Showing all posts in Swedish in America

December 28, 2010-2020

IT’S BEEN TEN YEARS SINCE I CAME TO AMERICA!! I can’t even believe I’m writing this. It doesn’t feel that long, and at the same time it feels like I’ve always lived here. 10 years, it sounds crazy (and it sounds like I’m old haha). I’ve been through so much these years. I found the love of my life, got married, became a pommy mommy, I have visited 16 US states and tons of cities, traveled to several countries with hubby, I’ve danced thousands of hours, I have had plenty of ups and downs, I’ve met a lot of new people, I have lived in six apartments and now I’m pregnant with our rainbow baby. It’s been ten very interesting and lovely years. 

Happy Anniversary to me and America 😀

Here’s random pictures in a random order from adventures I’ve been on in different places in America throughout the years. 

December 27, 2020

Hope ya’ll had a fantastic Christmas! This year looked different for most, some might have been alone, others might have celebrated outside with loved ones, some had to work long shifts at the hospitals and others enjoyed the company of others through facetime. My husband and I are used to celebrate the holidays just the two of us and Thor, so it wasn’t very different for us this year. 

I have to say, we had a perfect Christmas celebration this year. 

On the evening of the 23rd, I made myself an awesome Irish coffee (non-alcoholic) and we watched the animated version of The Grinch. Surprisingly better than I thought. 

Jim was working half of Christmas Eve (here in America it was just a regular Thursday) while I was baking saffron buns for what felt like hours and prepping some of the food for our “julbord” (Swedish Christmas table) before a quick facetime with my parents. At 3pm we had to say goodbye so that I could start “Kalle Ankas Jul” (the disney Donald Duck Christmas thing we watch every year) that I have on a dvd. After 4pm I prepared the rest of the food and J put a ham in the oven. And then time to eat:) My beets salad and the potato gratin didn’t turn out that great this year, but oh well, everything else was tasty.
At night we were so tired after all the food that we didn’t do much. We opened the gifts from J’s mom and Jim also gave me a gift (even though we had said no gifts). A new camera! The filming on my big camera hasn’t worked that well for awhile, but with this new one I can film our new family member:) We played a few games of Jackbox and then went to bed.
All night we had a massive storm (quite warm outside so no snow, just rain and powerful wind). The crazy wind kept me awake part of the night. In the morning we found trees that had been knocked down. 

The buns on the oven paper got burnt on the bottom so sadly didn’t taste good. The other ones turned out as one instead of 21 hahah, but they were probably the best saffron buns I’ve ever made, yum!
I’m normally not much for hot cocoa but there aren’t many warm drinks to enjoy, especially when you’re pregnant, so sometimes I do make myself a cup:) We haven’t made meatballs since we got food poisoning on Christmas 2014. We had veggie balls this year.
Thor snoozing with his present from his grandma

Christmas Day started with giving Thor his xmas gift. And then I made a nice breakfast with leftover ham. Since we had done most of the Christmas work the day before we had nothing other than facetiming to do. We talked to my sister and Mila for a little while, then we facetimed with J’s mom and stepdad. Then at lunch we “hung out” with my parents. We called J’s grandma when we cooked dinner (cornish game hens) and later called his aunt. In between we didn’t do much, just relaxed. At night we listened to music and then watched the end of the original Grinch movie that was on TV. 

22 weeks + 1 day. Tummy is biiiig now, I can only imagine how it’ll look at the end
This looks both amazing and disgusting at the same time.
I often go for vegetarian options but I do also eat meat, fish and poultry at times.
When it comes as a whole animal like this it’s a bit harder though, but it was delicious. 

The next day, the 26th, we ate leftovers and more leftovers, worked out for a little bit and then just watched crap on TV, pretty easy. 

I hope you all had an amazing Christmas (or Hanukkah or whatever you’ve been celebrating)! I hope you and your families are healthy. We know a few people who have got the vaccine already and hopefully the world can go back to “normal” soon.
Stay safe and Happy New Year!

December 23, 2020

Are you feeling festive yet? Does it feel like Christmas yet? 
I have tried to get myself and our home feel more Christmas’y over the past week, but nah, today it just feels like a regular fall Wednesday. But I’ve tried at least haha. 
This year I didn’t really feel like putting any decorations out, I even said no to putting the tree up at first but then decided that ok, why not. But nothing else. This year is so weird anyways plus I want to clean out things for when the baby comes, not add more crap to look at for a few weeks, hahah. Then last week I decided to put up the green garland and the lights on the stairs like I’ve done the past couple holidays, cause who knows, what IF we DO actually move within a year and what if that house doesn’t have these kind of stairs, then I would feel a bit sad that I didn’t put them up one last time. And it looks really nice, it’s very cozy at night.

Yesterday I made a Christmas stovetop potpourri. Our home definitely smelled like Christmas.

One orange, ½ cup cranberries, 3 cinnamon sticks, about one spoon of cloves and 2-3 cups of water.

Don’t laugh at me but I used dried cranberries instead of real ones, simply because we have a package of almost 2 liters of dried ones at home and I didn’t want to buy something new. I let it come to a boil and then removed the lid to let the smells out in the apartment. I always forget how smelly cloves are, it can sometimes give me a headache, but I think this was the right amount now. Not sure if you’re supposed to smell the orange or not, which I didn’t, but it looked pretty:) Should last for 4-5 days I read. I’m just gonna leave it in the pot and warm it up whenever I feel like we need more Christmas spirit in our home:)

Today I plan on baking us some saffron treats. I feel like testing making saffron muffins cause I’ve never done that before and buns is just too much work. But Jim seems to want me to make the buns (I’ve made them a few times over our years of marriage) so we’ll see.
We went to one grocery store yesterday and got most of the stuff we need for this holiday but we still need to go to another store tonight. Jim happens to be really busy this week for some reason (normally slow before Christmas), he’s just constantly in meetings and working long days, so I have to kinda adjust to do things whenever he has time. Like yesterday we went to the store in the middle of the day cause it fit him better.

Christmas isn’t until Friday but since I’m Swedish we also celebrate tomorrow and the festivities starts already tonight, called uppesittarkvall. So tonight we will have some irish coffees (non alcoholic and decaf of course) cause that’s a tradition from my parents and maybe I try to find this Swedish movie that I used to watch on the 23rd every year as a kid, but we’ll see. Tomorrow we will watch Donald Duck at 3 pm like always and enjoy a saffron and chocolate ‘fika’. Then we’ll have ham with a potato gratin. On Friday we’ll probably gonna open gifts (we only have two that we got sent from J’s mom) and then have cornish game hen with maybe potato or something. We don’t feel like making a whole turkey again, this hen is perfect size plus we will have tons of leftover from the 24th.

We have lovely weather these days, a bit warmer. It’s going to be even warmer tomorrow but unfortunately rain all day. Oh well. We spend our days mostly inside anyways:)
Happy Holidays!

Thor in the scarf I knitted for him a few years agoDuring winter you have so much to wear that it’s easy to forget something…like your facemask.
Luckily no people outside at this time, and I covered my face with the scarf when in the lobby of our building (mandatory face covering)
Just look at Thor, haha, enjoying the sun 😀
Thor’s paw prints in the snow, so cute

November 16, 2020

Good Morning! Hope you had a wonderful weekend. We haven’t really done anything. Went to Greenwich for an oil change on Saturday and while we were waiting we sat down at an outdoor seating for fries and a drink in the sun. Other than that, we’ve been home. We have enjoyed each others company and snuggled our pup, pretty nice and easy weekend. A lot colder outside yesterday too so not very pleasant to be outside. 

The world is getting worse again so the best thing to do is to stay home. On Friday I got an automatic phone call from the city mayor saying that we should only go outside if we absolutely have to – for us that means taking the dog out. Bars and restaurants have to stop serving at 10pm and we have a suggested curfew between 10pm and 5am. I don’t think we will go into another full lockdown, the country can’t afford it, but it kinda feels like it now.
I’ve been fine being at home this year, but now it almost feels like our home has turned into a prison. All of us around the world is experiencing the same thing, but that doesn’t make it easier for any of us. My husband and I have spent on average probably 22 hours a day, every day,  at home since March (or actually since February for me). We take our dog for park adventures when the weather allows, we have some errands to do during weekends, but other than that we spend time just us and the pup inside our apartment. Yes, we did travel for two days in July which I greatly appreciated but it also gave me major anxiety.
I think we can all agree that this is a sucky year. I think a lot of people have kept their positivity up and made the best of this situation, but at this point we are all tired. But even if we are tired we still need to remember that we have to keep doing our part to stop the spread of this dumb virus. No one knows when this will end, it will take time, even if there’s a vaccine coming out in a few months. It is the virus that decides, all it wants to do is to continue its party and hang out with as many people as possible. But all of us needs to try to stop this massive deadly party. Best way to do so is to stay home if one can, wear a mask when outside, frequently wipe surfaces with disinfect, keep distance to others and wash those damn hands. It’s not hard. The quicker people do their part the quicker the world can move on.