Birthday fika for Eric’s sister who turned 50.

The adults sat and talked and ate semla. Those too young to appreciate sitting and talking had a Lego Masters competition. Those too young for Legos hung around and explored the world.

Here’s a rhinoceros that Adrian built.

After a few hours the introverts start taking off into various corners, while the extroverts could happily keep going all night.

Christmas isn’t over yet but we’re running out of gingerbread cookies, so we made another batch. With just me and Ingrid working, it was less chaotic and more focused than our usual cookie sessions. And we ended up with more gingerbread men and women and far fewer sharks and crocodiles than when Adrian is involved.

Usually we start piling up the gifts under the tree the day before Christmas Eve but Nysse was all over the presents as soon as they started turning up, with claws and teeth, so we had to hide them away in the bedroom behind a closed door and only brought them out last minute. Only one or two packages got slightly chewed in the corners.

I am kind of proud of how I managed to wrap a large potted plant for Ingrid without breaking anything.

Lunch was the traditional devilled eggs, served with herring and an orange-avocado-feta-pistacho sallad, and vörtbröd.

Ingrid made a cream cheese Christmas tree for a starter. I didn’t think of taking any photos of the rest of the dinner, which consisted of the bean balls I always make for Christmas, potato gratin, brussel sprouts and a lingonberry sauce. I had planned for a cranberry sauce but there were no cranberries to be had in any of the three supermarkets I tried, neither fresh nor frozen. Lingonberries with orange peel didn’t taste half bad either.

We decorated gingerbread cookies. Ingrid and I decorated hearts and trees and pigs. Adrian made bleeding sharks, stitched-up crocodiles, and Frankenstein’s monster with parts of different gingerbread men glued together.


Then he went on to even more innovative creations, like a two-headed giraffe, a tangle of teddy bears, and 3D dolphins.

In the evening we decorated the tree. Unpacking the decorations is the best part: “remember when we got this one!” and “oh, I’d forgotten about this one”.

The advent calendar is up, filled with Lego.

There was a lull a few years ago when Adrian wasn’t that interested in Lego, but now he’s building regularly again. His entire wish list for Christmas was filled with Lego. So naturally that is also the theme for his advent calendar.

I bought an actual Lego advent calendar once, but it was pretty boring. Each day had pieces for a tiny little build, or a minifigure, which Adrian found underwhelming. I guess it was aimed more at playing than building – which is the opposite of what he’s interested in.

This year I bought a normal Lego Creator set and made a DIY advent calendar out of it. Printed out a copy of the instructions, divided them into 24 more or less equal parts, sorted out the pieces for each day (which took Eric and me a good chunk of an evening) and wrapped them in the printed pages. Now he gets to build a part of the set every day, and on the last day I’ll bring out all the instruction booklets so he kind of gets a gift for free. The Creator sets are nifty that way: they use the same bunch of pieces to build three completely different things with the same theme.

Ingrid asked for an advent calendar from Pen Store. Sketchbooks, pens and pencils, modelling clay and other art materials. We haven’t tried this before; we’ll see whether it’s a way to discover new fun stuff or just a way for the store to offload things they wanted to get rid of.

We had a minor snow storm on Saturday afternoon that delivered a few centimetres of snow – enough to cause mild chaos in traffic, with bad visibility, and cars in ditches because they were caught out in their summer tires. I caught the beginning of the snow storm on my way back from Uppsala, where I’d helped my brother pick up furniture I’d ordered. Luckily I did have winter tires on (Eric switched them that morning) and with careful driving I got home safe.

Sunday brought more snow. And then more, and more, and today was absolute chaos. By the end of the day the snow was knee-deep, over the edges of my tall rubber boots, so it must have been close to 40 cm. According to an article in Dagens Nyheter central Stockholm still got less than in the snowstorm in November 2016, but I’m not sure if that also holds for Spånga.


There was no way for the snow ploughs to keep up with it. Getting anywhere in the city was hopeless, I read in the news: cars stuck in the snow, many bus routes cancelled, trains delayed… I’m glad I didn’t have to go there. Here in Spånga pavements were impassable, except where there was enough foot traffic to trample a narrow path, and at least one bus had gotten stuck in a roadworks ditch hidden by the snow cover.

I shovelled snow for an hour Sunday night, another hour this morning, and a third hour at lunchtime, and I was still barely keeping up. There was just no end to it. My snow dump pile by the root cellar was as tall as me by the end of the day.

Cat, for scale.

Nysse was not fond of the snow, at all. The last winter was half his lifetime ago, and it wasn’t a snow-rich one, so he’s never seen anything quite like this. Once or twice he stepped on deep snow only to sink right through it, so that even his head didn’t peek out.

After I had cleared the deck and the back stairs for him, and the cars had made deep tracks in the snow in the streets, he made some cautious rounds. But he’s clearly sceptical of the whole thing. His walks are short, and he keeps shaking his paws to try and keep the snow off.

Adrian and Ingrid on the other hand are loving it. Both went out sledding with their friends – even sixteen-year-olds aren’t too old to enjoy sledding. Adrian spent all his breaks at school out in the snow, rolling giant snowballs and building snow forts and having snowball fights.

We’ve been saying for weeks, if not months, that we really should play a longer board game, with all of us. In the evenings, the kids are often busy with schoolwork or online games with friends. Whenever we’ve agreed on a time for a weekend, something always turns up. Adrian has a sleepover; Ingrid’s friends want to go to town…

This time we set the time a week in advance and decided that we’d go ahead no matter what. Whoever is not at home loses out. No postponing.

And of course Adrian was invited to a sleepover and was near tears about having to choose. The FOMO is strong with these ones.

But then we played Small World, which is one of our all-time favourites, and had a lot of fun, and the anguish of losing out on a sleepover was forgotten. I like the rule that this game has about keeping scores hidden until the end – this way everyone can believe that they have a chance, all the way to the end.

Eric won, by picking a new race in the very last round, with 5 bonus coins because the other players had been skipping that race so many times. I came in second place thanks to my army of skeletons, who very determinedly harvested their enemies’ bodies. Ingrid steamrollered her neighbours repeatedly, first with amazons and then with giants. Adrian’s trolls bullied my sorcerers because my skeletons had previously harvested too many of his tritons.

We’ve done canals and crooked houses, and an art museum and vintage shopping. Today we went to one of the larger parks in Amsterdam, and then tram-hopped our way back to the city via a circuitous route.

We wandered around Vondelpark and dodged cyclists. Adrian climbed a tree.

The rose garden in Vondelpark was still blooming.

Back in central Amsterdam we visited the lovely and peaceful Begijnhof.

Near our hotel the Beurspassage caught our eyes. The ceiling mosaic is filled with motifs inspired by the canals, including fish, rusty bicycles, and for some reason a tiger, and the chandeliers are made of bicycle parts.


We also went to see the allegedly famous floating flower market, which was much less impressive and interesting than it sounded. The shops were technically floating but they were just large booths that were open on one side, and you couldn’t even see that they floated. And the flowers were mostly seeds and bulbs this time of the year.

There was a cafe near the flower market, though, that sold macarons.


And then it was time to start heading home.

Amsterdam was an interesting city to visit, and parts of it were very pretty. But it’s not one of my favourite cities and I’m not sure I’d want to come back for a second visit. I didn’t like the crowds, or the ever-present smell or weed, or all the cigarette smoke.

In the end the best part of the weekend for me was simply spending three full days together as a family. At home we’re often each doing our own thing. Here we were together all the time.

We started both yesterday and today with luxurious breakfasts at a café that Ingrid had found online. Pluk on Berenstraat, in case you find yourself in that area. The online reviews are very mixed but we got very good food, though the service was rather slow.

We had seen enough canals and crooked houses and cute little streets yesterday and wanted something different today, so we went to the Rijksmuseum.

The museum was very visitor-friendly, with easy-to-read maps that guided people to the most popular paintings, but also to other parts of the collection. The popular works – like their one and only Van Gogh – had large crowds in front of them, so I didn’t even bother to try and look at those. There were plenty of other interesting things to see.

Even though we all walked in the same rooms, we often split up because of our diverging interests. Ingrid is interested in art and paints herself, so she looks at details and technical aspects that Adrian doesn’t care much about. So she and Eric (who also painted when he was young) looked at the paintings with artists’ eyes, while Adrian and I looked at them with general curiosity.

We noted, for example, the prevalence of grapes, glass bowls, and curls of lemon peel in 17th century still life paintings.

The curators at the Rijksmuseum had done a great job with the signage. All too often, museums label each work with its title, maker and year, and nothing more. Here there were often interesting background facts, and info sheets with even more facts and stories.

When we tired of paintings, we looked at cannons, porcelain, Delft pottery and ship models.

I liked this glass vase by Émile Gallé, with its irregular patterns borrowed from various cultures.

And this repeatedly darned sock, found in a seaman’s chest after a shipwreck.

From high culture to low. In the afternoon we took the boat to North Amsterdam to a large flea market that Ingrid wanted to browse for vintage clothing. She didn’t find anything that fit, but I bought a jacket.