To celebrate her new level of maturity — five-year-olds are big enough to go to town to get their hair cut, you know — Petra decided to change things up with a new ‘do, entirely of her own choosing. I think it suits her to a T.

Petra celebrated her fifth birthday on Monday, and she had her very first “kid party” yesterday afternoon. She was proud nearly to bursting when she filled out and delivered the invitations, and when we set up the party scene out on the front porch. I think maybe the party itself was secondary to the joy of the anticipation and preparation, but even so she had a fantastic time being the belle of the ball.

Of all the kids, her growing up so fast takes me the most off-guard. What happened to my chubby little baby?

My mom arrived on Friday, which coincided nicely with the start of Olof’s vacation so that now we’ve got four weeks stretching before us with not much on the schedule besides rest and relaxation. I can’t speak for the others, but I know that I’ve been needing that.

Olof and I dragged ourselves out of bed bright and early this morning to go to what was probably the most pointless doctor’s appointment ever. A couple of weeks ago, at my one and only prenatal appointment to date (and that was only an intake, not a “real” appointment), I told the midwife that I didn’t want to take the glucose tolerance test, particularly this early on. First, that drink is nasty, and the mere thought of swilling it down after a twelve-hour fast is enough to make my stomach churn unpleasantly. Second, this is my fifth pregnancy and I’ve been overweight for every single one of them with nary a problem. Finally, gestational diabetes generally doesn’t rear its ugly head until much, much later in pregnancy, and if there’s any indication of potential problems when my sixth or seventh month rolls around, I’ll reconsider my stance on taking the accursed test.

Anyway, upon hearing my refusal, the midwife booked me in for an appointment with a doctor, presumably thinking that I’d be swayed by the big guns. So Olof and Brynja and I left the house shortly after eight o’clock this morning for what turned out to be a ten-minute meeting with a slight, soft-spoken, bespectacled doctor who surely was ten years my junior — not a powerhouse of persuasion, in other words — in which she reiterated the healthcare providers’ position and I reiterated my own, and we agreed, slightly testily, to disagree.

Then we left and went grocery shopping.

The past few days have been more or less the same around here — lots of bright, warm sunshine and plenty of playing outdoors. Just what summer should be.

Tage is quite taken lately with jokes and riddles. His most recent favorite is “Why do birds fly south for the winter?” (A: because it’s too far to walk). Sometimes, just to keep us on our toes, he switches up the answer, saying it’s too far to run or too far to drive or that it costs too much to take the bus. No matter which version he tells, though, he always cracks himself up.

In the last day or two Petra’s been trying to play along as well, and last night she told me this one, clearly of her own invention. “What is a donkey instead of a zebra?”

Stumped?

A rabbit! Get it?

Yeah, me neither, but it was a real side-splitter as far as she was concerned. I think maybe you have to be four to understand.

I post one of these pictures every year, I know, but even though it’s my tenth summer here I still find it remarkable. This was taken off my front porch just after midnight last night, and as you can see, it’s broad daylight. It had been cloudy and raining off and on, which left things looking just a little less bright than they sometimes do, but it’s still not even close to dark.

For the first several years I lived here I had a very hard time with this ’round-the-clock daylight. You often hear people bemoan the darkness in the winter, but honestly, all the light in the summer was much more difficult for me to come to terms with. It’s only been in the last couple of years that it didn’t completely mess up my sleeping patterns, and this is the first summer I can say that it hasn’t bothered me at all. Who knows, maybe in another ten years I’ll be able to go to bed at midnight with my curtains wide open and the sun shining on my face, just like a true Swede.

So there was a biggish earthquake — 4-ish on the Richter scale — in our neck of the woods last night, and I missed it entirely, even though I was awake and up and about. It was all over the newspapers this morning, and I couldn’t help but feel a little ripped off. To hear everybody tell it, it was a hard thing to miss. Olof said it sounded like a huge truck driving right by the house, and the whole house rattled and shook. Lydia was upstairs at the time, and she came running down all kinds of freaked out. Me, I noticed nothing. I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth at the time, and I had the door closed and the dryer running, so it was pretty loud and rattly in there, which I guess masked the tremor. Interestingly enough, though, I’ve been on location for at least half a dozen earthquakes in my life and I’ve never felt a single one. All were relatively minor, of course (and thank goodness), but they were noticeable, yet somehow I managed to miss them all. Maybe I have an earthquake immunity?