I rolled her in toilet paper, and she scared us. A very scary toilet paper mummy (and a
cool ninja, too, after applying a bit of PS magic).

(Did you play paper mummies when you were younger? My brother and I did all the time. Happy memories.)

Happy, happy weekend. I'm off to Stockholm. See you mid-next week!

A Summer Picnic

Imagine this scene: a beautiful riverbend. The water glitters in the low sun. Chirping crickets. Two little girls are
playing, splashing in the water, hopping on the rocks, laughing, their white tunics flapping in the summer breeze.

Dreamy, isn't it.

Well yeah.

Reality went something like this:

We went biking with the family, we sometimes do that. Not as much as we'd like. But yesterday we packed our
picnic gear, I even made a pie, and off we went through the countryside into uncharted forest territory.



I, the wonderful wife that I am, complained the whole trip. No hills, honey, I can't do hills today. Ugh, a hill.
Oh man, another one. WHEN ARE WE THERE... and: I THOUGHT I SAID NO FRIGGIN HILLS.

Fe kept shouting that she is bored. Sisi cried every time I stopped to get off the bike to take a picture.

After about 30 minutes of this, we ended up finding the most beautiful place I've seen in a while. The scene
I described above. Riverbend, crickets, sun, etc. Even the girls in flowy white tops. And a dad doing some sort
of yoga on a rock, and a mother doing stretches by the shore, while the kids entertained themselves happily.

Well, that was a lovely family I would like to get to know sometime (or maybe not because I'd end up with a big
fat inferiority complex).





I took out the picnic blanket. We showed the kids the river, took off their shoes and socks... thought they'll
happily start splashing, kind of like those blonde girls with their flowy tops. Fe played for a minute, until she
stepped into mud and started whining about her feet getting muddy and ants climbing up her leg, and uargh,
this place was horrible! And that she was bored and wanted to go home immediately. And why didn't I take the
tent! And why did I make the kind of pie she doesn't like (rhubarb, yuck!), and why am I generally a quite
stupid mom. Sisi did what she's been doing best for the last few days: crying the sort of whiny cry that makes
my hair curl in frustration. Jonni, the patient soul, tried showing them birds and told them the names of all the
trees and plants, and made them look out for mermaids.

Which held their attention for maybe four minutes, and then it was back to whining.

[insert picture here of Fe pooping in the middle of the forest, with the perfect yoga family looking on in horror,
and I had no wipes.]

And so we rode our bikes back through the beautiful forest of Paloheinä and the countryside.




You'd think the day was a failure. Maybe one should never do it again?!

And precisely here is the lesson, I believe. The reason I blog.

You look at these pictures afterward and you see a day with the family. And the next year, the next week,
the next day, what you remember is a day with the family. You may have some recollection of someone whining,
maybe a little, and that your legs got sore from biking uphill, but what you remember, most of all, and what the
kids will remember, is that you spent time together as a family. You see the beauty in it. You'll remember
the river, even if it was muddy, and the forest (especially the part that became an impromptu outhouse.) You'll look
back on it, and it will have become a beautiful day in your memory.

I look back on the posts on my blog, and see it all: days with the family, one after the other, ... some good ones,
some bad ones, but family nonetheless, a big mesh of history, of pie baking, and tent building and flower picking.
The whiny moments are all in there, too. But they don't really matter. You'll forget them. Fe got stung by nettles
when we picked the wildflowers and she cried almost the whole way back home. But what I remember is the
wild flowers we picked together. That I held her and gave her kisses on her legs. And that's what she remembers, too,
down there, somewhere.


The pain you'll forget, the closeness will stay with you.



So, in the aggregate, it doesn't matter so much what you do to spend time together, it matters that you do spend time together. That's what I believe with every little corner of my heart. And that's what this blog is about, my little family history. Thank you all, for reading along, and for becoming a part of the experience, too!

-----


Thanks, sweet Nicole, for the reminder to keep it real.

-----

PS You will get snot on your breast when you breastfeed a baby with a runny nose.

Unfinished.

Unfinished(s) from around our home. Things I've been meaning to get to for a long (or short time) and haven't. Organizing memories, hanging up photos and prints (properly). Fixing the paper garland. Hiding all those plasticky princess dresses. Hanging the mobile.


That collection of old film photographs I inherited from my father.

That Polaroid is of my mother and me on the day of my birth. Newborn me, my life yet to live. Wonderfully strange.

Thinking of it, maybe I like those pictures taped to the wall like that, instead of in fancy frames. Memories are fleeting, not fixed, after all.

White.

The dress at the top left is my great-aunt's Mia's dress. She wore it, danced in it, when she was young, in the 50s/60s. It's a lovely, intricate knit dress, with crocheted straps. She gave it to me, on a sunny day in my grandfather Friedl's front-yard, when I was 16 years old. It's one of my most-prized processions. It's come with me, wherever I've lived. I've only worn it a couple of times, however. I'm thinking of changing that.


It's Winter Colours Week over on Poppytalk. You can see the pool here.

Lebkuchen und Russisch Brot

Scenes from this morning.

My mom brought me Lebkuchen and Russisch Brot from the Nuremberg Christkindlmarkt. With every bite, I am eating a piece of belonging. Us cousins playing hide-and-seek, aunts and uncles talking loudly, a long dinner table. Smells of Glühwein and Printen, and that first taste of Mettwurst and Grünkohl when it's cold outside.

Sigh... I never miss Germany as much as I do around Christmas. 

Grays...

Ah hello, it has been a while. (Warning, this will be long and personal, and possibly rant-like)

I have so many things to say, and then again, nothing really. I could talk about how an old friend of mine became a father this weekend and how I have felt strangely emotional about it. I have been mindlessly happy for him... He used to sometimes walk me home, with his bike, and we'd talk about the girls he was in love with (mostly that one girl), and I'd talk about anything, but never the boy I was in love with (that one boy, him). He made those first years in Finland, as an insecure teenager, much more bearable and I feel indebted to him, somehow, for being a friend when I felt very lonely. And now, he is a father! It's miraculous, to see the boys around us grow up.

I could talk about how another dear old friend got married, to somebody I don't even know... is she happy?, I wonder, because we haven't really talked in ten years... because I've moved away... I suppose, and left her there alone, and never thought to check back on how she was doing, although, in heart, I always was with her.

I could talk about how yet another friend, fellow first-time mother, fellow foreigner (although she has long since moved back to her home country) got a divorce last week. How it's made me sad, for them, for couples everywhere that used to be happy. I don't know any details because I haven't been in touch and it feels hypocritical to ask now.

I could talk about how I have been feeling a little tired lately, and a little blue, too. Everybody offers their help when you have a newborn, but you don't need it, because they sleep all the time and you are full of love and wonder. And then, by five months, when everybody expects you to have adjusted to your new situation with a baby, you start feeling like you stop handling it all that well.

I could talk about how I have been feeling like shutting the door to my soul for a little while. Curling up in my snug home, shutting the blinds to the outside world. You know, that feeling. I could talk about all of this, and yet I don't (really) because I feel a sense of shame over my emotional ups and downs.

Why is it that women are expected to be rational and reasonable (or are they?). I've never been good at being a steady stream of emotions, mine are more like little whirlwinds, and they hit at unannounced times. [I was once in class, the professor saying something about the Gulf War, and whatever it was he said, about military strategy, he said it with such cool rationality that it made me sick to my stomach and I yelled something like this, loud and clear, for everybody in the auditorium to hear: How dare you talk about war like that? People die! People die every day! Afterward a friend patted me on the shoulder and said: Aww, poor you, is it that time of month again? And I nodded and said, yes, yes, it is, finding myself highly embarrassed about my emotional outburst among a class full of serious students of political science. Only that, it wasn't that time of month. I simply felt like crying that day, that minute, for all those people that died that day.]

So, my question is, is it bad? To be emotional? To cry when we feel like it, and laugh when we feel like it? I have never had a depression (I think), but I have noticed that people who do are ashamed of it, and they treat it as an enemy, something foreign to them. And once they come out of it, they say, hey look, it's me, I'm back again! But isn't the blue feeling, the sadness, the grief, also part of who we are? And why do we need to hide that part?

You see, I think it's beautiful to be sad sometimes. To be emotional. To be warm. To be woman. There is beauty in gray. We took a walk by the waterfront on Sörnäisten rantatie yesterday and saw the most stunning double rainbow against a backdrop of the grayest sky. Semicircular arcs, with two golden ends. I think seeing that may be a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and the beauty of its sight made me cry...

So, you see. A lot of everythings and nothings. I don't know why I am telling you all this. Oh wait, I do. I felt like it.

(And I will very likely feel embarrassed about this post tomorrow... but oh well).

----
Es tut mir leid, ihr Lieben, ich hab jetzt keine Zeit das Gelabere hier zu uebersetzen. Alles ist in Ordnung, bei uns geht's zur Zeit ein bisschen drunter und drueber, ich bin auf einer Achterbahn der Gefuehle und mache hier den Punkt, dass man, als Mensch, als Frau, manchmal emotionsgeladen sein darf (oder etwa nicht!). Es gibt Schoenheit, auch in Traurigkeit. Grau ist manchmal ganz schoen toll.

Finland: Porvoo

I love doors and windows.

When I was a young teenager, before we moved to Finland, before I even knew where Finland was really, I took dance lessons at the one and only dance school my town had to offer. Well, it wasn't a "school" as much as one mirrored room. I would walk there, to the other side of town, every Wednesday. It was a 30-minute walk, which isn't too bad, I know, but it felt like a hundred kilometers to me at the time. (And yes, I could have taken the bus, but back then I was too shy to take a bus all by myself. Plus, I was always out of cash. Haha, some things change, some things don't).

Anyway, what I did during that one hour of walking every Wednesday was to peek into the homes of fellow Lintorfers. I'd look through their windows... or the slits of their doors left open... and I'd see families celebrating a child's birthday... or an elderly couple watching TV...and a lot of times... nothing. People don't spend that much time at home these days.

I still do it. I steel peek into other people's homes. Is that creepy? Maybe. But I can't help it. It fascinates me. :)

So. For this reason I love doors and windows. What lies behind them...?

Finland has incredibly fascinating doors and windows, I think. They can be surprisingly colorful, and old, and wooden. I think one could analyze an entire nation based on their doors and windows. Maybe somebody should travel the world and take pictures of the doors and windows he or she finds along the way. And make a book out of it. I would buy it!

On Thursday we went to Porvoo, a little town about  a 40-minute drive outside Helsinki, with a picturesque Old Town. These are some Porvoo doors and windows. Aren't they beautiful? I wish I'd know what goes on behind them.

Maybe I'll take pictures of Finnish doors and windows in different Finnish towns this summer. That might be a nice little project. And a  nice way for me to get to know Finland better. :)

Which one is your favorite door? I like the first one, the red house. So romantic. It was on a beautiful hill, overlooking a lake...

... or the blue-white-yellow one, with no stairs leading up to it. How strange!

Happy weekend!