Petra and I braved the elements this afternoon and headed over to the öppna förskolan, or “open pre-school.”  Most towns in Sweden have at least one of these, generally run by the church or the county, where parents who are home with young children can take the kids to play and meet up with other kids, while also having the chance to socialize a little themselves.

I confess that I don’t go as often as I should, considering that it’s only a block or so from our house, but, really, it’s just not my thing.  I’ve never been much for small talk at the best of times, and I feel very socially awkward in Swedish, so it’s not a whole lot of fun for me.  The kids don’t seem over-fond of it, either, and they almost always end up playing by themselves, which is something they can do here at home, obviously.  So, we don’t go over there that much.

But anyway, last week we were at a parent-teacher conference for Tage at his pre-school, and there was some talk about his teacher taking him to the school cafeteria a couple of times to eat there before he has to do it for real next year when he starts kindergarten.  All that talk of eating at school sparked something in Petra’s brain, and she spent the next few days saying that she wanted to eat at her school, so that’s what we did.  To round out the hour-and-a-half we were there, she also went down the slide a number of times and drew rather a lot of smiley faces with half-dried-out markers.  The highlight, though, was definitely the cheese sandwich.