This coming week is sportlov, or winter sports holiday, in my part of Sweden. Not being winter people or sporting people, really, we don’t generally put the free days to especially good use, I’m afraid. Tage has gone to the mountains with his cousins for a weekend of cross-country skiing and other wintry activities, but he’ll probably be the only one of us using the break for its intended purpose. We might, might, take Tage and Petra up to the little ice rink one day for a bit of skating, and it’d be nice if Lydia got out to one or another of the slopes with her snowboard, but honestly, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for either thing to happen.

I had hoped, earlier, that we’d be making a trip down to Stockholm during the break to get the kids’ American passports and citizenship registration sorted out, but I let time get away from me and haven’t gotten all the paperwork gathered up for that yet. I really need to get on that soon, though. We haven’t reported the births of any of our four younger kids yet, and Tage will be nine in just a few months. Nothing like putting things off, I guess. At least we can get it all taken care of in one trip, but I cringe to think what chaos — what expensive chaos — that trip will be.