Ava is 5

Well I gave in and we had Ava's 5th birthday party at one of those indoor playland places because that's what everyone else with birthdays in freezing months has been doing here. I studiously avoided having it at Lek & Bushuset, otherwise known as Lord of the Flies Comes to Sweden with Pixie Sticks, and hosted it at a more modest one called Lekstan in Sisjön instead (Sisjön, by the way, is pronounced something like SI + wh if you were exaggerating that combination + UN) . I was feeling sort of guilty about outsourcing the party because it's so impersonal, but after seeing how much fun the kids had (and how little there was for me and Adrian to clean up afterwards), I am sold! These places are da best! You show up at the appointed hour with your kid and a cake, and they do the rest, including herding the children into the Jungle Room for hot dogs, serving ice cream, and providing goody bags. Two hours later, happy kids and presents in tow, you just go home to your clean (ha!) house.

I'm guessing there are tons of these kind of indoor play places in parts of the U.S. where there is a) snow and/or b) lower property costs, but there sure aren't any nice ones in San Francisco. Too bad because sometimes drinking a good cup of coffee and talking to your spouse while your kids happily climb and run with abandon when it's yucky outside is pretty nice.

Snow life

The sign outside Liseberg says "Don't be doubtful, Spring is coming" (I'm sure there's a better translation for the "miströsta inte" part ...), but I'm feeling pretty darned doubtful after the amount of snow we've had over the past few days, with more on the way. We're hunkering down waiting for the next storm to arrive. In the meantime we're enjoying watching the huge icicles form outside our windows and drinking lots of hot cocoa.

Julian

Today is actually Ava's 5th birthday (what? I have a 5-year-old??), so I realize it's highly inappropriate to post something about Julian. However, since I have been a sloth in recent months, I figure something inappropriate is better than nothing at all, so here goes. And really, I am just compelled to post something about J because he has changed so much in the past few months. I keep looking at him at breakfast (OK, I'm not usually up when he has breakfast, Adrian does that, so maybe dinner is better) and thinking "hold on buster, let me get a good look at you, where'd you put my baby?" In just a few months he has lost all his baby pudge, stopped wearing diapers (except at night -- the fact that he woke up dripping with pee probably suggests that diaper-free bedtime was a bit premature), and started talking about things and in ways that shock me. Like he uses conditional ... and past tense ... and talks about feelings ... and tells me everything he did that day: "First I had breakfast, den I went to cool and had nack, den I payed outside, den I missed you [awww], den mama came, den we had bulle and den we went home." (Oh, and he asks why every 2 seconds, but since that's not pleasant I haven't included it above.) When you still expect your kid to speak in short staccato sentences a la "mama-milk-now" this kind of thing blows you away. About a month ago, Ava looked at me and said "Mom, I can't talk because Julian just keeps talking!" And you know if Ava a.k.a Chatty Pants can't get a word in then Julian must really be talking a lot.

Julian moving out of babyhood has happened right as ALL of my women friends in town (no hyperbole, I swear. Here is the list of friends who have recently had or will have babies: Traci, Karin, Gen, Merel, Sandy, Anastacia (twins!), and Monique) have gotten pregnant or have recently had a baby. Being surrounded by all this babyness has made my own jump from being a mom of a little girl and a baby boy to a little girl and a little boy more real and bittersweet. It's certainly shocked me into realizing I could give away all the baby stuff that's been hanging around -- high chair, changing table, bibs, swim diapers -- since we won't be going down the baby road on purpose again.

Another gig

I got a fun gig this month (as a result of the Manchester work) doing a graphic history of a team that turned out pretty good so I'm posting for you, my 3 readers, to enjoy. This was about 3'x8'. Why does anyone pay me to do this? Good question, and one I'm hoping to be able to answer better after reading a book called the Art of Engagement that Trevor lent me last week. The author has been doing this kind of visual work for awhile and thinks it's key to engaging employees and getting strategy implemented, the real failing point for many companies.

Swedish Pygmalion

The first summer we were in Sweden I posted about the oddity of seeing West Side Story in Swedish during Kulturkalaset. What struck me then was that everyone was white and blond (I still contend this is a bizarre choice), but there was more to it than that. Must have been because I keep thinking about it. If I think that the translation, casting and removal from the cultural context did the play a disservice, then think what the Russians might think of an American staging of a Chekhov play (egads!) or the French about a Kansas high school's revival of The Misanthrope (quel horreur!). Call me dense, but I'd never given much thought to how much you miss of what the foreign playwright or author meant and was when the language changes AND you don't have a good sense of the cultural context. On the flip side, I suppose we non-native speakers give the piece new life viewing it with our own cultural maps. The original idea in the piece of art makes connections to our own lives and can transcend language (is that possible??), and maybe that is the power of art.

Anyway, I didn't quite mean to get into all THAT artsy nonsense, but I saw a piece in the paper today about a Swedish staging of Shaw's Pygmalion and the difficulty of figuring out how to translate Eliza Doolittle's cockney dialect into Swedish and it reminded me of that earlier post. The dialect IS Eliza before her transformation and when you hear it and know so much about her (even more true if you are actually British, not just English-speaking), so how on earth do you translate that and make it work in supposedly classless Sweden?

The accent the actress apparently decided on was based on a suburbs-Skånska (Skåne is in southern Sweden and the accent is, er, unique) that she tweaked to sound like nothing that actually exists. She basically created her own language. If I had any hope of understanding said suburbs-Skånska I'd love to go check it out. Sadly, the only Skånska I can vaguely understand is that of creepy Anna Anka (she's the Swedish personal trainer who married singer Paul Anka and is now infamous in Sweden after appearing in a ridiculous reality show called Swedish Hollywood Wives), and that's not saying much.

Brrrr

In Little Women, one of the girls, Jo I think, goes on an on about how she hates French and so when some old Auntie is going to go to France and wants to take someone with her she decides not to take complainy old Jo, but to take her nice sister, Amy, instead. Amy just loooooves French and would just diiiiiiie to see Europe, so she goes and Jo is left singing "je ne regrette rien" in her whiskey (or maybe this only happened in my edition). This is the only part of Little Women I remember, so clearly the danger of complaining wasn't wasted on my 8-year-old brain. So it is with some trepidation that I admit I really really dislike snow and cold weather. My reaction to the piles of dog-pee-dotted white snow lining the streets and reflecting the weak winter sun, which seems to elicit joy from many, is along the lines of "just melt already so I can wear my high-heeled boots again."

Clearly, as well as not being a pet person I am not a snow/cold/wintery sort of person. I'm annoyed I have to wear long underwear; I'm annoyed I have to bundle the kids up 3 times a day; and I feel like a pack mule always trudging through the snow or slush with my stuffed Coop Forum bags. I'm sure my dislike is amplified by the fact that I don't ski and, being from San Francisco and all, have no fond childhood memories of frolicking in the snow. Now, I know it would be much more annoying to be living in northern Sweden, where it's been like -25 degrees (-33C) instead of the balmy 14 degrees it's been in Gothenburg for weeks, but I'm still annoyed. I am just always cold and I refuse to buy those super ugly $500 Bally Curling boots everyone has. I realize this probably ruins my chances of getting invited on an all-expenses-paid ski trip to Kitzbühl next year by my long-lost Uncle Teddy, but so be it. I am freezing my West Coast tush off and tired of looking like a puffy black ball topped with a purple pom-pom.

Barcelona with kids

We just came back from a week in Barcelona with, you guessed it, the kids. Ever since I saw photographs of Gaudi's buildings (like the Sagrada Familija, Parc Guell and the Casa Batllo above), Barcelona has been on my list of must-sees, which is sort of a good thing and sort of a bad thing if you are traveling with small children. As many of you know all too well, kids (especially 2-year-old boys) don't exactly like to wait in line or look at buildings, which is a problem if Mom has come to the city to do exactly that. I should have re-read my post about visiting Rome last year before we left and reminded myself that the key to successful big-city traveling with kids is to lower your expectations. You will not, I repeat, will not, get to take your Lonely Planet and make check marks next to every museum and architectural gem. You will, however, begin to see bus rides as a highlight of the day (especially in Barcelona with their terrific bus system) ...
... eat way too many sweet things to appease the feet of tired children (this shot is from La Pallaresa and those mugs are filled with melted chocolate below all that whip cream and you are encouraged to dip the deep-fried churros in said chocolate. My kind of place) ...
...and do many kid-centered things that you would other wise never have dreamed of doing. Like rent those goofy-looking family bikes and pedaling along the beachfront on a gorgeous New Year's Day (note that shortly after this picture was taken Julian fell in the cold ocean and cried the rest of the morning about having "owie sand" in his pants because I forgot to bring him a change of clothes):
You might also go to the zoo and see the dolphin show, which turns out to be fantastic, ...
... watch the kids run like caged animals finally released from their captors around pedestrian placas, ...... spend way too much time at playgrounds wondering if you really spent all that money to push swings 1000 miles from home, and do drive-by viewings of the buildings and monuments you wanted to see as your kids yell "Mama, that dog is peeing!!" and talk about dogs and pee for the rest of the afternoon.

And those are all wonderful and valid ways of experiencing a city, even if they are the antithesis of how you used to approach traveling. Plus, when you travel with your kids and your husband you get to spend your days with the most loving, interesting, funny and sweet people in the world. And having traveling companions like that is pretty darned great, whether you see the Miro museum or not.