Sunday with Cousins

Opening birthday gifts continued on Sunday with the arrival of Ulf and Olivia Nilsson from Köln, Germany! Ulf is my husband's other brother who owns a foo-foo wine shop in Hagen. He is one of Europe's wine masters (with title)! He always brings us wonderful wines to enjoy at the moment or some to savior in the distant future. The one he served last night, which I couldn't have, was exceptional apparently but he left a bottle for me to have after I've beaten this rotten cancer! I'm certainly looking forward to that! Olivia and Maya had a jolly good time outside as well as inside together despite their language differences. Olivia only speaks German with some Italian (her father has taught her Italian since he used to live in Italy for 10 years and he hopes she will be fluent some day--perhaps to take over his wine business?). Maya with her Swedish and English (and bits of Spanish) gets a little frustrated that Olivia can't speak SOMETHING that she can understand! But amazingly enough they find the way to communicate with each other enough to have a lot of fun together! Kids always do! Here they are preparing something that never flourished...but they certainly look artistic! They are exactly a year apart in age, Maya is older & slightly taller but Olivia is more muscular and tougher than petite Maya. Both are PRINCESSES! Although Pepe wore this tutu with pride, he wasn't such a cooperative dancer in the troope. He preferred to be a member of the audience!

With the right music, the ballerinas performed their best piece yet!
Bravo, BRAVO!

At the moment, (Monday afternoon) the cousins are out on a picnic with Farmor, Farfar, Papa and Pepe! I've taken the quiet time to sleep, take a walk (went 600 meters today! better than yesterday!), and catch up on this blog! Oh...here they come back!
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Farmor is COVERED with Maya's car sickness throw up! GROSS! But Maya is fresh in clean clothes and running to the swings with Olivia. Poor Farmor! (Maya reported that she PUKED ALOT!) It was rather obvious by the look of Farmor's clothes and hair (even in her ear!). Yuck!
Sorry to share so much but this blog tells it like it is! That's life!

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PS- Ever since our upstairs bathroom has been "in renovation" Maya and I have been taking a shower and sauna together in our basement bathroom. (We have very interesting sauna talks!) Before our Sunday guests arrived we were again doing our routine there in the bathroom, it is often difficult for me to bend down to pick things up from lower levels and Maya has proved to be quite handy to have around as she is so willing to be a Mommy's helper! I asked her to please pick up the dirty clothes to take them to the laundry room and she did it without a fuss. Then I asked her to hand me my socks and pants which of course she did without a fuss. So I said to her how much I appreciated her help, especially when I only had to ask her to do it once (instead of our usual bantering!). She replied, "I want to help you as much as I can Mommy so you won't die!" (choke! my heart flew to my throat!) So then I answered, "I thought you were doing it to be nice." "Oh and that, too!" she said.

I had the awful thought that if I do die she might think it was HER FAULT for not helping me enough! Each comment I make is so weighted these days. It's a precious line between the wrong and the right way to say something to her sweet little ego ...I just hope I will say and do more right things than wrong things.

Taboo things

Ever since I've been diagnosed with cancer my language has usage has changed a bit. Sort of reminds me how I have always kept my swearing in check because I'm a teacher. (Always trying to be the good model of acceptable language!) So when I do swear, those who know me well, know that I'm really MAD, FRUSTRATED or PISSED OFF! Using or not using Swear words hasn't changed for me....but those phrases that involve death, dying, killing and cancer have suddened ceased coming out of my mouth. You know what I'm talking about....phrases like "The wait is killing me!" or "I'm dying to see that new show." or "I just about died laughing." I used to call the little sweetner tablets "cancer pills" for my coffee. Yes, those phrases were about to come out but they stopped in my mouth and were immediately swapped for a similar phrase without the fatal reference. As for those little sweetners...I'm hardly drinking coffee now and when I do I'm using unrefined brown sugar. (I have one little cup a day...for my pleasure, not my health.) Another taboo....on facebook & on email I filled out two different "bucket lists" several weeks ago before my diagnosis. If you are not familiar with these lists, they are a list of activities, travel destinations and life experiences that a person "should" do before they "kick the bucket" (a phrase meaning "to die"). Well on BOTH of the lists I had experienced, travelled to, or had done nearly everything on the list! At the time I felt a little odd...now, if I think about it too much, I'm a little freaked out. WHY did I fill out those lists? A few friends had agreed with me that both lists were rather lame, incomplete. There are SO MANY things to do in life...they can't possibly be put on a list to be emailing around cyber space! I'm never going to fill one of those out again!

This morning two of my English teaching colleagues are coming by...May and Maria. Each has taken over one of my classes. We need to talk about a few things and I have a bag of stuff to give to them to use with MY kids! (oh how I miss my regular life!) Looking forward to the short visit...so maybe I should get dressed now!

Thank you for all the emails and comments!
I appreciate each one of them! :-)

School trip to visit Buddhist Temple

Last Thursday, January 29th, I accompanied the main Swedish teacher of my Grade 5 students to a Buddhist Temple in Bjuv as part of their religious education. As soon as we walked through the gates, we were in a different world, it seemed!
Through a Nun interpreter (Swedish to/fro Vietnamese) we learned about the birth of Buddha (shown below), how to sit properly to mediate, what different symbols are on the alter, what happens after death, meditation techniques, the most important Buddhist holidays, and many other things from the Buddhist Monk.
Beaming with joy at our visit, the Monk answered every one of the good questions the children asked of him, including a demonstration of how to put on a monk's robe! I was very proud of the kids show of respect and the quality and thoughtfulness of their questions. I'm not sure if we came away knowing more about the actual religion but we certainly had a brief glimpse into something very different than what we are used to in a church setting. I think it made the children even more curious to learn about Buddhism, and me, too!
Look at these beautiful prayer flags and decorations ... I was already thinking how I could make a small version!

Away for the weekend...

It's my folks last weekend with us here in Sweden so we are staying with them at the summer house for a couple of days. BEAUTIFUL weather! Hope to get down to comb the beach for shells and other delights. We're expecting my husband's cousin's family of 5 (3 kids) to arrive later today from Göteborg. Maya and one of her 2nd cousins are a year apart...and they have such a grand time playing together. Bo's cousin's wife is from Malaga, Spain so all their children speak both Swedish and Spanish! The languages of today will mostly be Spanish and Swedish with a little English mixed in. (My parents also speak Spanish as we lived in Peru when I was young.) We're fixing salmon rolled in halibut on the grill...and looks as though we'll be able to eat outside! Usually we have a 'crayfish' party this time of year but last year we decided we didn't really like the imported crayfish from China.(The Swedish crayfish are nearly endangered so the ones you can buy are extremely expensive.) So we are bending the traditional faire just a little! But we'll still use the "end of the summer" decorations that are used for the traditional crayfish parties in Sweden.

I've just spent an hour looking at something over the internet (since I couldn't watch it live earlier this week) which thrilled me to the point of tears! I'm so proud to be an AMERICAN at this moment and I REALLY wish I could be "home" to participate in the fall's activities! CHANGE is in the air...a real positive change! I will do my best to be a part of it in some way!

Living in the European Union.....

means having LOTS of languages close at hand! It's one of the things I love about living here!
The other day I set up a new DVD player in our basement (which serves as a crafty room, exercise room, spare guest room, etc) . Just look at all the languages I could choose from to set it up "Quick Start"! There are 2 books with instructions as well....for the not so 'quick' things to do with the machine. I should tell you something more....unintentionally, I setup the TV for this DVD player in RUSSIAN! And I can't figure out how to switch it back to English, which is the standard start up language! It bothers my husband to have it this way but it doesn't bother me as long as I can get the TV to do what I want it to do, when I want it to do it! And I just love that I have a TV and DVD player that can speak in so many languages! Wow!
How many languages does your TV "speak"? Another windy storm passed our way 2 weeks ago....we lost a lovely Tulip tree in our front yard. Our biggest Walnut tree (in the photo) almost fell over too! But Bo has managed to strap it back up with high hopes that it will survive it's near fall. (across the street is our neighbor's stable and wood pile in the photo) We don't usually have these storms in the summer...just the winter. This time we only lost power for about 3 hours.
Because of the storm we decided to take down two more pine large trees in our front yard since they are quite near to the house. Just as a precaution. Our neighbors' also lost several trees in this last storm, luckly none fell on the houses. So, the "trädgubben" was back over here climbing up and cutting down....lots of extra yard work for my husband!
And now we are so exposed....as soon as the mess is cleaned away we'll plant some new trees and big bushes! We're feeling naked over here! I miss those big trees...but I didn't want them falling on the house!