We never got around to going camping this summer. Instead Ingrid has been sleeping in a tent in the garden for a week now.

It sounded nice. Birdsong in the morning, fresh air… I thought I’d try it out, too. Eric and the kids were away this weekend so Saturday night I went to sleep in the tent.

I don’t know how she does it! The light woke me at about 5 in the morning. I desperately tried to go back to sleep, pulling the sleeping bag over my head, but kept waking again and again, so I fled to the darkness of our bedroom after 40 minutes. And the sleeping bag didn’t let me move around freely so I was stiff as well. Never again!

A late night swim in a small, quiet lake. Just us two at the entire lake.

Ingrid has swim camp this week. Tomorrow is the last day and Ingrid wanted to make sweets to share with the other kids and the leaders.

These are traditional Swedish sweets commonly called dammsugare, meaning “vacuum cleaners”. Some say the name comes from the way they resemble old vacuum cleaners. Others claim it’s because these sweets function as vacuum cleaners because they use up all the leftover pieces of cake, the ends and edges and crumbs that would otherwise be thrown away in a bakery.

Dammsugare consist of an inner core made of cake crumbs, butter, some cocoa powder, and a few carefully counted drops of arrack essence.

That core is wrapped in a skin of marzipan. Traditionally, dammsugare just have to be green. Occasionally someone makes pink or white ones but they just look wrong to me! You can actually buy green marzipan in Swedish supermarkets, in convenient rolled-out sheets, because green marzipan is also essential for Sweden’s most popular cake, the princess cake. But we made our own from plain marzipan and green food colouring. Kneading the colouring into the marzipan was hard and boring work for Ingrid so she left it marbled, which looked quite decorative. The colour evened out with time so they became plainer overnight.

Finally the ends of each roll are dipped in melted chocolate.

Ingrid, at home again after five days of scout camp.

Packing for Ingrid’s upcoming scout camp. 5 days away from home!

We managed to get all of her stuff into one big backpack, but not easily. I do wonder how she will manage to get it all in there again for the trip home.

Ingrid and I went shopping for hiking gear: she’ll be leaving for five days of scout camp on Sunday. Well, we really only went shopping for rain clothes, but came home with some eating equipment as well, including this collapsible bowl that Ingrid keeps using as a hat.

Running out of things to keep the kids busy. Normally I’d just take them to a beach but the weather is still semi-crappy. Today we went to the trampoline centre. This is Ingrid diving into a pit of foam rubber.

Quirky habit: Pre-emptively saying “what?” with a shrug when she is doing something that she thinks we might question, even though I have no intention of questioning it.
Quirky habit #2: calling everything grejsimojs (“thingamajig”).
Random fact: avatars are important. When we play Just Dance on the Wii or some other game, she must have a nice-looking avatar. It needs to look like a girl, and it must have stylish colours. Silly animals, bearded faces etc are not OK. Same with usernames. Her top choices currently are mostly pretty girl’s names, and sweet names like “cupcake” and “candy”.
Fashion choices: she’s transitioning from child to tween. She always used to choose dresses with strong floral patterns in a lot of bold colours (especially purple and violet). Now for the first time ever she has asked for blue jeans, which she has always dismissed as way too boring and colourless.
Bedtime stories: Narnia with Eric; Doctor Dolittle with me.

Favourite new thing: an activity-tracking wristband.
Favourite food/drink: carbonated water with a bit of apple juice.
Favourite entertainment: Minecraft videos. She especially loves iHasCupquake and her videos about the Enchanted Oasis mod.
Favourite entertainment #2: radio! Until now we’ve only ever listened to the radio while driving. It’s perfect for her. She likes pop music, she likes to have a lot of sensory input, she likes variety. She even enjoys the advertising. Now we happened to find a radio in the basement and it was an instant hit.

For those of you not familiar with Stockholm, Gröna Lund is Stockholm’s amusement park. We try to fit in a visit to “Grönan” each summer.

I love roller coasters best, and chain carousels are also great. Anything that makes me feel like I am flying, basically.

I’m looking forward to when Eric and I will be able to go on some rides together. Ingrid is old enough to go off on her own, but not enough to take care of Adrian for as long as it would take us to queue and take a ride as well. The queues weren’t too bad in the morning, but after lunch the waiting time for all the best rides was around 30-40 minutes.

Ingrid loved every moment of the day and went on almost every ride she could. (A bunch of them have a 140 cm height limit and she’s quite a bit short of that still.) Roller coasters, things that spin, the scary stuff, things that spin and go up and down at the same time – anything! She’s not afraid of any of the rides so we could do a lot of them together.

Adrian almost broke down crying when he realized where we were going. He’s not fond of any of the fast rides, which means most of them. But after calming down he remembered that the flying elefants were fun, and the mini Ferris wheel, and the wacky house (a vintage attraction from the 1920s!) and above all the “Love tunnel”. He did the Love tunnel at least three times. In the end even he was quite happy with the day.