Today we had our traditional Christmas baking day: lussebullar and gingerbread cookies. The gingerbread dough would not co-operate but stuck to the table all the time, so Eric was kneading in more flour and rolling it out again and again. Which the kids found incredibly boring – but they also didn’t want to miss a single moment of making the cookies, so they stayed and waited.

Close-up of an Advent star.

Ingrid and I are making preparations for her birthday party next weekend (yeah, just a little bit late). Invitations, cakes and ice cream, decorations, games, and all that.

This is Ingrid preparing for “pin the tail on the donkey” except in Sweden the donkey is a pig, and the kids draw a tail rather than pinning a ready-made tail.

Getting ready to put up the Christmas tree.

Celebrating Ingrid’s birthday with family lunch at a conveyor belt sushi place.

Don’t these Apfelstrudel just look like two grubs or worms of some kind, cuddling up to each other and wondering who shall eat whom? (They looked much more appetizing and less wormlike after baking, but I kind of liked this look.)

Today was the day for the annual gathering of family and relatives to celebrate the kids’ birthdays. Presents for the kids; a chance to chat for the parents; cake and snacks for everyone.

Both Eric and I have cut down on sugar and the kids usually prefer sweets to cake anyway, so there is rarely a reason in our household to bake a cake. Several of our guests have moved in the same direction and some eat no sugar at all. Most of the Apfelstrudel got eaten, but we still have an entire half left of the cheesecake we made. They’ll probably last me a week at least.

Some of the guests also eat almost no carbs, which made snacks into a bit of a challenge. I wanted the snacks to be finger food, vegetarian (for our own sakes), low carb (for the guests) and child-friendly (the party was for the kids after all) and yet something more interesting than just cubed cheese and fruit. Now I can sort of imagine what it must feel like for non-vegetarians to try and cook for vegetarians. You sit there and ask yourself – how can they possibly come up with meal ideas every day with these limitations? But if you’ve been vegetarian for a while it’s just normal and takes no extra effort.

(For the record, the snacks I came up with were cheese crisps, baked cauliflower and cheese balls, and devilled eggs. But when we added the cakes, we thought we had way too much food, so we totally bypassed the guests and ate the eggs for lunch before the guests arrived.)

I am tired, and especially tired of organising and managing things for other people, including my kids. But a birthday is a birthday, so I dredge up some energy and do my best to make it a fun day for Adrian. I don’t think he’ll remember it as his best birthday ever.

Writing birthday invites.

Midsummer’s Eve. Cloudy, chilly, and with rain showers, so we will skip the traditional celebrations. Not that we’re really particularly interested in them, anyway. But it would have been nice to be outside at least…

But we still get the good Midsummer meals. Potato salad, devilled eggs, herring, home made ice cream and raspberry cheesecake.

After Christmas, Easter, a disco, some birthday parties, and other already-forgotten events, Ingrid’s stash of candy is overflowing. Whenever she sets out to eat one, she pours them all out on the table and then picks among them to find one she wants.

Enough is enough! Now she has them all sorted into little boxes, by type: chocolatey candy, marshmallowy candy, sour candy, and I forgot whatever else.