due to a bridge day between the holiday and weekend.   Sweden has about 10 days that they label as bridge days.  There purpose is to bridge the gap between a Tuesday or Thursday holiday to give you a four day weekend.  The last of our luggage arrived.   It was like Christmas again since we couldn’t remember everything that was in the bag.  We attempted to make a cheese ball.  We couldn’t find onion flakes, just onion powder so it turned out more like a spread but tasted the same as normal.   We did however find a cracker that is almost but not quite a Ritz.   It is the closest thing to an American cracker that we have found.  David discovered a bakery across the street from the apartment.  Now we know where to get cakes from.  We found a really yummy layered chocolate custard cake to take with us to game night. 

After naptime it was off to Angie and John’s apartment for game night.  She had also invited her friend Ida (pronounced Eda) and her dog Wilson (pronounced Vilson).  Eda is the first Swedish person that I have really spent time with in a small relaxed setting.  Thank goodness for Google.  Her English was wonderful (She even corrected some of our English) but it was interesting the words that were different enough that she didn’t know (ie midwife = barnmorska).  In Swedish barn is child but morska is only a word with it is with barn.  There was also much confusion over moose and elk.   A moose in Swedish is älg (which sounds a lot like elk).  We had a great time playing farkle and pippi memo (memory). 

Ellie required lots of jewelry for game night.

John, Ida, and Angie cutting the cake.

Time for Pippi Memo

Epiphany

Epiphany is a bank holiday in Sweden.  I still am surprised by the number of “church” holidays that are bank holidays in a culture that does not believe in organized religion.   But hey, David gets the day off so I am all for it.   Ellie had a much better night but the week must have caught up with us.  David slept in until 10am which is so unusual and woke us up about 10:30.  After a quick breakfast, we decided to head down to Gamla Stan to explore.  Right as we were leaving the snow start falling fast and thick.  It was beautiful.  Unfortunately, the camera just couldn’t capture it.  We ended up with about 6 inches in 3 hours.  Gamla Stan was beautiful in the snow.  While we were poking around, we found another craft store that appears to specialize in needlework (cross-stitch, embroidery etc.)  They were closed for the holiday but I will have to go back and check it out one day. 

Ellie enjoying her new "windshield"!

Although you can't tell the snow if falling fast.  The ducks and geese were enjoying the water and the frozen "bank".

January 4th

Ellie hasn’t gotten the hang of time changes yet.  She was up for 4 hours last night confused about why she wasn’t tired.  Hopefully this won’t last as long as it did in October.  Between the cold I finally caught from Ellie and the lack of sleep I spent the morning curled up on the couch.  Ellie was an angel playing on the floor beside me.  She even got out her new doctor kit to take my temp and blood pressure and give me a few shots to make me feel better.  She really loves using the stethoscope to listen to the baby’s heart.  David surprised Ellie at lunch time by coming home with McDonalds.  

Ellie's first laydown stroller outing

Back to work for David.  I have no idea how he made it through the day.  Outside of a little more unpacking and cleaning, they only thing Ellie and I accomplished was a run to the grocery store.  She was so excited to take her laydown stroller for its inaugural run.  She got everybody ready to go: paci baby, bath baby and princess baby.  She looks so cute pushing the stroller since she isn’t much taller that the stroller is.  I was surprised how much easier it was to push through the snow.  She is still getting the hang of making it go the right direction since she is having trouble seeing where she is going.  It was so much fun to watch how excited she was.  She even enjoyed using the basket under the stroller to help get some of our groceries home. 

Back to Sweden

And the airline fun continues….We were all up early for our trip to the Atlanta airport.  Ellie chose to celebrate the New Year by waking up a 12 am due to thunderstorms in the area.  She stayed awake until the alarm rang at 3am.  Everyone woke up and came down to say goodbye.  It was such a hard goodbye.  Once on the road we drove through lots of heavy rain.  Thankfully, Ellie fell asleep and slept the whole way to Atlanta.  We sailed through check-in and security with no delays.  At the gate everything appeared to be on schedule.  The plane we were taking landing on time but with “mechanical issues”.   After about an hour, they announce it was a windshield wiper motor and delayed the flight until 3:30.  Unfortunately, that put us landing after our Stockholm flight was supposed to depart.   The Continental representative who was working our gate was awesome.  Before long we were rebooked through David’s “favorite” airport, Frankfurt with meal vouchers in hand.  

We made our way over to the Lufthansa gate to wait for our 6pm departure.  By this point I was so tired I actually fell asleep on the airport floor.  Our flight took off without issue and went very smoothly.  Ellie slept almost the whole way to Germany.  The rest of the trip was smooth sailing.  One pieces of luggage and Ellie’s car seat where missing at the airport.  We had planned to take the Flybuss home but decided not enough of our luggage was lost.  We brought back more cases than we took and so decided we would take a cab instead.  Ellie was excited to be home and talked about the snow the whole way there.   After a quick taxi ride home, we all got busy unpacking.  For Ellie it was like Christmas all over again as all the presents came out of suitcases. 

Where is that plane?