Language

I wonder when Little Girl’s Swedish will catch up to her English. She was just three when we moved here, and now, almost two years later, she’s finally gotten less shy about speaking Swedish, but her language skills are more par with a two-year-old. She has an American accent, a limited vocabulary, and makes a lot of non-native (not little kid-variety) grammar errors. People who don’t know her, or even who do, often don’t understand her when she speaks Swedish at all (I have no trouble except when she breaks out kid-type words she learned at playschool). Also, oddly, there are certain sounds she can pronounce easily in English (e.g. /v/) which she somehow can’t in Swedish. While she’s definitely improving, has even started talking to herself in Swedish when she plays, and has pretty much stopped speaking English entirely when at playschool, at least from what I’ve been told, Little Girl has been referred to a speech therapist to see what we can do to help her so she’ll be more prepared when she starts school next year. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her in terms of competence—her English is evidence of that—but if she can have some extra support, that would be great.

I do what I can for her Swedish, mostly in the form of reading library books and having her in playschool and in a few other activities in order to get more exposure to the language. A few months ago I also decided to make more of an effort to speak only Swedish with Swedish people, even if we’ve previously communicated only in English, even if they keep trying to talk to me in English, at least when Little Girl is around, with the idea that it would encourage Little Girl to feel more comfortable with the language and normalize its usage, and I think that’s really helped. Or maybe it was just seeing my attitude change (I’ve also been trying to integrate more and stop complaining about Sweden and Swedes in her earshot. Not that I have been super-successful with these goals.)

Husband still mostly speaks to her in English, as well as his parents (I have no idea why and I can’t get them to stop). I’m sure the speech therapist will have a thing or two to say about that. (They do speak Swedish to the baby, so maybe he’ll have an easier road.)

But my role is really to model English for her. Lately she’s starting making Swedish-sourced errors sometimes in her English, like calling all buildings “houses” or using Swedish words with English grammar or vice versa. I try to restate whatever she said in standard English. (I do that with her English errors too, of course). When she starts school we do plan to make use of Sweden’s school system’s offering instruction to immigrant children a few hours a week in their native language. And it’s harder for children to learn to read English than Swedish (what with English’s whackadoodle spelling) so we’ll probably do extra work on that at home if she ever gets interested in learning to read (so far that’s a big No.)

I hope–and I suppose there’s no reason to suppose this won’t happen—she will be fully fluent in all areas of communication in both Swedish and English and that she can go on to university and work and whatever else she will do in either the US or Sweden seeming just as much the native speaker in both. She’s had kind of a weirdly slow start with Swedish (to be honest my Swedish is significantly better than hers, and I don’t mean in an adult vs. kid kind of way) but there’s no reason she won’t catch up. If she does end up with an accent, it could actually be when she speaks English. That’s honestly what concerns me the most, my American-born daughter ending up not sounding like me at all!

Bragging on my baby

Baby Brother is an ambitious four-month-old. He can roll over; he can sit unassisted (up to 30 seconds before tipping over); and although he fails 100% of the time, he keeps doggedly trying to—of all things—stand up and walk. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Or rather, the flesh has no clue what to do, but he’s strong enough to push his fat little self up and then sort of lunge towards his sister, his goal.

Such a special baby I’ve got. I love his fat little cheeks and his tubby little legs; his damp, smiley little face and his bright blue eyes. I just can’t get over how lucky I am. I get to look at this sweet little face all day! (It would be nice if I didn’t have to look at it quite as much at night, what with his frequent need for pacifier replacement, but that’s a small price to pay.) Feeling fortunate.

Deprivation is the mother of invention

Husband was lately converted to the cult of Apple products, so of course he has an iPad. Little Girl gets to play with it sometimes. She is alarmingly good at Angry Birds and there are several math and physics and reading educational games she likes to play, too. Much to her disappointment, however, she’s not allowed to play in the iPad as much as she would like (i.e. continuously, without limit). As a result she’s recreated apps on her GlowDoodle. At this point I think she actually prefers her own “iPad” now. She can play with it as much as she wants, and it has endless possibilities! Not to mention it’s purple.

Swedish baby food practices

This week during my mothers’ group a nutritionist came to talk to us about introducing our babies to solid foods. All of the babies are just four months old and so I was extremely surprised to discover that every single one of us–yes, including me–have already started our babies with solids. And the nutritionist thought this was great and appropriate.

In the US there is a huge push to wait until six months, and I dutifully waited until nearly seven with Little Girl, but with Baby Bro I started earlier (he was eating massive quantities of formula; he was desperately disappointed we weren’t sharing our meals; he’s on the large size for his age). I was feeling kind of defensive about it, though, (despite the pediatric nurse saying it was best to follow his interest) until I learned at that gathering that that’s the norm here in Sweden anyway. Lots of people even start with “smakportioner” (little tastes) earlier than four months.

There were some other notable differences in baby feeding guidelines that caught my attention. We were advised:

–start with mashed potato, parsnips, or turnips
–add olive oil, butter, or margarine to baby food
–no leafy green vegetables under one year
–introduce gluten-containing foods by age six months
–starting at ten months, babies can drink regular milk, as long as it is low fat
–from four to six months, when the quantities are small, babies can have salted adult-style food
–you don’t need to wait several days between trying new foods to see if babies react allergically
–formula and välling (which I believe is a formula/cereal hybrid) are equally fine as baby’s main food (if not breastfeeding, or in supplementation)

There was nothing about rice cereal. I don’t even think they sell it here.

Some of the other tips were not that different from what I remember being told in the US (e.g. try vegetables before fruits, try the same food multiple times before deciding the baby doesn’t like it). There was no real discussion of Baby-Led Weaning (skipping purees and going straight to finger foods) but I think that’s because all of our babies are too small to feed themselves at this point. I largely did that method with Little Girl and it was easy and fun, though.

I’m not sure why the Swedes are not pushing the wait-until-six-months thing that the WHO recommends and which is such a benchmark of educated and careful motherhood in certain circles in the US, but it’s nice to know the thing I thought made sense for my baby is completely accepted here.

Baby Bro’s tried tiny bits of several different foods so far (notably potato, mango, banana, and oatmeal) and though sometimes it seems like he’s not eating the food so much as redistributing it around his person, he is super-psyched to join in our activities at the kitchen table (finally, they’re sharing!), and that really seems like the important part.

Don’t get carpet in Sweden

In the 70′s everybody in Sweden ripped out their carpeting. They also go rid of their tubs, also on the theory that they were unsanitary. It’s still very common for a house to have no tub, just a shower, and often that shower is not on the floor with the bedrooms. (It’s weird.) Until we renovated, the only place to bathe in our house was in the basement. True story.

For the most part I agree about carpeting, that it can get kind of grody. But it’s also really nice to have on stairs and where children are playing. A lot of stairways in Sweden are rickety-seeming, twisty, slippery, wooden, death traps. Our house, however, had a carpeted stairs and landing. Nice, except that it was the oldest, grossest, carpeting known to man, all black and green and disintegrating and smelling strongly of decades of dogs.

So it was one of the first things we had replaced. And at first the new carpet looked great. But then it started looking, well, bubbly. We got the people out to look at it, and they claimed we were mistaken to expect carpet to look flat “like a mirror.” Husband set them straight, and a few months later they replaced it, adding a new sub-floor.

Except they either did not order enough carpet the second time around, or some of it was damaged in delivery (we heard various stories), but at any rate there was not enough carpet for the bottom stair. They patched together seven pieces of remnants and expected us to be satisfied, but once again, Husband set them straight.

They avoided us for a while, but eventually were persuaded to install the carpet a third time. Disappointingly, the carpet we liked was no longer being manufactured (which is why they couldn’t have just ordered more carpet for that last step) so we had to pick something new out. It was boring and brown, but at this point we weren’t feeling picky. The top carpet-installer guy refused to come to our home a third time, so they sent some other guy. He sucked at carpet installing. The edges are somewhat uneven in places and it is driving me nuts. I bet I could have done a better job. But we don’t want to go through the torture of a fourth carpet job so we are just going to live with it, I suppose.

I guess carpet is installed so seldom in Sweden nobody really knows how to do it.

Husband did the rest of the work renovating the stairs (new dry wall, paint, railings, and painted trim) and it looks really nice.

The dryer

When we bought this house from my in-laws we inherited their washer and dryer. They were low-capacity and, in the case of the dryer, 20 years old, so when Husband renovated the laundry room we got a new set.

I can’t really complain about the washing machine (except that it’s way slower than any American machine would ever dare to be), but from the beginning I had the most trouble with the dryer. It was astoundingly reluctant to dry things—its only task. It seemed like it thought its job was to make everything smell moldy instead, and it was great at that. But the energy-efficiency of the appliance was compromised by the fact that it would take seven hours of drying effort to dry one load.

Husband, who does not do the laundry, kept telling me that I couldn’t expect an European-style energy-efficient dryer to be as awesome as what I was used to in the US, but it still seemed wrong that the dryer couldn’t even dry one sole item during a single cycle. I started to suspect that either there was a conspiracy in Europe to get people to just hang up all their laundry instead of using a dryer by making dryers total crap, or there was something actually wrong with the damn thing.

Finally I convinced Husband to get somebody out to look at it. First the man told me the problem was due to the full lint traps. “But I empty both of them every time!” He showed me three additional lint traps sprinkled throughout the machine. (Guess I should have read the manual.)

But when I told him it had worked poorly from the beginning, before there could have been any substantial build-up of lint (by the way, what color is your dryer lint? For a color load mine is always purple-grey.), he looked some more. He told me something technical I did not understand in Swedish, and said he’d come back next week with a new something-or-other.

He came back. He replaced the something-or-other, but that didn’t solve the problem. He came back the next week with some other mystery replacement part, and finally, lo and behold, the laundry is dry in just one cycle! Not hot and bone-dry, but not, you know, still actually wet. It seems like a miracle!

Innocents abroad

During college I studied abroad in Spain for a term. While there, I decided I was urgently in need of a shower poof. Maybe using the bidet to wash the dust off my feet every afternoon wasn’t cutting it for me anymore, I don’t know.

When I got to El Corte Inglés and didn’t see any shower poofs on display anywhere I decided to ask someone who worked there. I button-holed a well-dressed sales lady. As I had no idea what a shower poof might be called in Spanish, I had to try to describe it. “I need a ball of net, like to catch fish? But it is also like a sponge.” Then I helpfully added, “So that I can put ham on myself in the shower.”

Because in Spanish “ham” is just one letter away from “soap.” And I frequently got them mixed up.

I didn’t realize I had told this poor woman I wanted to purchase fishing equipment in order, somehow, to adorn myself, nude, in pig meat, so when she looked alarmed and perplexed I just figured my accent was the problem.

“I want to put ham on myself? To smell good?” I repeated slowly and cheerfully. “Perhaps a ball of net is available in many pretty colors and has a little rope? Where can I purchase this item? Is it near the toothpaste?”

I never did find a shower poof in Spain.

Celebrations

This year we’ll be enjoying three Christmases. My mother and her husband came for the holidays (and, well, left already) and we had a little celebration with them.

Next, on Christmas Eve, will be Swedish Christmas, which Husband’s family (his parents, his siblings, their spouses and children) celebrates in the standard Swedish way. Big midday meal, a smörgåsbord if you will: ham, meatballs, sausages, red cabbage, pickled herring, lox, Julmust (Christmas soda), mulled wine, beer, hard liquor, Saint Lucy saffron buns, homemade chocolate candy, and gingerbread cookies.

And Rice Krispie treats because that is, I kid you not, what they requested I bring. Not my American Christmas favorite, the labor-intensive, pretty, and delicious three-layer peppermint brownies, the recipe for which was my grandmother’s, but plain old Rice Krispie treats, which have just three ingredients, require only a microwave, and take ten minutes. I’d made them for Little Girl’s birthday party or something in the past and the Swedes were just totally enchanted by what they interpreted as a fancy, exotic delicacy, and now it’s the only thing they request from me.

Anyway, after the food will be Donald Duck. I know that sounds weird, but the entire nation of Sweden watches old, badly-dubbed Disney cartoons at 3 PM on Christmas Eve. Then Santa (aka Tomte, aka Farfar, aka the children’s grandfather) will visit. Personally I think it is kind of weird to have a real Santa come in your front door—it seems hard to keep up the illusion that he is “real” when it is obvious it is their grandfather in a costume—but it’s fun nonetheless and maybe less creepy than the American version.

After that the four of us will come home and put out milk and cookies for Santa to come, well, again, to our house, down the chimney, in the night, in secret, with his reindeer, like he’s supposed to, because the next day will be American Christmas, with the whole waking-up-to-filled-stockings-and-big-presents tradition. My favorite! So that’ll be nice.

Last week I took the children to see Santa. He was at our regular grocery store/building supply store. The two times I have done this in Sweden it has been much simpler and nicer than in the US. No waiting in line, no exchange of money, you can take as many pics as you want. This year the guy was very fun and spoke English, putting Little Girl at ease, and had a helper who made a candy-based Christmas-ornament craft with her. We hung out for a while with Santa—on a Saturday afternoon right before Christmas—and no other kids showed up!

And the shortest day of the year has passed, meaning from here on out there will be more and more light every day. Also very exciting!

The Darkness in Sweden

Usually when people complain about how dark it is in Sweden they are complaining about the winters. And while it’s true it can be a downer when nightfall arrives shortly after lunchtime, that’s really just a couple of months out of the year and is not a big issue for me.

No, what I can’t stand is the darkness inside. Swedish people seem to have something against overhead lighting. It’s very common to have lit just a dim little lamp in a window, maybe a few scattered tea lights, and no other lighting whatsoever, even if it’s pitch black outside, even if you’re eating, especially if you have company, even if you are in a hospital or school, even if children are playing and can barely see where the toys are it’s so damn dark.

Swedish people think this is “mysigt” or “cozy.” I think it is demoralizing and creepy. I am not interested in a romantically candlelit parent-teacher conference or obstetrical waiting room (no hyperbole), and I really hate it when people are serving me food and I can’t for the life of me make out what it is. I like having lights on. It feel it counteracts the darkness, not complements it. I feel like it acknowledges my presence in a space. It feels welcoming. I have partially adopted the decorative-windowsill-lamp esthetic, but I also put on the overhead light.

Nonetheless, all winter long here people can and do live a life lit solely by what are basically nightlights. Some people don’t even install overhead lighting. (What I can’t figure out is how they see to clean anything in the winter.) I know they think I am just as weird by putting lights on all the time, that it’s wasteful and glaring (though it’s not like I don’t turn them off when I leave a room). I’ve actually had guests turn off lights at my house, I guess automatically, because apparently having the lights on is just as uncomfortable to them as having them off is for me. At one dinner party it was like a game: I walked into the room, turned on the lights. A Swedish person walked into the room, turned off the lights. I went to the kitchen, brought something back, turned on the lights. A Swedish person turned off the lights. (I gave up as I was outnumbered.) Now I leave the overhead lights off when we are hosting Swedes (though this makes me feel like my vacuuming and dusting efforts were in vain).

Little Girl has started to get into the Swedish spirit of things, turning off the kitchen table lamp or playing in the utter blackness of her room. I’m always saying stuff like, “I’m not going to sit around trying to put together a puzzle in the dark.” But I guess I should be glad one of us us integrating into Swedish society.

The plague upon us

Three weeks ago Husband got sick and never fully got better. Two weeks ago I got sick. Then the baby. Next Little Girl, who also now has an ear infection, her first, and who is just miserable. All night long we keep each other awake coughing, taking turns. Have you ever seen a tiny little baby cough and sneeze and snuffle? It’s the saddest goddamn thing, especially when it’s three AM and it’s been an hour and he still can’t settle back to sleep. And then once he does go back to sleep, you keep yourself awake another hour with your own coughing, and then you get to listen to everyone else. Not the best of times.

The animals in our house

We have two gigantic ten-year-old dogs, a sibling pair named Loki and Freya, whom we brought with us when we moved to Sweden. While they are gentle and sweet, they have a major behavioral issue we have never trained out of them and which seems to be getting worse: they steal food and destroy random things.

I’ve kept a list of recent items they have eaten/chewed up. This is not including trash, which they attack at any opportunity, or food we have accidentally left out on the table or counter-tops (they are really tall).

a banana
an entire box of sugar cubes
a rubber-backed rug
a pair of leather gloves
a waterproof mitten
a roll of toilet paper
a pacifier
a full box of chocolate milk powder
a previously-killed mouse
a lime

Really, dogs? A lime? Have you no standards at all?

Without going into gross-out detail, let me just mention that because neither dog has an iron stomach, the fall-out of their massacring these things is never just the absence of the above-mentioned item. “Ew” would be an understatement.

+++

We also have mice, at least in the wintertime. I TOTALLY FUCKING HATE THE MICE. I hate their poop all over the recycling in the basement. I hate their poop all over the stroller I stored down there. I hate their poop on the cellar windowsills. It is so gross. And we can’t seem to get rid of the damn things. We set traps, we kill mice, more mice show up. I’m seriously considering getting a cat just to deal with this problem.

But then with our luck I’m sure we’d end up getting a cat that likes to scratch up furniture and pee on the carpet.

Snapshot

It would be hard for this old country house we live in to have more rooms. Many of them are tiny, and are sort of off-shoots of other rooms, but there are nice big ones. A family room, a formal living room, the kitchen. But that doesn’t stop us from spending most of our time in the hallway.

I’m not sure if it’s because it’s carpeted or what, but the landing at the top of the stairs that is sort of the common area of the bedrooms has become the de facto play room, though Little Girl’s room is a hot spot, too. Its renovation is still not completed but it’s comfortable enough. It’s pretty much where I spend my day.

In the picture you can see some very standard Swedish decor elements: the lights in the window are always there, and the Christmas decorations are the hanging lighted star, the tomte (Santa/Elf creature) and the julbock (goat made of straw). The door goes to a balcony. In nice weather we set up an easel there and Little Girl can paint while overlooking the valley. I guess at some point we’ll have to add a baby gate to the top of the stairs, and maybe someday I will finish painting the other half of that bookcase and set it on top.

In the picture Little Girl is playing with her kitty and her Official German Christmas Dog, which is her favorite toy, though she sleeps with Panda, which is fine with me because that dog is filthy and she won’t let me wash him. A few years back Husband bought it for her when he was in Europe for work. And Baby Brother is trying to figure out how to suck his thumb. It is proving challenging.