We took the overnight ferry from Stockholm to Tallinn and this morning continued our trip by driving to Tartu. In Tartu we checked into our guest apartment and then headed out for some urgent grocery shopping – the pantry was stocked with salt and pepper, cooking oil, and some flour and sugar, and not much else. Oh, right, there was some flax seed and flax seed meal, too. I didn’t even know that flax seed meal existed, but even so, it definitely didn’t get us any closer to lunch.

The kitchen this year has both a proper modern stove and a water kettle and a microwave oven – quite luxurious compared to what I got last year. On the other hand there is exactly one saucepan, about one litre in size, and no serving spoons or ladles of any sort. Tomorrow I’ll see if our host can lend us some more equipment.

We were met in Tartu by a most unpleasant heat wave. 29°C with high humidity, “feels like 35°C” according to the weather report. I had flashbacks to last summer’s trip. Luckily this time I’m not 7 months pregnant and can take the heat slightly better. Adrian on the other hand was really suffering. Tomorrow we’ll be fleeing to the countryside to escape the worst of the heat.

Bad luck: With 4 hours left until our departure for Estonia (by car and ferry), the car’s electrical system died. No power to even lock or unlock the doors. Based on the car’s behaviour just before it lost power, Eric decided that the battery was faulty. Frantic phone calls to half a dozen gas stations and garages ensued.

Good luck: After maybe half an hour we found a gas station that stocked the right make. Eric cycled to Vällingby and back, and installed the new battery. That was enough to bring the car back to life.

Bad luck: At the car queue at the ferry terminal, a car ran over my left foot.

Good luck: Barely a bruise resulted, and some slight scratch marks.

The day before yesterday I ate a small chunk of goat’s cheese with my dinner. No complaints from Adrian. Yesterday I boldly ate a slice of cheese after breakfast, another small chunk of goat’s at lunch, and finally two slices of cheese in the afternoon. That was apparently too much; Adrian woke and cried a lot during the night. No cheese sandwiches for now.

Butter on the other hand is now tried and tested and works well. I love butter. Just plain good bread with butter on is delicious.

Today the builders finished their work, packed up their stuff and went home. Just in time for the weekend, and just in time for my vacation! (Today was my last day at work, I’m on vacation for the next four weeks.)

The very last thing they did was sand the floor in the old hall. When they started work in there, back in January, they tore up the laminate flooring, and the glued cork tiles beneath them, and uncovered the original pine planks at the bottom. The cork layer had been glued right on top of the pine and left ugly patches everywhere. For half a year the floor looked atrocious. But now after sanding it is pristine again, and looks lovely.

We now have pine plank floors in all three rooms on the ground floor, as well as that hall. In the old living room the floor is varnished; in the other rooms the new floors are untreated as yet. We have ambitious plans to leave them that way and simply care for them by scrubbing them with linseed oil soap, which both cleans and protects the floor, a bit like oiling it.

You can see this kind of floor in some old Swedish houses, and after a hundred years it both looks and feels wonderful – silvery gray and satiny smooth. This is especially nice if you walk around barefoot at home, like us. I’ve been told that it doesn’t take a hundred years to get there. Should the floors not turn out nice, we can always change our minds later and treat them with oil.

Today I gave the newly-sanded floor its first scrubbing. Now the hall smells of linseed oil soap. To me it smells like a very old but well-cared house, like an old rural schoolhouse that’s been turned into a museum, or an old Estonian farmhouse. A very cosy smell.

If you can read Swedish, you can learn about using soap for floor care from Skansen.

Yesterday we all went to Drottningholm again, this time specifically to see how the king lives. I think Ingrid was pretty disappointed. Lots of large rooms with paintings and chairs you’re not allowed to sit on, and not very much else. No princesses whatsoever, nor even any princessy-looking stuff. She had more fun at the picnic we had afterwards at Ängbybadet.

Ingrid is staying awake so late in the evenings that I hardly get any peaceful computer time. Something needs to be reprioritized so I get more time for blogging.

Our wooden deck is pretty much finished now and we’ve had dinner outside for three days in a row. Absolutely lovely. But if we are to eat breakfast here, too, we will definitely need some kind of umbrella thing – I had my breakfast out here this morning at 7.30 and it was already almost too hot.

Our kitchen garden is now producing strawberries at a good pace. I think I picked about 20 large strawberries to share between the three of us after dinner. Today we got the first ripe berries from the later varieties, so we could try all four varieties side by side. Both Eric and I liked Polka best – it has the richest, deepest flavour. Honeoye and Senga Sengana have a fresher, lighter flavour, and to me those two taste pretty similar. Rebecca is a variety that looks like a garden strawberry but tastes like a wild one. More weird than good.

I had butter on my bread yesterday evening. Adrian has not yet reacted to it. Yippee!

I drove a car today. Well that’s probably no big deal for you, but the last time I sat behind the steering wheel of a car was two years ago. And that was a single drive, there and back in an afternoon. I haven’t done any real driving since before Ingrid was born – when she was tiny I had to sit in the back seat with her and keep her pacified, so Eric always drove.

Our plan for today was to move furniture, again, to let the builders occupy our old living room and kitchen, again. But that got done much faster than we had expected, so we sat here at half past eleven, wondering what to do. It was raining outside so we couldn’t just while the day away by pottering around the house and garden and perhaps walking down to the supermarket. Confined to the house both Ingrid and Adrian get very annoyingly bored very quickly.

So Ingrid and I drove to the swimming pool in Husby. That’s another thing I haven’t done for a long time: Adrian hasn’t been fond of bathing so until now it’s been me at home with him while Eric and Ingrid go splashing. Now that he (Adrian, not Eric) can go half a day without access to my boobs, and without crying about it, I can go out and do things with Ingrid again. Which is good for both of us, I think. I suspect she feels she’s been pushed aside somewhat, even though she’s been a good sport about it.

Oh right, the car. We bought a car this week. After years of resisting car ownership I gave up. Mainly I wanted a car for our upcoming Estonia trip. Financially it makes much more sense for us to rent rather than own a car – we might need it every other weekend at most. It’s a bit of a hassle so we actually don’t rent that frequently. But we will definitely need a car in Estonia, and it turns out that no car rental firm will allow their cars to be taken to Estonia, or any other Eastern European country for that matter.

So here we are, owners a Volvo something something (V40? S40?) from ’98. Our requirements were simple: a robust car, spacious boot, tow-ball. Not too expensive. Eric did some research, found a car on Blocket (sort of a Craigslist equivalent) and this Thursday brought it home. In addition to our requirements we got a roof rack, too. I can’t say I’m excited about it but I guess it will come in handy for our trips to IKEA, Plantagen and so on.

It turns out that I still remember how to drive. I didn’t even stall when taking off at traffic lights!

I took the day off work so we could all go to Gröna Lund. We wanted to go on a weekday to avoid the worst crowds, and the weather reports had been promising a cloudy day which should also lead to fewer visitors. In the end most of the day was sunny but the crowds weren’t too bad. We were there as soon as they opened, at noon, and up until about half past two we could go on most rides with very little queueing.

I got to go on two roller coasters this year, Jetline and Kvasten (The Witch’s Broom). Both were great! Kvasten was fun because you’re hanging below the tracks so it feels like your feet are going to hit the house / tree / whatever you’re flying over, but the ride was a bit too short for my taste. Jetline is a serious roller coaster with steep ups and downs, and enough g-forces to give me a stiff neck. I totally agree that it is unsuitable for pregnant women, even though I found that rule most disappointing last year, when the most adventurous ride I could go on was the wave swinger.

Ingrid revisited all her favourites from last year, and also tried three new attractions: the bumper cars (that she was too short for last year), Blå tåget (a ghost train, which she found way too scary) and Rock-Jet, which had her literally squealing with laughter for the entire duration of the ride.

She was surprisingly utilitarian about her choice of rides. Nyckelpigan is her favourite, and Kärlekstunneln (the Love Tunnel) is a close second, but she only went once on each of those and then rejected them because the queues were too long, opting instead for the instant gratification of rides that were almost as good but with a much shorter waiting time.

Adrian had at least as much fun as the rest of us. There was so much to look at he could barely find time to eat. Things going swish and vroom and clang all around him, lots of people, never a dull moment. And he got the best value for money since they have free entry for kids up to the age of 3.

Jetline! Image borrowed from the Gröna Lund web site.

The Estonian playgroup’s annual summer picnic at Drottningholm. Just like last year a small picnic turned into a full-day project: first packing and preparations, then the picnic itself (which we manage to drag out longer than most of the other families) and then since we’re there we might as well take a quick walk through the labyrinth and of course there’s the large fountain right next to that and by the time we get home it’s 5pm.

Ingrid liked the fact that we were right next to a royal castle. Princesses and other royalty are hot stuff right now, in fairy tales, pretend play and other settings. She asked if we could go inside. Not today, we said, but I think we’ll try and visit one of the royal castles soon.

Tired. Adrian has been waking a lot at night for almost a week now. Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe he’s thirsty because of the heat. Maybe it’s a phase. In any case he’s woken every 2 hours. I’ve got no problem with being woken at three- or four-hour intervals, but two is hard. It seems to interrupt my sleep cycles in a bad way so I feel like a zombie every time he wakes me. The only thing I can think of is putting my head down on the pillow, so I nurse and then pat him to sleep again. It may be that he doesn’t need nursing but I’m unable to think. I sometimes even forget to check his nappy first, so I’ve had to interrupt his nursing, which he is not at all happy about.

I had my hair cut today. I’ve found a hairdresser very close to work whom I really like. While I was on leave with Adrian I went to a salon close to home. They were cheap and quick but the result was not as good. So when I started thinking it was time to get a haircut, with only a few more weeks left of my maternity leave, I decided to wait and then get it done as soon as I was back at work. I hadn’t taken into account all the piled-up tasks waiting for me there so three weeks passed before I got around to it. Now I feel all fresh and tidy again! I like having my hair really short at the back of my neck, otherwise it sort of itches and bothers me, especially now during hot summer days.