We decided a couple of months ago that if we didn’t end up being able to make our trip to the States we would go on some sort of consolation trip instead. I starting thinking early on about Legoland down in Denmark, mostly because Tage would L-O-V-E it, and he’s the kid who’s most disappointed about missing out on the big trip. A trip like that for a family as big as ours is a fairly expensive endeavor that we probably wouldn’t ordinarily undertake, but right now it feels downright manageable, considering the princely sums we’re “saving” in not taking a vacation on the other side of the Atlantic.

So Olof and I have spent much of the day planning and plotting, and we even went so far this afternoon as to buy airline tickets for the lot of us down to Stockholm for the last week of June. I made appointments at the U.S. Embassy to finally get all the younger kids registered and get their American passports, just so that’s done, and we’ll spend a couple of days seeing the sights in the capital city. Later that week we’ll hop a train down to Copenhagen then make our way over to the Lego lovers’ mecca in Billund, where we’ll hang out for another few days before heading back home.

Funnily, for the past few weeks when thinking and talking about this, I’ve been referring to it as a “mini-vacation,” and only just now did I realize how European that is. Ten years ago I wouldn’t have thought there was anything “mini” about a ten-day vacation, especially a vacation involving planes and trains and leaving the country. I’m practically a jet-setter these days.