Good news! It’s been a year now since I last got pregnant, not that that worked out, and I think I may actually finally be mildly interested in getting pregnant again! After the miscarriage I was stunned, then overwhelmed with the move, then apathetic and frankly too busy at the beach to care, then in a bit of denial, and now a little ready.

Not that it matters, since I won’t. I mean, hello, we’re in the middle of an international move. Sweden’s national health plan also won’t cover your pregnancy if it starts before you get enrolled. And just a few months after getting there I’d like to start an intensive year-long course in Swedish, after which I’ll need to go through the teaching (re)certification process. And then there’s the renovations we want to do. And passing the Swedish driving exam. Plus learning how to drive manual. That last one’s like a full-time job. Not really a good time to see about creating new life to care for.

But Little Girl’s three-and-a-half already. And let’s see, we wait another year-and-a-half or so to try, I get pregnant in a reasonable time-frame, I actually stay pregnant and don’t have to start over, then the baby’s born…I don’t know, that’s a lot of math, but that’s a really long time from now! Little girl’s car seat will totally have expired by then. I don’t want to buy a new one! I don’t think you realize how expensive that thing was.

And I’m starting to like babies a little bit (blame our one friend here; she has a two-week-old that never cries! It just gurgles and grabs your finger! Aww!). I’ve looked at old videos of Little Girl, too. She was so cute! If you leave breastfeeding out of it, maybe babies aren’t so bad! They can’t run away when you want to cuddle them!

Even if I decided not to do such a hardcore Swedish language program, which is my main mental obstacle to getting pregnant in the next year-and-a-half, Husband isn’t anxious to have babies. He wasn’t with Little Girl, either–it wasn’t an unbearable need for him like it was for me–though of course she’s the absolute center of his life now. Her fleeting preschool whim is his command. I’m not worried about that. He’d get on board.

But there are a lot of potential pitfalls here. The isolation of a new baby (not that I had that with Little Girl, but I have no idea about Sweden) wouldn’t be a good combo with a new country with a foreign language. Hello, postpartum depression! And Husband is having a hard time finding a job there (he’s been looking) that doesn’t require a lot of travel. Can you imagine–winter dark and cold, preschooler with cabin fever, no friends, stupid incomprehensible language, can’t drive, half-finished kitchen, bathroom with no bathing apparatus, all alone in the countryside, fussy newborn who fears and loathes my breasts? Holy shit.

That’s the worst-cast scenario. Maybe things could go differently. It’ll be a while before it makes any sense to roll the dice on this one, anyway. But it feels a little healing to want to hold a baby, even if I still have to hand it back immediately if it starts to even look like it might want to fuss.

2009 has been rather dramatically unpleasant for us. I even kept a list of reasons why:

high-risk and expensive pregnancy
extended and expensive miscarriage
weird and expensive horseback-riding situation
moved
moved really quickly
got rid of most possessions
left friends
left good teaching job
Husband traveling all the damn time to Europe
Husband commuting five hours every week
Husband work stress
my work stress
realtor problems
lost lots of money selling house
cat Tang died
Husband car accident
moving to Sweden stress and worry
roofing scam
lemon dishwasher
driveway problems
lost my glasses
constant construction/yardwork etc. noise in neighborhood
beach house living weirdness with mom
chronic arthritis pain
grandmother’s Alzheimer’s decline
granddaddy’s strokes and decline
money continually going away
two speeding tickets
broken washing machine, useless dryer

Nothing on here about Little Girl, though. So that’s good. On to 2010! It has its own massive set of risk factors, but I guess it might be okay.

It’s the end of the year and it seems like a good time to clean out my Drafts folder again and try to figure out, from cryptic notes and sometimes absent titles, what I meant to post about but did not. Usually very sensibly:

Ersatz
It starts like this, “A friend of mine, way overeducated for it, is a nanny. Her current employer has gotten all whack-jobby so she wants something new but, due to the above-mentioned whack-jobbiness, she’s nervous about” and there I stopped, below it posting a redacted version of all the back story my friend wanted to me to use while I was being her fake job reference. I had no problem with the lie: the details were what made me nervous. I’ve actually been a fake reference before, for a friend who was applying to the police force in NYC! Neither time was I called. It’s been a bit of a let-down, really. I remember once when I was doing hiring for my social work job, I called a reference and it turned out, I could tell from the answering machine, that the applicant was using her roommate as her “former boss.” The best part of this story is the social work agency was so hard-up for employees they hired the unsavvy fake-reference lady anyway.

Sick
“Omigod, I have some horrible illness that just causes high fever (102!) but no obvious symptoms (no coughing, sniffling) so no one is sympathetic. Not that it matters, since Husband had to go out of town for work again anyway. I’ve got my fever down to 100 so at least I no longer feel like I am near death.” That was a really brief illness because I think I was better within six hours of starting that draft. But I really did feel bad!

Correct
“I correct other people’s children.” Yep, it’s true. I was probably going to to on to describe specific incidences of this behavior. Hm, maybe that’s why we haven’t made any friends here.

Really good gossip about people you don’t know
Wow, I really wish I knew what this was supposed to be about! I love gossip!

Evolution
Aha, I’m not going to reprint it here, but you can imagine what follows: I’m trying, but not too hard, to be sympathetic to evolution doubters, and to explain why they are wrong. But that was way too overambitious for a post.

Passport
Oh, this was supposed to refer to this excellent post about infertility and expound on the comment I left there: “I’m a mother after infertility (2.5 years) and loss (one) and am more bemused by all the effortless fertility around me. However, the more I talk to people (and I am really open about the infertility–I always mention it in the kinds of conversations you mention above) the more I see many other people have had those problems, and if not those, then others. And I don’t feel like I am less a member of the motherhood community. Honestly it makes me feel MORE like one–like for crying out loud I WORKED to be here, I deserve it. Now when I was going through infertility, I was totally miserable and uncomfortable with fertility, but now I’m like, eh. And I’ll be honest about something else: I am a little happy that I am not so fertile and don’t have two under two accidentally now or whatever. There are some benefits!”

Religion: I just don’t get it
Again, obvious. This is how I started: “As Steven Weinberg said, ‘With or without religion you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.’ “

Awesome and Swedish all at the same time
Let them sing it for you!

What’s on her mind
A transcription of one of Little Girl’s monologues

(no title)
“At just barely three years old, Little Girl has caught on to irregular past tense verbs. “You bought that at the store, mommy!” When talking about our late cat Tang,” and that’s as far as I got. I guess writing about irregular past tense verbs is boring.

Help
Oh yes, I remember this. I wrote this whole long post about something from my past and then realized I’d already basically written that post before.

Seattle trip 2009
This is a bunch of pictures that I worked on uploading and ordering forever, before realizing I wasn’t uploading them to the private blog I keep for family.

Public work
Here we have a comparison of my two jobs and an inevitable complaint. I bet you are super-disappointed I never posted it!

Defending Sweden
Well, that certainly doesn’t sound like me.

Scary
Again something positive about Sweden. When did I write all these posts? “You know, none of this emigrating-to-Sweden business was intended to be analogous to the I’m-gonna-move-to-Canada musings many people professed during the Bush years, but it’s starting to be very troubling, even frightening, to me that right-wing domestic terrorism is, like, normal now. I feel compelled to point out that you don’t see liberals killing people who work perfectly legal jobs that they nonetheless don’t approve of. These hate-filled murderers are, to my mind, unable to cope with modernity, so act out in primitive ways.” But that’s a little mean, so I didn’t post it.

Mice on bikes*
?????????

Good things
You know me, so surely you aren’t surprised I didn’t have any actual text to go with that optimistic of a title.

The Handyman
I was writing about the handyman at the beach house, and how, in Husband’s absence Little Girl was getting attached to him and how sweet that was, but then I got all pissed of at how slowly he works and didn’t want to say anything nice.

You can’t bring it with you
Things the internet says you can’t buy in Sweden:
Adult-size broom
Large trash cans and garbage bags
Underwear if you wear over a size 10
Baby powder
Chocolate chips
Ziplock baggies
Baking soda

Posting to other blogs
Before my camera broke, I was getting really into taking pictures of things and sending them into snarky blogs. Like this one about apostrophes.

Okay, I am getting bored with this activity. There are 51 drafts left! If I posted as often as I began a post I would break the internet!

PS: Bloglines seems to be pretending my blog doesn’t exist again, but it really, really does!

So I haven’t been posting under the “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” guide to human communication. Just a lot of stress and illness here. Money worries. Work issues. Nothing major. It could be worse, but when did knowing that ever make anyone feel better? So my gift to you is not to moan biliously all over your holiday spirit, should you be possessed of any.

+++

Little Girl is doing well. She now likes to assign rotating names, like “Steeny, Ganina, Sito, and Loli” to her toys. Lately she’s been talking a lot about “Fweeden” and our various relatives there, with whom we’ve been talking on the webcam more often. She and her four-year-old cousin A have managed, characteristically of children, to play together despite physical and linguistic boundaries, and that’s neat to watch. Little Girl really has quite the imagination; she can be entertained merely by her own two hands for twenty-minute stretches at a time, in which they talk to each other (did you know her hands were boys?) and gambol about.

Originally, she has wanted a a remote-control helicopter from Santa. When we saw such an item in action at a family party, though, it was clear this would not be the right toy for her, and since she was kind of scared of the thing in close quarters, she agreed. Instead, she wanted a cow. Uh. So I suggested what I, as her mother, know would be a big hit with her–a baby doll you can wash in the tub–and, possessed of a high order of self-awareness, Little Girl wholeheartedly agreed. We “called Santa” to change her order. After quite a lot of research, I settled on one and ordered it and it came and I am SUPER, SUPER EXCITED about this dolly. She’ll love it.

She’s taken after my grandmother, who is constantly calling out “yoo hoo!” when she’s looking for my grandfather (which is her primary occupation, never remembering where he is if he’s not right in front of her). Now when Little Girl wants attention, it’s “hoo hoo! hoo hoo!” until you pay it. It always works since I find it so endearing.

Oh, and I discovered a solution to her tangly bedhead hair and the complaints I get when I comb it out: a braid at all times. My little girl has a hairdo! So grown up!

I guess it’s Sweden Week because here’s another post on the topic. Maybe that’s because it’s about to be MY LAST AMERICAN CHRISTMAS. Did you know they open their presents on Christmas Eve in Sweden? No running down the stairs in the morning to see what Santa left, no stockings and cinnamon buns, no spending the whole afternoon trying out your new things. And what about Santa? It’s barbaric! Of course we could still visit the US for Christmas (I confess to having been surprised to learn that planes can still fly when it’s snowing; of course I’m from Georgia, where any snow completely halts society) but my mother has been talking about how “neat” it will be that we can get together in various spots–like Italy–for future holidays. That sounds pretty stressful, I have to say.

Anyway, as I’ve mentioned before, I speak Spanish, and my brain has a nice niche for it under “foreign languages.” For many years now I’ve been sporadically exposed to Swedish, and can usually understand whatever the topic is and often more than that, but in terms of production I’m quite limited. And when I am expressing myself in Swedish and I meet a hole in my lexicon, my head helpfully supplies the Spanish word. A few times the opposite has happened if I’ve been hearing a particular Swedish word a lot in my studies or whatever. This phenomenon does not increase my fluency.

There are a few differences that really trip me up. In Spanish, verb infinitives (like “to go”) end in the letter R. In Swedish, it’s the conjugated verbs that end in R. And the pronoun “he” is “han” and “she” is “hon“–so the A goes with the masculine, and the O with the feminine. Since it’s the opposite in Spanish, I had to create a mnemonic: “hon” is what waitresses, who are female, say in diners to customers.

I keep trying to get out of doing Spanish translation at work so I can focus on Swedish but they really don’t have anyone else. There’s a good chance I, in fact, will keep this job after the move (I work remotely as it is) but I just can’t operate effectively in three languages, one of which I am struggling to acquire. It’s confusing!

Whenever I happen to mention to strangers that we are soon to move to Sweden people always want to know why. In fact, first they usually propose a reason why. One that has come up was 2012. I had to get the first lady to explain that one to me. Evidently some people think the world is ending then (it is not) and are preparing. It’s not like Sweden is on another planet so I’m not sure how that would have helped us. I’m not sure she thought her comment through.

Another one is military stationing. Sometimes I just let people continue believing that to keep things short, though I can’t figure out why I hear it so much–perhaps people think Sweden is a region in Germany? Do we send troops to Sweden? Are we invading them to control the supply of cheap furniture you have to put together yourself? While I personally would absolutely not want to be a military spouse (to have an external power dictating my choices, to face the worry and risk and loneliness of deployment–not for me) I’m not above enjoying someone else’s thinking I would be so self-sacrificingly virtuous, at least people with whom I am talking to only so long as it takes them to inform me of the availability of cranberry wine.

I guess Sweden seems pretty exotic. One person wanted to know if I needed shots. Many get confused and comment about chocolate and the Alps. They talk about clogs and blondes. I’ve known Husband so long and been to Sweden so often that I have a really hard time remembering what the common perception Americans have of Sweden is. What comes to your mind?

By pushing my craftiness to the limit I was able to produce a dress and crown for Little Girl to wear to celebrate the Swedish Christmas holiday of Luciadagen, or Santa Lucia Day. The particulars and wherefores of this custom are not especially clear to me, frankly due to a lack of interest on my part, but I understand that in Sweden the oldest girl of each family, on December 13th, wakes up the household at some godawful hour of the morning wearing a white dress with a red sash and a crown of greenery on her head lit with candles and carrying a tray of coffee and special buns called lussekatter. I also believe there’s some special song involved.

Since we’ll be attending an extended family get-together on that date (my family, obviously, since we’re in the US) I decided to torture myself by arranging for Little Girl to do this herself–complete with hand-made accouterments. But in the afternoon, and without the fire on her head, and with the buns in a bag and not on a tray, plus no mysterious song. Making the dress was such a trial (the crown was actually kind of fun) I deliberately measured it too large so as to save me from having to sew another one for a few years.

To make this event extra-stressful, I waited to inform Husband, who is sick and a big baby about it, of his requirement to make the complex saffron-infused, cat-tail shaped buns until this evening. I’m not sure how they’ll turn out, but the nice thing about putting on this performance for neophytes is that they certainly won’t have grounds for complaints as to the authenticity of the affair or the texture of the buns. Maybe rock-hard is just how they like to eat things in Sweden. Who would know?

We’ve had a roof leak much of the time we’ve been here. (It took me a while to figure it out; I just kept thinking Little Girl had had an accident, since the leak is in her bathroom). We’ve had it fixed. It still leaked. We had the roofers out again. It’s still leaking. Apparently the roofers suck. And I can’t get them back out here to work on our roof–they keep lying to me and blowing me off. (I feel like the person who complains that the food is bad, and the portions small. But I really want the same company to fix it because, you know, I already paid them to do so. Surely they know how and are just being lazy).

My keyboard has started randomly, intermittently, of its own volition, typing series of Ts. I have to reboot to get it to stop. It’s so frustrating. And kind of freaky.

Next week I have to go take care of my grandparents while my mother has a little vacation. I’m happy to help, but I’m not actually able to do so. I can’t get them to take their meds. I can’t get my grandmother to use her walker. She won’t let me change her (I know, change!) or dress her. My grandfather won’t let me cook for them. And Little Girl always gets into trouble for doing regular little-kid stuff. But if it makes my mom feel better, I’ll go. But it’ll suck. Mostly I don’t think my grandmother knows me anymore, and when she does, she just gets pissed I’m living at the beach house, and keeps asking me when we’re leaving. That or she, in her forgetting-how-to-walk Alzheimer’s way, will keep fleeing whatever room Little Girl and I are in, confused by us, I guess. And they’re both so complainy and sad. But we’ll go.

I have too much work and I can’t get it done and it’s performance review time so I can’t say no to tasks and I keep volunteering to do shit I don’t have the time or interest to do and it’s really stressing me out.

As per my mother’s request, we are getting a new driveway here. After much prep, the concrete should be poured tomorrow. I am not altogether thrilled with how it is turning out, though I think it’ll be fine. The problem is that it’s all on me since I’m the only one here. I had to get bids, I had to pick one, I had to get approval from the architectural review board, I had to work on the plans, I had to answer all the questions (“Where do you want the 4-inch sleeve?” Uhhhh…), I have to live through the work. Sometimes I really wish Husband were around more. For the roof situation, too. Partners are useful.

As a sub-topic to that, I am super-excited about the landscaping opportunities the new driveway (which is in a different place from the old one) will provide, but then we only have a few months more here and they’re mostly in winter so it’s sort of like the gardening version of blue balls–all anticipation and work and no payoff. And that’s no fun.

Our one friend here is about to have a baby and so we’ll be down to no friends at all, since obviously she’ll be in the newborn hole for at least six months.

I’ve been trying to eat really, really well, and tonight I was compelled to purchase donuts. I ate two. (Little Girl had one and a half). They weren’t even good. Now I’m irritated with myself.

Let’s see. There’s more, but they’re in the vein of “I have to move to a beautiful country with a high standard of living and omigod peanut butter is expensive there!” and “My toe hurts” so I’ll just stop.

We’ve been here over half a year and only made one mother/daughter friend combo. Our social life is a far cry from what we had before, and sometimes, like right now, that makes me sad. I’m pretty sociable, and Little Girl is, too. I’ve said it before: I miss our old friends, and I miss having friends in general. I can get by okay by talking to my friends on the phone, but it’s just not the same as getting together with another parent and his/her kids for playdates, park trips, picnics–the assorted pleasant activities you do to entertain small children and oneself.

It’s not that we haven’t met people. It’s not that I haven’t made an effort. Mostly I think it’s that we’re here temporarily, and when people find that out, they don’t want to make an effort to get to know us.

Which I get. Which is why I only just last week told our one friend that we’re moving to Sweden. We’ve been getting together frequently for months (they had just moved here, too, so she was just as eager to swap phone numbers as I was when we met at storytime at the library), but I just never brought it up, and since the move is one of the big things going on with me, that means we talked a lot about her instead, which made her like us even more. You know how everybody likes to talk about themselves.

When I finally did inform her we were “thinking” about moving to Sweden, it was calculated. We’re firmly friends now. She’s heard about the difficulties we’ve had living in a family house. She knows Husband’s unhappy with commuting five hours each way every few days and wanted a new job. She knows he has a big family. It sort of made sense in the narrative of our lives I’ve disclosed to her, even if the idea of the move as a new theory is false. She wasn’t surprised to hear it. They’re even thinking of not staying here permanently themselves. Maybe she was hedging the same way I was.

All this time I was uncomfortable with keeping our plans from her, for not being authentic, but I wanted Little Girl and I to have some buddies even more. We needed them. As it happens, we just met a new mother/daughter pair that could potentially work out great, too, but I’m not sure I even have the energy to try to strike something up, though we did exchange numbers. I really liked the mom, which makes me even more discouraged: why make friends if you just have to leave them, anyway? We don’t have much longer here. Maybe I’ll should save up my friend-making efforts for Sweden, where it will be even more difficult to connect, for so many different reasons. But is that any way to live? Putting off happiness for convenience’s sake?

We just don’t know what to do about this bathroom in the Swedish house. We are planning on gutting it but we don’t know how to put it back together.

It will be the only full bath in the (six bedroom!) house and so we want it to have the following elements: toilet, sink, storage, mirror, towel rack, tub, shower. It’s about 5×8 feet (160×257 cm). We had hoped to have a separate tub and shower but it seems the room is just too narrow for that I think.

The other problem is the window–if we have a shower/tub combo over there where the tub is now, how do we keep the window from being damaged by the water? And with that slanted ceiling a shower curtain won’t work, not that I like those anyway, and so I guess we’ll have to get some custom-cut glass panel. Or what?

And it looks like the typical thing there is to have floors and walls and the slanted ceiling all covered with the same linoleum-type material (but you can use different colors; we don’t want tile, except maybe for an accent somewhere).

So what should be put where? How do we solve our problems? What color(s) should it be? What kind of vanity? I need new thoughts on this!

Since my birthday is two days after Halloween I traditionally have weeks of candy/cake/chocolate gifts to enjoy. This has been less the case this year as Little Girl mostly did not get sweets while trick-or-treating but boring shit like pretzels and popcorn balls and little plastic toys. Obviously this was great for her, but since, in addition, she also has a much lower tolerance for trick-or-treating than I do, and was ready to pack it in after no more than a dozen houses, there really has been no candy extravaganza, especially as we didn’t stock ourselves for trick-or-treaters at all, rightly expecting none (which is why we got in the car and traveled to the only child-infested neighborhood on the island for Halloween).

Wow, I don’t know what happened with that sentence, but it is really long. To summarize, it’s my birthday Monday, and Halloween was meager (but fun). They’re starting to do Halloween a bit in Sweden so I didn’t have another this-is-the-last-time-I’ll-ever-do-this-again freakout.

I dressed up, too, as always, and carried the extra treat bag a neighbor had given Little Girl. But nobody mistook me for a kid. One person even asked me, “Are you collecting for another child?” And then at lunch today the waitress, upon learning it was my birthday celebration, asked me, laughing, “Are you twenty-two today?” Why is that a joke? I mean, I could be twenty-two, right? How would she know? Hell, I could even be a teenager, for that matter! Maybe I was trick-or-treating!

Uh, I guess I’m having some birthday issues. But Halloween was good, even though it was pretty weird to be sweating while trick-or-treating. It was so warm that day we swam in the ocean. Ah, island living.

Bonus points if you can guess what Little Girl was. She nodded affirmatively to everyone’s guesses yesterday but nobody got it quite right. Probably because it’s not an actual thing. Cute, though. (She’d also nod affirmatively anytime anyone told her that, too. Which was even cuter.)

My wallet’s falling apart. I wanted to get a new one. But wait–Swedish crown bills are a different size–I should just wait until we move.

I guess I’ll just add that to the increasingly-distressing list of Shit We Gotta Buy All Over Again In Sweden. I don’t understand how we are shipping a 20 ft. container and it doesn’t include any of these items. What the hell are we sending, then? The only stuff I remember for sure are fancy china we never use, pillows, and Christmas decorations.

Kitchen

pots
pans
plates
bowls
glasses
mugs
cutting board
canisters
tupperware
table
chairs
toaster oven
bread box

Entryway

table
mirror
shoe storage

Living room

couch
chairs
table
tv stand
tv
dvd player
stereo
rug
bookcases

General

pots/plants
lighting
trash cans
phones
vacuum
sewing machine?
bike(s)
car(s)
litter box
hand towels for bathrooms

Master bedroom

bed
bedding
side tables
wardrobe(s)
dresser(s)
chair?
mirror
shoe storage?

Office

desk
chair
shelving
bookcases
filing cabinet

Little Girl’s room

wardrobe
side table?

Other room

futon/guest bed

Six days ago we were swimming in the ocean and making sand castles in our bathing suits under a nice, warm sun. I don’t know what the hell happened but it’s totally freezing now. Hot weather doesn’t bother me at all–100 degrees? Great! No need to wear clothes!–but anything under 70 is unacceptable and we are already 20 degrees below that and I am unbearably cold. (Sweden, here I come!)

I’m pretty mopey about it. It feels not just like the end of this summer, but the end of any kind of summer for the rest of my life (don’t make fun of my melodrama). Even in July in Sweden you might need a jacket. Normally I like fall–my birthday, scarves, the candy, corduroys–but since the weather in Sweden is, in some ways, perpetually fall, at least Georgia-style, I’m not interested in experiencing it in advance. As though I had a choice. I’m pretty, disproportionately, I suppose, upset about the turn in the weather.

But I reluctantly put up the Halloween decorations and we carved a pumpkin and ate the seeds and that was nice so I guess I’m finally giving in and accepting that summer is gone and I’ll just have to be cold forever. There’s still fun stuff to do, I guess. Like washed-up logs to jump over and dead baby sharks–with teeth!–to poke at with sticks. It’s not all bad. Sigh. Sucks though. Least it’s not snowing, like it is in Sweden already.

So my sister-in-law’s baby, S, is two months old now, and I keep getting emails about her development from her proud pappa. There’s a kind of hilarious element of competitiveness with them. Like: “S weighed 14.55 pounds and she was 24 inches tall at her 2-month visit. Exact same numbers as [other cousin A] when he was 3 months. How big was [Little Girl] at that age?” (I went ahead and emailed him her growth chart from birth to age two for his convenience.)

I’m happy she’s doing well. I imagine it’ll be fun to watch her grow, once we finally get to Sweden and meet her, and I’m sure Little Girl will enjoy it. My brother-in-law and his wife asked us to be S’s godparents, which of course is very sweet of them. I just wish I knew what that entailed in Swedish society. From what I gather it’s pretty informal, but there is her baptism coming up in November that we’ll have to miss. Too bad: I’d like to see a Croatian-style baptism done in Swedish. (S’s mom is a first-generation Swede. My other brother-in-law is Serbian. My mother-in-law is Finnish. It’s a very international family.)

For the move I divested myself of most of Little Girl’s multitude of outgrown clothes, and kept only one bin of items too precious (too cute, too imbued with memory, too fancy) to part with, for in case I ever have another girl. But then it seemed silly for them to be sitting neglected when S could use them, so I asked them if they’d like the hand-me-downs. And they said no! They only want S in the new clothes they buy or are given! Apparently they also turned down clothes from S’s cousins on her other side, who are all girls. Goofy. But then these are the people with the nine-hundred dollar pram. I knew enough of my sister-in-law’s personality to ask first and not assume they’d want the clothes. What’s kind of funny to me, on reflection, is that several of the items in that bin were themselves originally hand-me-downs.

Little Girl absolutely thrives having lots of family around. Nothing stimulates and delights her so much. It’s definitely the big plus of Sweden. At least for her. Growing up the only children of only children of only children, for me the benefits are largely theoretical at this point. Do you like a lot of family around?

It makes sense, of course. We’ve had a hard year. Husband’s had lots of work worries; I got pregnant to mixed feelings; we realized we had to move out of our neighborhood, newly plagued by crime; I had a lengthy, expensive, painful miscarriage; we sold/gave away many of our belongings and had the rest packed away; we moved; we sold our house and lost a shitload of money; we’re in limbo until the next move; Husband is gone more than half the time for work.

So I’m not surprised that Husband and I are, let’s say, less than delighted with each other these days. We’re having a hard time getting along, being friends, liking each other. Usually my prescription for this kind of situation is more sex, but like I said, he’s gone a lot, and the master bed here in the beach house has this weird bed frame where the headboard is a shelf with all these knick knacks on it and, well, it just makes things ungodly loud. Plus I am all freaked out about getting pregnant again which is also an enthusiasm-damper.

I’m sure any couple in this situation would be testy. I hope once we’re settled in Sweden–and perhaps after his parents, with whom we’ll be living for a while, move out–we’ll get back into some normal relationship mode, that’s not only switched on the four days of the week, max, we see each other. We’ll feel like a team instead of the combatants we sometimes find ourselves these days. And it’s not all bad, now. Today we’re buddies.

It’s just that sometimes, horrifyingly, I’m content to see him leave, and I don’t miss him when he’s gone.