Let the Sun Shine

You know how you feel when you see a field of yellow flowers and go 'Yay!'

That is how it feels to love you

So keep bringing bouquets

And we will collect buckets of Sunshine

And see if we can capture that feeling

Dandelion Wine

From Susun Weed's Healing Wise 2gal/8 liter crock 3-5 qts/3-5 liters blossoms 5 qts/5 liters water 3 pounds/1.5 kg sugar 1 organic orange 1 organic lemon 1 pkg/8 grams live yeast whole wheat bread toast DIRECTIONS: Find a field of dandelions in bloom on a glorious shining day. Follow the honeybees to the finest flowers. Pick them with a sweeping motion of your parted fingers, like a comb. I leave the green sepals on, but get rid of all stalks. Back home, put blossoms immediately into a large ceramic, glass, or plastic vessel. Boil water; pour over flowers. Cover your crock with cheesecloth. Stir daily for three days. On the fourth day, strain blossoms from liquid. Cook liquid with sugar and rind of citrus (omit rind if not organic) for 30-60 minutes. Return to crock. Add citrus juice. When liquid has cooled to blood temperature, soften yeast, spread on toast, and float toast in crock. Cover and let work two days. Strain. Return liquid to crock for one more day to settle. Filter into very clean bottles and cork lightly. Don't drink until winter solstice. Preparation time: A week's worth of effort yields a drink not only delightful but good for your liver, as well.

A Perfect Day in Sweden

Electric Bright Yellow of the Canola fileds

Cherry Blossoms

Bright Light Green of Newly Born Beech Leaves

Living The SwedeLife is so great it will make you want to move here!!!

And so my sister in law and brother in law did!!! Just last week.

You can see how it goes by following their new blog, The Swedish Experiment.

We will be seeing them at their place for midsommar, so look for us dueling bloggers to be writing about the same events!

May life here be just as sweet for you as it has been for us.

SwedeBaby Update, 14 Months

for her far off fans

So I never even posted the pictures of her first steps at 11 months, and now she is off and running. Our little girl likes going outside above all else, and brings her shoes to us and sings the little song we sing when we put them on her as her way to beg to go out. The song is to the tune of elmo's world.... we sing 'la la la, la la la la, baby's shoooooes! We have have our shoes on, let's go outside, baby has shoes!' So she begs to go out by opening her mouth and wiggling her tongue and going la la la la , in a sweet little begging motion. We also sing a song when we change her diaper that goes 'Didy didy dooer, didy didy doe, diddy diddy dooer, you know we love you so.' So if she has to go to the bathroom she lifts her shirt and points at her belly button and sings 'didy didy doe.....' We have been doing elimination communication with her where she goes on the potty, and so she sings us this song to let us know she needs to go. Most of her poops are on the potty, and the pees when we are looking out for it.

She likes this car, as it is one of the few things that is hers alone. This morning she did not want to come in, and stayed outside in the car where she could see us through the kitchen window, waving with excitement with glee in a 'look I am outside, you are inside, and I see you' way.

She is a good sleeper. We have never had an up all night, or up in the middle of the night night, even with jet lag and changing time zones with our winter travels. She is still a twice a day napper, but if there is something to do at nap time we do it, and sleep longer later. She nurses when ever she wants, which is basically when she wakes and sleeps, and in the night. We cosleep, so she is in our bed, and mostly falls asleep nursing. I attribute her calm sleep demeanor to the fact that we can always just nurse her back to sleep and stay cuddled up together.

She weighs 22 pounds, and we have no concerns over what she eats.

Her quickie snacks are skorpa which are swedish toasts like teething toasts, knackebrod (wasa type) crackers, rice cakes (which she helps herself to in the cabinet when she wants one), whole wheat pasta, pancakes, meatballs, chicken, red pepper, oranges, eggs, cheese, oatmeal, granola and yogurt, and her new found love- milk. She loved the vietemese pho soup we made so much she laughed out loud, and we ended up putting it in a sippy cup so she could eat plenty with out us having to spoon it in. She also enjoys pad thai and tom kha gai. She has a special fondess for smoothies.

The carnage after a peanut butter and jelly sandwich

Even under the arms...

If you think a kid can get messy with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, may you never know the damage that can come from her finding two stray frozen blueberries that rolled away on the floor to melt. We are on a smoothie kick making them with milk, frozen bananas, frozen berries. When she wants a smoothie, she stands at the kitchen counter and makes high pitch blender noise. I was making one this morning, and she opens her mouth really really big in an 'O' to indicate she wants some. She did this recently when we were having some ice cream, we were laughing as she chased the cones with her big wide open mouth....

Her other talents include saying water, mama, papa, her sister's name, and nanny and pa, and picking them out of photos. She can sign water, all done, more, owie, brush teeth, squirrel, cat, dog (or saying 'woof') when seeing a dog, and indicates she would like to go to bed now by making the rounds and giving goodnight kisses then walking in the bedroom. She is also a great dancer, and likes to push buttons to try to get the CD player to come on, her favorite CD is 'Let's Play' by Raffi. She loves to do itsy bitsy spider, and requests Old MacDonald often by singing EIEIO. She snuggles her older sister, and even curls up next to her. She tries to do sommersaults, having a strange desire to stick her head on the ground very firmly on the carpet, then sometimes toppling over. Today, she was leaning forward and guiding my hand to scratch her back, and clearly requesting a back massage and scratch. She also loves the stroller, and will go crawl up in it to request a walk in the neighborhood. She is patient in the ergo and beco back carriers, allowing me to take hour long walks in the forest with her strapped on. If it is nap time, she will sleep there. On the play ground, she loves digging in the sand. We can let her dig unsupervised in the yard for quite sometime. She also likes going on slides that are way too big for her. They make her laugh. If we go to the playground, she demands we put her on them over and over. On the toddler playgrounds, she can climb up the stairs or wall to the platforms herself.

In the garden, we try to keep her from playing in the dirt where the seedling are sprouting. She likes to have the water can filled so she can dump it out, often all over herself. She loves baths and water play, and experiments by putting her face under water and blowing bubbles.

She can follow instructions in swedish or english. She knows belly buttons, eyes, mouth, hair, head, feet, and others. She generally like copying anything we do, so if her sister is getting her hair done, she like to have a comb in her hand to follow along.

The little copycat likes to 'help' when we are working with the dishwasher, and gratefully, she is learning that sometimes it is being filled and sometimes emptied. She usually takes things out of the drawers but is now learning how to put things back in as well.

Her personality and demeanor are calm and sweet. She likes to make people laugh, and has developed a impish fake laugh to indicate she thinks something is funny. She once got quite squeal from me when she unexpectedly stuck her finger down my exposed butt crack while I was bent over weeding, a trick she tries to repeat when she sees any exposed skin, tickling and squeeeling, and making her fake laugh.

She has been an easy and fun addition to the family. While babies are always so demanding and ON all day, having a sweet older sister who is 4 and now 5 who can wait her turn made the transition to two kids pretty easy over all.

American Mother's Day

Sunday I slept late and woke up to find this lovely hand colored banner hanging in the kitchen. Swedegirl immediately showed me which letters she colored herself and told which ones her dad had done. Even the baby, just 14 months, was excited and walked me over and pointed up at it with a big grin, proud to show the surprise she knew was special for me.
Swedish mothers day is not until the end of the month, but this last Sunday was American Mother's Day. Last year, we did not do much for either one, and I ended up getting a little sad about it. So SwedeDaddy knew this year he was going to have to do something to acknowledge Mother's Day to keep me happy! SwedeGirl had a birthday party, so her dad took her and gave me the best present of all, a silent solo afternoon. I got to make a pot of real Starbucks coffee courtesy of the package my mother sent me recently, so I enjoyed that as her little gift to me. And I got to check in on the computer undisturbed and guilt free, and then clean without anyone making a mess in my wake.

So I got sometime alone on mother's day, and even got to go on a long walk by myself at my own brisk pace. On my walk I noticed a cool rocky hilltop spot with a fire pit, and thought it would be fun to surprise my family by taking them up there for a Mother's Day evening grill out. Swedegirl jumped up and down for joy first when she realized she was going to get to cook a hot dog on a stick over a fire, and again a second time when she realized I had packed marshmallows and prepared to make S'mores.

Take care of mom, let her have space, some time to think, some time to be, and she will always take care of you! If momma is happy....

I made this Mother's Day a day to enjoy and savor that I get to be a mom. So many of my older friends look back and say this was their favorite time, the time when their children were small . Looking around at the stick people and rainbow drawings, the mysterious arrangements of toys that are strewn around, and the bouquets of dandelions, and vitsippia, and dried lavander stuffed in vases that my girl proudly picked for me, and I can imagine what they mean. So I thought I would use my day as a chance to be a fun mom, and do a fun mom thing, make a camp fire in the neighborhood on a Sunday night.

As I cleaned I was thinking of a woman I never met, named Cyndy, from Miami Florida, most recently of Gothernberg, Sweden. She was participating in an online forum I am on, and I answered many of her questions about pregnancy and birth. She considered going back to Miami to have her baby, as she wanted her mother and sisters around her to share her joy after the birth. She was going to use a licensed midwife and have a birth center birth. I have only bits and pieces of her story, as it is with an online friend. I was waiting to hear from her, thinking perhaps someday we would meet. She went silent and I was looking out for word from her, wondering about this Floridan in Sweden about to give birth. Last Friday, one of her friends shared that she stayed in Sweden and gave birth in Gothenberg. On March 5th, began having some contractions, and after a long labor, her son was delivered by c-section on March 9th while she was under general anesthesia as the epidural anesthesia was not working. She died on the table. The day she died, I was lighting candles and singing happy birthday to my second child, celebrating her first birthday. Every March 9th, as I have a birthday party, there will be a family mourning the loss of this woman, on the day she gave birth to her first, and only child at age 30. Her son will never know her, and her family...well, they are in Florida, her son with his newly widowed father in Sweden.

I was pondering this news as I cleaned alone on my Mother's Day Sunday.... the irony that she had expressed the wish to return to the USA, to Miami even, to give birth. Sweden has some of the best outcomes for mothers and babies in the world, the USA, the worst as reported recently by Amnesty International in their report Deadly Delivery:Maternal Health in the USA. USA ranks behind 40 other countries in its outcomes for mothers in birth. The USA ranks behind Bosnia, Herzegovina, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Lativia, Lithuania and more. Two women every day in birth in the USA, and and many more have life threatening complications that will impair them. Maternal mortality rates are bad and rising, they have increased from 6.6 deaths per 100,000 births in 1987 to 13.3 deaths per 100,000 births in 2006. In New York city, the rate of death is 83.6 deaths per 100,000. for black women. But Cyndy did not go back to Miami, the american town with the highest c-section rate in America. She gave birth in Gothenberg. And died, in birth.

There were many families grieving the loss of a mother in birth this Mother's Day. A close friend, whose birth I posted about in February, contracted an often fatal postpartum strep A infection, and four days after she gave birth was in a coma hanging onto life by a thread. Another woman in Texas, Katy Hayes, contracted the same infection five days before my friend, and was just moved now out of the ICU, and is now a quadruple amputee. My friend was lucky and has made a full recovery, but she will forever wear the scar of the experience of being in a coma for the first weeks of her baby's life, and we who love her are all forever changed by going to the place where we were not sure she would live through the night.

So this year, for Mother's Day, I was simply and profoundly grateful to be asked by my girl to hold her hand and walk at her pace as we made our way through the forest. I paid attention when she presented me with yet another bouquet of wild flowers. And at the fireside, I wondered why it is I hear my own mother's voice in my head when I say 'perfect golden brown' in regards to a marshmallow as I instruct my daughter on the fine art of toasting them. Is it because I remember my mothers voice and her instructions to me? How lucky I am to have known that voice, and to be able to be that voice for my girls.

The hike, the bouquet, the baby on my back

Building the Fire

So a toast, raise your marshmallow sticks!!!

To all the Moms

You are Irreplaceable

(for sound track scroll to 3:12 on this video, not savvy enough to make it just that clip for you)

Nature's Role in Swedish Schools and

More Great Play and Public Spaces

I have discovered there are all kinds of people thinking outside of the square lines of the sandbox.

I was just discussing that it is not only the Waldorf schools in Sweden that have great play spaces and a focus on outdoor education, it is all the schools. Then while looking over the community website for Lund, I found some really great resources for teachers (and parents) to use in outdoor education. I realized part of why the play spaces are so inviting here and that teachers actually use them is that the Swedish teachers are educated to do so. Attention follows focus, and Swedes have consciously chosen to prioritize exposing children to the natural world.

This link to Lund Nature Schools can be translated with translate.google.com from Swedish if you want to read what type of (tax funded) education the teachers get to include nature in their classroom activities. There are courses for teachers on using technology outside, identifying butterflies, climate, and growing food. There is a specific intentional focus from the highest levels of the Swedish education system to get children outside, learn about nature, sustainabilty, and climate. The seventh link down on the menu translates to Nature Leaf School, and has some nice curriculum plans on ecology, mushrooms, bugs, astronomy, leaves, storms, and all kinds of things. Very helpful for me who is new to this climate and ecosystem!

There is also a resource list with a book about inviting outdoor play spaces that mentions the Coombes school outside London. I did a quick google search on the Coombes school and found the FreePlay Network and their Places for Play: The Exhibition that showcases creative play spaces. It makes me sad to think of all the money spent a few years ago on the fun, but predictable big metal play ground equipment in my old town in Florida. For all the money that was spent, they could have engaged some creative people to make neat natural forts of shell, sand, boulders, and logs....

That link shows the play spaces of the city of Freiburg Germany and says every play ground in Freiburg has a water pump so kids can make mud. How fun is that!? There are so many ways to make public space inviting and fun. I am glad to know creative people are imagining and building places for people to BE.
Malmö has some great public spaces in the Vastra Hamnen. This blog by someone studying public space had some interesting reviews of public spaces around the world, including the parks in Malmö. If the Vitsippia helped romance me into thinking the nature in Sweden was cool, it was the public space of the Vastra Hamnen- West Harbor that convinced me Sweden is a modern wonder.

Malmö has inviting and useful public space, and it was created with great intention. They even call that part of Malmö 'the city of the future'. It is better than Florida's Epcot center, which was Walt Disney's vision of a city of the future, an E.xperimental P.rototypical C.ity O.f T.omorrow made into an amusement park. Disney Inc. went onto create a real Disney city called 'Celebration', but it is just American tract housing with front porches, a throwback to 1950's ideals that never were, not a real vision of the future.

There is a guy in Florida now, Jacque Fresco, who built demos of his dream futuristic cities called The Venus Project in the middle of some cheap swamp land. These videos showcase is his vision of what cities of the future should be like. If you live in Florida, you can go tour his home and research center.

Where do the children play?

Where do you play?

I think the whole point in fostering a connection to nature in children is to preserve their creativity and connection to the natural world and their wildish wonderings, so they can use their whole self to imagine what kind of world they wish to have and be free to use their life energy to make that world a reality.

Neighborhood Walk

This pretty forest walking path is just a few streets away in the neighborhood, an easy hike with SwedeBaby on my back in the carrier. We just discovered the path connects all the way around to make a loop.

The Descent to Green

Canopy Green

Pooh sticks, anyone?

Vitsippia face the sunshine

Lovely little faces of white and yellow

Stepping Stones

Magical Grandma tree, how old are you?