Photos, finally, and Ayyam-i-Ha! (and owls)

I know that it is about time  for a post with some pictures, and not just some pictures, lots!  And it’s finally here!

Now, to prepare you for this post, I have to tell you that I love owls.  I LOVE owls.  Anything owly and I like it.  Automatically.  And I’m incredibly thankful that they are “in” right now because they are everywhere!  So I am busy collecting as many owl things as possible, so I have enough so that when they’re not stylin’ anymore, I can still have my owls.

So, it’s Ayyam-i-Ha!  I know that doesn’t mean much to a lot of people, but for the Baha’is, it’s party time!  It’s sort of our version of Christmas, although there’s nothing specifically religious to observe or celebrate.  In the Baha’i calendar, there are nineteen months, with nineteen days in each.  This leaves four “leftover” days in the year (five in leap years!) that fall on Feb. 26th through March 1st which are earmarked for Ayyam-i-Ha, a time of celebration, being with loved ones, doing service, helping others and anything else nice you want to celebrate.

This year, I hadn’t had much planned.  To be honest, I got a bit caught up in Valentine’s Day, and the end of February really snuck up on me.  My family did a “Secret Camel” (it’s a long story, but it’s basically the same as secret santa) exchange, but I sent my gift off weeks ago, to make sure it got there in time, and kind of forgot about it after that.  To help out our camel-partners, we each made a list of things we’re interested in/would like to get as gifts and sent it to my mom who was doing the coordinating.  Somewhere in my list was, of course “anything with owls.”

My parents have had a box of some things I left behind when I moved that I’ve been wanting recently, mostly because my laptop battery was all but dead, and I ordered a new one to their place to send to me (because even with the shipping, it’s less than half of what a laptop battery would cost me over here).  So I was really excited when the box came, and it also had Ayyam-i-Ha goodies in it!

Now that I had some little gifts, I wanted to make sure Andreas had something to open, too, so I whipped up a quick little surprise…Let’s start with that one.  To preface this, I made this, for Andreas’s sister and her husband when they were expecting their little girl:

It was big and bouncy and…well, big.  Andreas loved it.  So, for Ayyam-i-Ha, he got:

This little guy!  He’s maybe eight inches tall, very round, and bounces off of everything Andreas throws him at.  The most impressive part is that I knitted him up from start to finish in less than four hours.  You can just call me Speedy Needles.

Anyways, this was only the beginning of the owly goodness!  The package included this lovely lady (which Andreas also loves):

So sweet!  And her eyes have cellophane in them, so they crinkle.  I have a feeling the baby will enjoy this one.

But that’s just the beginning!  What the package mostly consisted of was the afghan I crocheted after Andreas and I got engaged, which we are now using to cover the couch, since the couch is not a particularly pretty color…

If you don’t want to cuddle up onto that couch with those owls and all the pillows, I think there’s something wrong with you.  But wait!  The owls aren’t finished yet!

We’re pretty excited about our new calendar!  Especially now that we actually have social engagements and have things to write on it!  Another gift consisted of this, and Skittles (YAY! Skittles!):

I’ve been looking for a good candy dish for a long time now, but haven’t really found the “perfect one.”  Luckily, my mom did!  It’s owly AND green.  That gives anything double-score in our eyes!  We also got some candles which was wonderful!  We’ve been candle-fiends recently, partly because we don’t have any little lamps in the living room yet, and partly because we just love them.  We got some nice simple candle-holders from IKEA (where else?) and I’m falling in love!

And last, but definitely not least was my present from my secret camel!  The day before we opened the presents, we went to visit Andreas’s sister because she had cake leftover, and what better reason is there to get together for an evening than cake?  Anyway, she gave us the lovely gift of a baby-book!  It’s something we both wanted to do, and knew we wouldn’t keep keepsakes or write mementos if we didn’t have a structured book to put them into, so we were so happy!  And my secret camel (my little sister!) included the following in her gift! (along with a generous skein of green baby yarn!)

Baby’s first presents!  I keep cuddling the sleeper.  I can’t help it!  And finally, there was also two more big skeins of wool from my mom, which I already have plans for!  But first, I have to finish this little number:

Everything is so exciting right now!  Happy Ayyam-i-Ha!

Food Photos!

So to make up for a lot of posts about moving and my daily life, I thought I’d do a picture post of all the food I probably haven’t shown you yet, (and some I probably have but forgot).  Enjoy!

Mini Carrot Layer Cake

Quorn Salad

Doughnut dough

Mini Apple Pie

Pasta Salad

Potato Leek Casserole

Pretzels

Basic Scones

Apple Pie/Tart

Spinach Artichoke Macaroni and Cheese

Waffles!

I hope that was enough to tide you over for a while!

 

 

Putting Things Together

So as I said, over the weekend, we started putting together our IKEA things.  We’re still far from finished with all of it, but we did manage to get the sofa together, which is really the most important thing.  One of the worst moments in moving is when, after lifting heavy things and losing small things, you look around for a place to collapse for half a moment, and there are none, so you have to sit down on a box and hope it’s filled with sturdy, non-fragile things.  So, in an effort to avoid that moment, we put together the couch first.  It was a good decision.

That color of cover was on clearance, so although it’s not the nicest color, we can always buy a nicer one when we have a bit more cash on hand.  We were extremely glad we started with the couch because it went really smoothly and easily.  The bed that followed was a lot more complicated, and my thumb still hurts from those dang allen wrenches.  If we’d started with that, we’d have gone home long before the couch was finished, and wouldn’t have anything to collapse onto in times of moving distress!

Yesterday, we moved basically everything we have to the new place, so while we wait for it to have internet access, we’re basically staying in our apartment in Sweden as overnight guests.  It’s nice to be on the home stretch, and although we don’t have much food here, we’ll work it out.  I’m just excited to go back and do more organizing/cleaning/setting-up work!

A Favorite Place: Louhelen Baha’i School

Since I’m blogging every day in November, I thought I’d make use of the prompts given here to help me a bit, since housewifing around sometimes doesn’t generate that much blogging material (though I could take hourly progress photos of the cushion-cover I’m knitting…).  Anyway, today’s prompt was to justify the existence of one of my favorite places, things, or people.  Since I’m not the biggest fan of persuasive writing, I’m choosing to merely sing praises instead of justify existences, and one of my favorite places on the planet is Louhelen Baha’i School.

Now, the first time I went to Louhelen, I was 15.  I went there to do a few months of service (volunteer work) over the summer.  The summer had its ups and its downs, but it left a big impression on me.  Before I’d gone, I’d never had really any contact with another Baha’i my age (siblings not included), and realizing that there were other youth going through the exact same things as me really helped to solidify me as a Baha’i.  The support of the wonderful people I met helped me get through times when I might’ve veered away from the Faith, mostly in an attempt to feel like a normal teenager, and for that, I am really thankful.  I still keep in touch with most of the youth I met that summer, and am so glad I did.

I’m on the left, the other two were my “next-door neighbors.”

I didn’t end up going back to Louhelen for four years, but returned after my freshman year of college.  I was really excited to be back, but was also really shy upon my return, since the group of people serving changes every summer, and I didn’t know anyone.  I needn’t have been worried, however.  That summer got me through a bit of heart-ache that was still hanging on from back at school.  I met more of my now-best friends, and near the end of the summer, met Andreas.  So basically, Louhelen changed the course of my life (quite literally, veering it off into Europe isntead of the midwest, where it was headed).

But forget the big stuff, Louhelen is the place where I learned to fold fitted sheets, make enormous amounts of hummus, and clean public bathrooms (whoohoo!)  I loved working full-time in the industrial kitchen.  When I came back for the third time, I assumed the roll of resident baker and with my baking partner, would bake batches of 100 cupcakes, and make trifles when all else failed.  However, I have mysteriously few pictures of us working….but we did, I swear!

The above is the first picture I ever took of Andreas, shortly after meeting him.

We worked hard at Louhelen, but we also formed deep freindships, had sleepovers with a ridiculous amount of candy (I mean it)…

and we fell in love.  I’ll forever be indebted to Louhelen for introducing me to my husband and so many of the kindred spirits in my life.  I’ll never forget my three summers serving there, and even if I wanted to, I couldn’t!  I have a very handsome souvenier coming home to me every day.

We visited Louhelen again last summer, as my camera was on its very last legs

I love Louhelen.

A Day in the Life (with photos!)

So, nothing is happening on the apartment-finding front, but I’m trying my best to be optimistic about it!  Being optimistic about it means that I’m assuming we’ll soon be leaving here (though to be completely honest there’s a nagging black demon tugging on my amygdala and whispering that it’ll probably be months before we get a place to live).  Anyway, seeing as I have a (hopefully) short time left here in Sweden, I wanted to remember what daily life is like.  When I’m crazed with school and babies, I want to be able to remember “ohhh that’s what having free time was like…I wonder why I was so angsty about it…” So, without further ado: my Wednesday.

Now, I didn’t have the idea for this “day in the life of” post until mid-morning, so I don’t have pictures for the first part.  Fortunately for you, the day started with me going on the rainiest, coldest run and I came back red-faced from exertion and windburn, literally dripping all over the entrance and all the way into the shower, so it’s really a blessing that I didn’t take pictures of that.  Afterwards, I cleaned up what was left from knitting night the day before, and since before/after pictures are one of my favorite things, I went a little crazy with them…

Sometimes these before-and-afters help a lot to ease the discouragement that is keeping house.  I feel often like I do the same things over and over.  Every week I wash clothes, towels, sheets, blankets, un-do the bed, re-do the bed, vacuum, meal-plan, grocery-shop…and then there are the things I do every day (or multiple times a day) make food, clean up after food, prep for next day’s food etc.  It can be irritating at least, disheartening at its worst.  However, there’s always a reward.  Today’s in the form of cheesecake and knitting:

I usually sit a bit and watch a few programs on TV while I knit and/or choose to wander around the internet.  Today I managed to finish up my most recent project, a little cotton cardigan for my newest niece!

It ended up a lot bigger than I anticipated.  She’s less than a month old now, but I was knitting it to fit her when she’s about a year.  Turns out, it’ll probably fit her older sister seeing as…

I was going to make her older sister a matching shrug, but I think this one might be more appropriate for her, and I’ll make a tinier one for the baby…we’ll see.

After having been so productive (*snort*) I played around online and went through all the backlogs of this:

while enjoying my lunch:

This is where I become slightly ashamed of exactly how easy my life can be.  After lunch, I debated for a while whether to take a nap…or read my book.  Take a nap…….orrrrr….

Turns out I needn’t have worried my lady-of-leisure head over such a question because I ended up falling asleep while reading my book.  Gettin’ everything done.

Luckily, I had enough time after waking up to

before I went to go pick up Andreas!

When we got home, I made dinner, and promptly forgot about taking pictures of my day, so there are only two left!  One of dinner in-progress:

We spent a lot of the rest of the evening on IKEA.dk and IKEA.se comparing prices in Sweden and Denmark, and getting really, really excited for the big move.

Before bed, I read Harry Potter out loud (in Danish) to Andreas as usual.  We were almost done with the second book at 10:15 (Andreas’s bedtime is 10 PM) but decided that we couldn’t sleep without finishing it, and stayed up late reading about Harry’s adventure in the Chamber of Secrets.  We’re now one hundred pages into the third book, and I’m hoping that by the time we finish it, we’ll have found an apartment!  Pleasepleaseplease!

In other news, my sister-in-law Rebekka is coming for an impromtu visit this whole week, and then on Friday we’re going to my in-laws house to celebrate my father-in-law’s birthday!  I’mlooking forward to the time spent with family.  I miss Andreas’s family more and more when I’m away from them.  Today I talked to Rebekka for an hour over Skype (all in Danish!) and then later called his mom to ask her if I could borrow some of her knitting needles.  I know it doesn’t sound like much, but with my anxiety (especially over the phone, especially in Danish) it was a huge step for me to call her by myself, speak in Danish the whole time, and I was not nervous at all!

Progress!  Woohoo!

Now for a short aside:  Once when my sisters were cleaning their room, every time they got something accomplished, they would say “progress!  whoohoo!”  Now, every time I think of the progress I’m making, their voices ring in my head.

Cookies, Colds, and Being Really Frustrated

The 5k on Sunday was fantastic!  Unfortunately, it was also cold, and I seem to be welcoming fall with open arms and a very, very runny nose.  When I was really tired on Monday, I figured I was tired from the race.  On Tuesday, I wanted to keep up my momentum and went for a run.  It was awful.  I could hardly run, and couldn’t wait to come home.  Turns out, I was pretty sick.  The rest of my week looked like this:

I’m now at that point where I don’t think I’ll ever stop blowing my nose or recover from my earth-shattering sneezes, but…we’ll see.

We’re also dealing with challenges concerning our Danish visa process (they sent a letter asking me to come in next week, which I can’t do because I don’t have my Swedish visa, so I was asked to go to the embassy who told me they were booked solid the next month, and to call the Danish migration office.  Again.)  I handled it all pretty well until the embassy said they were booked and we couldn’t do it there.  Then I added watery puffy red eyes to my already shiny red nose after a healthy crying session.  We’ll make some more calls, and hopefully get it all figured out next week.

Last week, I had a sudden and intense craving for something baked.  I was also slammed with a truckload of emotions or hormones or something, an dwas convinced that I would be grumpy and mean until I got. some. cookies.  So I made some!  They didn’t help that much but, I mean, they helped a little.  They are cookies after all.

Sanity-Saving Chocolate Cupcakes

Things are still hard.  I’m still having good days, and bad days, and the occasional mental breakdown.  It’s about time to move again.  We were supposed to move next Wednesday, but we might be putting it off a few more weeks, as the person we’re subletting from might not be coming back.  Might.  Maybe.  Even though I’d like to stay here a bit longer before moving, all this uncertainty is getting to me.  It might not seem like a big deal, but amid all of the other uncertainty and “stuckedness” it’s really frustrating and disheartening.

There’s not much that seems to help sometimes when everything gets so overwhelming, but having little things to look forward to, and to take my mind of off whatever is happening (or not happening) in the big picture does perk me up a bit.  These chocolate cupcakes are exactly that.  Even Andreas loves them, and he doesn’t have nearly the sweet tooth that I have.  I’ve found that the people I’ve met here in general aren’t really big fans of frosting, but this one can capture anyone’s heart, and it has.  It’s more buttery and rich than sweet, and the cupcakes are wonderfully fluffy and chocolatey.

Now, as I’m making my way through another rough patch, I feel the urge to make these today.  These and soft pretzels…but we’ll see how far I get.  The cupcake recipe is the base of these delicious-looking hostess-style cupcakes.  When I baked them, they ended up perfectly domed on the top, and I decided they were better suited to a pile of silky frosting.

The buttercream recipe is the one my mom has always used that she got from her mom, and maybe that’s why these are so comforting to me.  With buttercream, it’s generally suggested that you let it sit out for a while before serving, so it can soften, but I’ve always preferred it straight from the refrigerator, and so does Andreas.  Something about the solidity of it melting slowly on my tongue is like a mix between frosting and ice cream, and brings me back to almost every birthday my family celebrated while we were growing up (which were many, because we were a family of nine!).

Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

1/4 cup (60 g) butter
2 Tbs. flour
2 Tbs. cocoa powder
3/4 cup milk (I used chocolate oat milk to make it extra-chocolatey and more Andreas-friendly)
1 tsp. vanilla (I use vanilla sugar)

Melt butter over low heat.  Add flour and cocoa powder, then gradually add milk.
Cook until it boils and thickens, stirring constantly.  Cool to room temperature (this is super important!  I usually put mine in the fridge for a while) and then add vanilla.

Cream 1/2 cup (120 grams) of softened butter with 1 cup sugar.  Add the “pudding” mixture and beat for about five minutes, until it reaches a nice spreadable consistency and all the sugar granules are dissolved.

 

Photo-a-Day July Digest #2

So, I’m not doing the *best* about keeping up with my photo-a-day…I slipped a lot when I had my visitor, and I’m still working to catch up, but I’m having lots of fun, and I’ve been working on some other things lately!  10. Your Favorite Color

11. Letter

12. Texture

13. Open

14. Building

15. Finger

16. Sign17. Your Addiction

18. Plate

 

 

July Photo-a-Day Digest #1

I decided to do photo-a-day again for July!  I took a break for June because I fell too far behind in May, but I missed taking pictures, and found I took far less pictures of other things when I wasn’t doing photo-a-day, so it’s back!

1. Self-portrait
2. Busy
3. Best Part of Your Day
4. Fun

Sooooo, I forgot to bring my camera to knitting group which was to be the subject of this picture, so I don’t have one.  However, I will say that during knitting group, we talked about visas, childbirth, stolen bicycles, weddings, yoga, childbirth (some more, one of the girls who comes regularly is pregnant), a tribe somewhere who believes that babies are actually made up of an accumulation of sperm inside the mother’s uterus (believe it or not we have talked about this every single time I’ve been to knitting group, except for one), and…….oh, yes: knitting.  Briefly.

5. On the Floor
6. Chair
7. Garden
8. Lunch

Anniversary Post Part 2

Yesterday I did a sort of look-back-over-the-year anniversary post, and while those were things I definitely wanted to say, I also wanted to do something a little more light-hearted!  I also wanted to share some pictures from the wedding last year, and a bit about what we did to celebrate.

As per usual, I made Andreas a little gift:

The short one’s me.

Even though our anniversary wasn’t until Monday, we decided to celebrate early and have a picnic in the park on Saturday.  We found a perfect little secluded corner, the weather was perfect, and we bathed in the sun (and sunscreen) for the first time this summer.  We also got to watch some fearless goose-families who surrounded us while grazing.

Our first wedding anniversary was celebrated in the same spirit as our wedding was a year ago–calm, laid-back, and not a huge deal (at least that’s how I remember it…)  I love going back and looking at all the pictures from that day, and I thought I’d share some (maybe a lot) here.  You might notice that my family isn’t in any of the pictures. Don’t worry, they haven’t shunned me for marrying a Dane!  My family is very spread out, and I knew from the beginning that no matter where we got married, most if not all of my family wouldn’t be able to come.  I wasn’t sad that nobody could make it, but I do remember feeling a bit sad that nobody there was there for only me.  Still, knowing I had my family’s support and love from far away meant a lot, and our wedding day was really perfect.

I didn’t pick necessarily the *best* photos to post here, but some of the ones that capture what I remember most about the day, or that mean the most to me.

Me playing Fruit Slice while the girls did my hair

Just after being pronounced husband and wife

My mother-in-law made the wedding cake, a friend of hers, a retired chef, made the dinner, I crocheted little flowers for the favors, my friends who came early helped pick out the flowers, candles, and tablecloths.  We spent time together folding the napkins, sorting bags of gummi bears into individual colors, and making cupcakes.  It felt intimate and cozy, and was practically stress-free.  In fact, I think that the moment that I felt the most anxiety that day was when Andreas and I were waiting together to come out for the ceremony, and we couldn’t tell if our entrance song or the “sitting-down-time” song was playing.  For the record, it was our entrance song, and we were a good 3 minutes late to our own ceremony.

It’s nice to remember how excited I was to have the words “my husband” roll off my tongue, and how giddy and happy I was to start our life together.  In the midst of the worry and stress of everyday (and not so everyday) life, it’s a good reminder of how very worth it this will be.