One of the charms of life in a nanny state is that, when it comes to routine check-ups and the like, you don’t decide when you go to the doctor;  the government decides when you go to the doctor.  And so it came to pass that Tage’s 5½-year checkup (how random is that?) and my [...]

Yesterday Lydia and I, with Brynja in tow, had our monthly lunch in town, and Olof and the middle kids–I’m having such a hard time learning not to call Tage and Petra “the little kids”–tagged along for a lunch of their own. Driving there, Olof and I were trying to agree on a place [...]

The new Counting Crows CD dropped into my mailbox on Thursday, and I still haven’t had a chance to listen to it, carefully, all the way through. For what is surely the first time ever, I’m looking longingly back to my days doing data entry for the U.S. Postal Service, when I had endless [...]

Things are finally starting to warm up a bit around here, with the temperature today very nearly reaching 40°F (about 5-ish Celsius). You could almost call the weather “spring-like,” if it weren’t for the eight or ten feet of snow still piled in the front yard.
After taking the dogs out this morning, Olof came [...]

So, the Nintendo DS Lite repair went pretty much the way Olof had feared. That is to say, not well at all. And because I’m the kind of mother who’s raising my kids to demand instant gratification at every turn, I took myself off to the electronics store this afternoon and bought another [...]

A month or two ago, the shell on Olof’s Nintendo DS Lite got broken, most likely after being dropped by one child or another. He took it in stride, because that’s just the kind of guy he is. Also, it was nearly two years old and he’d more than gotten his money’s worth [...]

Olof and I have been playing Scrabulous, Facebook’s Scrabble application, for the past several days, and it’s with a certain sense of shame that I report that he beats me most of the time. I went in thinking that I had an obvious advantage, being a native speaker of English and fancying myself a [...]

Winter, that is.
In the past two or three days, we’ve had temperatures as low as -18° C (0° F) and more new snow than I care to think about.  If things don’t change soon, I think March will be going out like a lion as well.