What Blogging Is Not About

It is not about over three months of silence. Life has taken over, instead. It’s a shame that it gets in the way, but I suppose I shouldn’t complain. It does, though, nag at me that I have been quiet of late, something I hope to rectify.

Zelda is now nine months old, and time is flying by. She is as sweet as I could have imagined, a truly wonderful being to have in our lives. Freya is loving and proud, too. The usual milestones have been passed: saying “Mamma”, mouthing a fish sound when asked, as well as knowing what a microwave says (beep, beep, beep).

Her love of water is almost fanatical, splashing around ecstatically like a wind-up toy when we go to swim-school; her love of tasting new food is wonderful to see, especially loving an apple and lentil soup that Freya and Edla made the other day.

She’s started to walk around with our help, and a few weeks ago she started crawling; she eats everything she picks up from the floor, something we never experienced with Freya.

Children are brilliant.

Four Months with Zelda

It’s now four months since Zelda came into our world. We had no idea what to expect having a second child, and were ready for a total upheaval. And yet, four months in, our lives have not been changed very much at all.

Since Zelda’s arrival things have been running quite smoothly – Freya’s four-year old moods withstanding – and she has been a fantastically easygoing baby, happy to be. We still have our own time when they both get to sleep before 8pm, and when she’s awake there are relatively few moments that require any real effort. But I suppose it’s all relative.

Freya was a joy as a baby. We felt we were blessed to have a first child. And then when Z came we had difficulties believing that anyone could be calmer than our beloved Freya. But so it was.

Everything is going so quickly that it is hard to imagine Zelda as a newborn. Looking at other babies I cannot fathom that Z was once so small and fragile.

As a newcomer I thought, when wrinkles were more prominent, that she looked a bit like how I remember uncle Stan to be (he’s not dead – I just haven’t seen him for many years).

And then Jo pointed out the similarities to the “real” Princess Zelda…

The Fly Incident

We are up in Jämtland on our annual holiday, and I’ve just been part of something that for many would be a once in a lifetime experience.

The family were at the local “byakamp” (where teams from local villages compete in a sort of pentathlon type thing), and were sitting outside having a few drinks. A fly landed casually on my arm, walked about a bit, and then departed, leaving a very small poo in its wake.

I have never studied fly-poo before, but I am almost certain that is what it was. Maybe it had contracted leprosy and left behind one of its feet or a chunk of abdomen, but it looked round and definitely poo-like.

I feel slightly violated, or at least degraded by this event. Flies do not understand the niceties we humans expect of each other, and it was only doing what comes naturally, so I feel no malice towards a creature that is probably now long dead; however, being literally shat on is unpleasant, however it occurs.

We Are Newsworthy

Well, it took forty years, but I finally got myself in one of the national newspapers. Best of all, I did it without sadistically murdering someone and eating their pubic-hair, which appears to be an increasingly easy way into the headlines nowadays.

Nope. Jo, Freya and I got into the DN Sunday supplement for just being, really, though more specifically for being vegan. But don’t let the Sunday supplement suffix fool you, my non-existent readers; the DN is a newspaper of distinction here in Sweden, equivalent to The Times, Telegraph or the slightly inferior Guardian. And although the Sundayness of it implies a jauntier, lifestyle feel, one should still consider it a worthy contribution to the journalistic world.

Lotten, our neighbour and (after her decision to base an article on us) admirer good friend wrote an article about four families and their different ways of saving the planet. Not that I’d ever seen myself in the same light that some do Superman, and I would never vocally make such claims, though it is of course well-deserved (if not a bit embarrassing) to receive such accolade from the rest of society. I would obviously not even try to compare our “work” with the great names (like Gandhi), though unlike Gandhi we continue our fight without the fame-game he and his ego were involved in. No, we are more comparable with the likes of the Nobel Prize winners (which Gandhi has never won, by the way), I would say, than to the star-struck elite who go on and on like a broken record about their “plight”.

The article did a very good job of making us (and thereby vegans) look normal, approachable and a little bit cool. I’d had a good idea of what I wanted to get across, which, despite the lack of column space, I think we manged to do quite well. Anyway, hats off to Lotten, who did a splendid job.

Mission To Sigtuna

We went on a mission today to Sigtuna.

Without our usual co-pilot, Chris.

We’re………sorry, Chris.

In our defence it was more of a mini-mission, Sigtuna being neither that far away nor that big a place. Also, I don’t reckon Chris would mind, since I believe he’s currently diving in Egypt. Still, it did feel treacherous, and we had to console ourselves by eating pommes-frites and onion rings when we got there.

Sigtuna is a quaint village situated by Lake Malar, the third biggest lake in Sweden. It’s one of those touristy places that, despite having lots of modern shops strewn along its main road, still manages to blend them into the surrounding architecture without it being too much of an eyesore.

In fact the only eyesore we saw was a seashore t-shirt store. Actually it wasn’t, but once I saw a tongue-twister on the horizon my animal instincts took over. No, the only eyesore in the rustic village of Sigtuna was the brutally bleak crazy-golf course. Seemingly designed by a clinically depressed Puritan who had got a degree in drawing straight lines, thereafter eschewing his education because drawing lines was too much fun, I think I’d find more enjoyable things to do if I were locked in a white windowless room with a golf ball and a knife with which to stab myself repeatedly in the eyes.

Apart from that it was a wonderfully relaxing day out that all the family seemed to appreciate.