We all drove to Nyköping for Eric’s nephew’s birthday. We were very many people in a very small house so I mostly felt cornered and uncomfortable. The best moment was when we went out to look at the neighbours’ goats.

Our wardrobes actually fit through all the doorways and the narrow staircase, so we got them downstairs without having to completely disassemble them. It was enough to remove the doors and drawers.

The past few days have been hot and the pool water is getting more temperate. Ingrid and Adrian bathe several times a day.

While they are not in it, the pool water makes pretty patterns in the sunlight.

The library, soon to be bedroom.

We’ve been talking for a while about reshuffling the rooms in the house to give Adrian a room of his own. He’s had a corner of the living room for his stuff, and his bed is in our bedroom. (Luckily he is a very heavy sleeper.)

The kitchen remodeling forced us to move things around anyway, and made Adrian’s corner disappear. So while his things are all packed away, we’re seizing the opportunity and making this happen.

Adrian will get the room that used to be Ingrid’s. Ingrid will get the room that used to be ours. And we will move down into what used to be the office/library.

It’s a chain of moves, and obviously it has to start in the other end. Can’t move things into a room that is already full!

The first step was to move the entertainment station out of the office. We used to watch movies on Eric’s computer and its large monitor. When he bought a PlayStation, he hooked it up to the same monitor. So his workstation was also everybody’s entertainment station. Now we have a TV for movies and games, and the TV and its sofa are installed in Adrian’s old corner.

The next thing we have to move out of the office/library is all the books, and Eric’s desk. We spent much of today packing books in boxes. (Can’t put them in their new place yet because we need to keep the living room and kitchen mostly empty, for when the builders come back to finish the kitchen floor.)

Most books went into boxes which we took down to the basement. Some ended up in paper bags instead, ready to be taken to a charity shop. And some definitely go straight into the recycling bag. Not even a charity shop will want The NHS guide to pregnancy and childbirth, or a 1990s English-Estonian dictionary of business and economics.

Between these lies the street atlas section of an old phone catalog, probably from around the time when we moved here. We got phone books delivered to the house for the first few years. The phone book parts we threw out, but the street maps (with their characteristic red edges) were useful, back in the days before we all had smartphones. This one I’ve even reinforced to lengthen its life. I remember cycling with it in the basket of my bike, with little sticky tabs to mark the page I was currently on.

We have an inflatable pool that we bring out every summer, and both Ingrid and Adrian love it. On warm days, they are in and out the pool many, many times a day.

They love the pool as it is, but they also argued that a larger pool would be even better. Eric and I weren’t very convinced. But we agreed to pay half the cost of a larger one, if they saved up money for the other half. And they did. We got the new pool just before we left for Estonia. Eric unpacked it and set it up while we were gone, and now it’s up.

It’s huge. Over four metres in diameter, and over a metre deep – the water comes up to the top of Adrian’s chest. In fact we probably couldn’t have bought or used it last year, because it would have been too deep for him.

The only problem now is that the water is freezing cold! The temperature outside is around 12°C so the water isn’t much better.

Nevertheless Ingrid and Adrian wanted to try it out today. They didn’t stay in the water for long.

And just like that, our time in Estonia is over and it’s time to go home.

Ingrid and Adrian are both telling me that they wish we could stay longer, and so do our friends here. As for me, I’m quite happy to go home now. I’m looking forward to being with Eric again. I’m looking forward to being in my own home, rather than living in a suitcase. A proper kitchen, and a bedroom with blackout blinds, and a room of my own where I can be on my own. Being with friends is fun, but constantly being with other people is also quite exhausting.

During summer, the Tallinn-Stockholm ferry usually has some kind of entertainment for kids. Their conference centre gets no use this time of the year so they fill it with other activities. This year they have a bunch of “big wooden games”. There were games I’d seen before, and games that were totally new to me. There were all kinds: games of skill, of memory, of speed, of logic, and so on. We had a lot of fun here.

Sangaste castle has a newly opened exhibition about the last count of Sangaste, early in the last century, and the technologies of his era. Both things that have survived to this day such as the wireless radio and the telephone, but also more odd ones such as massage machines and grain sorting machines.

Alongside with the tech of those days there was a gallery of pictures of what the people of those days imagined future tech to be like. Some of it has come true, even though it doesn’t exactly look the way they imagined it back then: hearing the day’s news in your home instead of buying newspapers; robots cleaning the floor; machines imparting information to schoolchildren. Mail delivered by flying postmen might become reality one day. Underwater races seem unlikely.

There is a hiking trail at Kauksi. We walked the trail and we ate blueberries and had fun. But none of it could compare to the beach.

Empty and flat. Endless.

Even though the weather was cold, the children played for hours. There were shallows where the water barely covered the sand, and a lagoon with warmer water, both of which offered great conditions for digging – and for photography.

We only left because of the threatening thunderclouds that appeared in the early afternoon. A speedy hike back to the cars saved us just in the nick of time; the rain came pouring down while we were driving back.

After a morning of shopping (primarily funky patterned Estonian socks, and Estonian candy) we treated ourselves to a restaurant lunch today.

I now have a new favourite restaurant in Tartu: Forrest. Modern, healthy pub food with plenty of vegetarian options, and a wide variety of interesting fruity, non-alcoholic beverages.