I got home from Liverpool early on Monday afternoon and jumped back into the fray of family life with scarcely a moment to exhale. That evening Petra’s class had an end-of-year grill party out at the local beach, where we spent a couple of hours fending off mosquitoes and biting gnats while the kids ran… Read More No rest for the weary

So Tage will be thirteen next month (I know, I can’t even with the passage of time) and that means, according to family tradition and Swedish law, that he’ll be able to open his own bank account. To do so, he needs to have an ID card, so Olof and I took him to the… Read More Advancing age

Almost three years ago Petra got her first pair of glasses. She’d been having fairly frequent headaches, which is what prompted the visit to the eye doctor, but she never was very consistent about wearing the glasses. The headaches went away and her eye checks at school were fine, so we all just more or… Read More Two peas

Long ago, in the summer of my first year in Sweden, my then-new-and-shortly-thereafter-lifelong friend, Leslie, taught me how to crochet. I’d been able since I was a child to crochet a chain, but the ability to do anything more complicated had always eluded me. Somehow, though, Leslie was able to explain things in just the… Read More Handiwork

I took this picture last week, at our Valborg bonfire. Spring is coming to northern Sweden, slowly but surely.

In one week I’ll be down in Uppsala again, this time with my mom. She arrives next Sunday for her yearly month in Sweden, and we’ll be meeting at the Stockholm airport like we did last year and taking a leisurely five-day road trip to get us home. Since I have my place in Uppsala… Read More Upcoming

When we started the Ph.D. program last spring, all of the first-years, according to department custom, shared an office, charmingly referred to as “the incubator.” It’s a fine enough space and it easily accommodated the three of us, but we always felt somewhat outside the action, not least because the room is outside the corridor… Read More New digs!

This is from a conversation between Petra and Tage that I overheard probably nearly a year ago now, but I thought of it for some reason this afternoon, and it still makes me laugh. Like most kids–or most people, even–my kids can sometimes be insufferably superior about their language skills in relations to others. Their… Read More Self-satisfaction

This last little while I have felt like a true weekly commuter. I haven’t yet been gone an entire week at one stretch, but it’s been close a couple of times, and in April I was away from home fourteen nights (to be fair, one of those nights was in Ume? for Petra’s soccer tournament,… Read More Up, up, and away

So I found myself with a little extra time this morning, so the Easter pictures are turning up sooner after all! Our annual egg hunt was last Saturday, and though the weather was chilly and grey, the kids didn’t seem to mind much. And the dogs were plenty happy to be out and relieve a… Read More Egg-citement!