It's been eventful, scary and tiring. There's been good times, bad times, illness and a whole lot of weather!
We arrived in early April, to a beautiful warm day - blue skies and sunshine, and since then we've had pretty much everything! Rain, hail, snow, high winds, fog so thick we couldn't see the end of the garden, let alone Denmark! The Danish coast is about 5/6 km away, so we use it as a measure of how bad the weather is if we can't see it! And today as I write, it's an odd sort of weather - warm, windy and overcast!
We're starting to recognise people in the village, but let's be honest there aren't that many (read none) people walking huskies or women
We've been brave too.
Ned and I visited his preschool twice now, and have another visit in a week or so. I wasn't quite sure how he'd feel, but he's said that he wishes he could start now, and not in August (the Swedish school holidays start in July).
I've had comedic phone calls with Swedes - texts I can cope with as I cheat and use google translate, but actual people.......!
Jim and Maisie have both survived their first weeks a their various new establishments, and Maisie has started coming home on the bus by herself.
After being in Sweden for a week, we drove to Norway for the Easter holidays. It took 11 hours of driving, and actually most of it was okay. We used just one motorway from here all the way past Oslo (about 8 hours away), and then we picked up a local road. I won't say much about it, as I feel it'll probably make a blog entry all by itself one day.
However we did discover an enormous moose!
Easter in Norway was lovely, very sociable, snowy and we had our dogs with us for the first time! They absolutely loved the snow - it was lovely to watch them bouncing around in it, and eating it! And thanks to them we were able to show Ned why you must not eat yellow snow.
We did a little bit of skiing, Jim went cross country skiing with a friend and took the dogs, and there was lots of sledging.
We've settled into our new routine; up at 6.30am, Jim leaves at 7.20 to catch the bus to go to work, whilst I leave at 7.57 - not a minute later! to take Maisie to school (until she catches the bus!) Ned and I then get home at 8.15 and begin our day. Mostly it consists of watching ships going past and then looking up on the very wonderful boat finding app we have!
It's 'Cruise Season' so every couple of days there will a MASSIVE boat going past, which results in a flurry of activity to find out what it's called, where it's going, how many passengers and where else is it going!
But Ned and I have something new to do every day now. About a 5 minute cycle ride along the coast is a little rocky outcrop, usually home to lots of cormorants, herons, swans and various other seabirds whose names I don't know yet. There's a telescope, and this being Scandinavia you don't have to pay to use it, and today we saw the seals that come here every May/June to breed. Its very exciting, although Ned gets bored after about 2 minutes and wants to go and play on the rope swing in the woods, but still - seals!
