July 22, 2022
After 2.5 years, I’m back on Swedish grounds. Last time I was here was in January 2020 when my niece was born, she was only a few days old. Since then we’ve been through a pandemic, I did my last months of the partial molar shitshow, we lived in isolation through a full term pregnancy, we experienced newborn life alone, moved from the north to the south into a house where we’ve had plenty of work done, we’ve seen very few people and done very few things while waiting for the world to look better. Now finally Lily and I traveled to Sweden so that she can meet my side of the family.
4 airports, 3 planes and 2 car rides later, my 1 year old finally met her grandparents that she has only met through video calls a handful of times before. After 20 hours of traveling, we stepped into my parents house in Sweden. Lily was an absolute dream during our trip, couldn’t have wished for a better experience. Neither of us slept much though, Lily only slept for 1-2 hours at a time and I only slept for a couple minutes here and there. After 32 hours I finally fell asleep, Lily slept for 13 hours her first night.
I was hoping for slow days in the beginning so that baby girl and I could settle in and get used to the time difference (7 hours), but we’ve been kinda busy and I’m exhausted hahah. But it’s ok, Lily seems to have adjusted pretty well here and seems comfortable and that’s all that matters to me. I’m still not able to leave her for more than like 30 seconds (except for when she’s sleeping) which makes things a little tricky at times, but she is sleeping at night and has some good naps here and there so I’m overall very happy.
All of us has however ended up with a cold, it’s a real sniffle fest. I was prepared for this to happen, you can only wipe and sanitize surfaces so much and toddlers like to explore so of course there’s a chance that we have caught something on the planes or airports. Or maybe not, maybe we got something from the grocery store here or my niece or sister was already carrying something, you never know, it’s just life. It doesn’t seem to be covid at least which I was nervous about before our trip (my mom had to take two tests this week and both were negative, and I don’t feel bad enough to even take a test), just sniffle sniffle.
We’ve been here for 1.5 week already and we still haven’t gone to the beach. I would have liked to go last weekend but this town had a car event called “Wings and Wheels”, it’s like the biggest two days of the year here. I’ve never gone before and wasn’t interested in going this time either cause I don’t care about cars and I don’t like people:) I happily prioritized my baby’s sleep and stayed home. This event takes over the whole city so to go to the beach was just out of question. And this week we had to wait for a builder to come finish my parents new kitchen plus my mom was home from work a couple of days and on top of that it’s been a heat wave so beaches has been packed, so I haven’t stressed about going, hoping to go maybe on Sunday. It’s not far, maybe 30 min walk or 5 min drive down, just need to time it right (baby’s naps and the sun haha). But my sister and her daughter came over on Tuesday and we went for a walk to a park not far from here, it’s right next door to my old school. They have always had some farm animals here and now it looks a thousand times better, it’s really cute. Lily slept in the stroller while we walked around so we have to go back a different day so that she can see the pigs, goats and chickens. We continued our walk across the river and went to feed ducks. Lily woke up and both girls seemed to have fun. I don’t think Lily really knew what we were doing or understood that it was ducks (which is like her favorite animal) cause they were not yellow like her toys or pictures in her books. But it was a cute experience.
The two girls are so cute together. There’s some jealousy here and there regarding toys and whatnot, they don’t know how to share things yet and Mila doesn’t always remember that Lily is younger and that she doesn’t understand everything, but overall they are good around each other. The very first moment they met they first waved and then gave each other a hug, it was the freaking cutest thing I’ve ever seen.
I’m sure Lily will wake up any minute now so I have to stop writing here. I hope to update more about our Swedish journey later
.