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.