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Those little people can be silly at times.  Our little one took a tumble in the bathroom the other night, and instead of catching herself with her hands (as is most common) or forehead (less common, but it’s happened more than once), she caught herself with her mouth.  This new technique resulted in one very loose little tooth, a bit of blood, and quite a lot of tears.

According to the dentist, the tooth is quite likely to be alright once the gum around it heals up nicely and snugs it back into place.   So she’s back on “baby” style food for a while – mushy stuff and things that can be cut up really small.  Which is a shame when she has really started to enjoy using her incisors on apples, knäckebröd, and other crunchy things.

The most perplexing thing about this episode is that it happened when she wasn’t even climbing on anything.  She’s such a danger monkey that we’re both amazed that the first tooth injury didn’t occur as a result of climbing in the fireplace, or out a window, or up on a dining chair to play with my laptop, or onto the kitchen stool to play at the sink …

I have been rather hopeless at posting on the blog lately.  Since our darling daughter started at daycare, she has become very good at bringing home strange and unusual bugs that our poor immune systems are not used to, and so there has been a string of colds going through the house.  My most recent one turned into a sinus infection that actually had me shedding tears in misery.

Happily, we are all healthy again now.  I thought I would post some photos from last month that haven’t previously had their public debut.

Back in the spring, everything started to green up and then the ground burst out into a sea of these little white flowers – vitsippor in Swedish.  This bit of forest is on our daily “commute” to daycare.  In the winter it was impassable, but in the spring it became the highlight of the day.

We had our own cherry blossom festival here:

And then we had a storm, after which they looked like this:

We had some stunning weather in May.  After a brief heat wave:

Richard arrived for a visit, and it turned back to average springtime.  But it was still nice enough for a picnic down on the beach.

And we took our guest to Universeum in Gothenburg, where we saw pointy pink birds and fluffy black monkeys.

I had one lonely tulip blooming in the tulip patch:

Most of its friends were nibbled to death by the deer:

Lonely tulip did eventually get some friends who also bloomed, but it was far from being the tulip patch of my dreams.

That pretty much sums it up for May 2010.  We did a lot of digging in the garden, but I don’t have particularly interesting photos to show for it.  Stay tuned though because the vegetable patch is starting to produce the goods!

I used to be hard to buy things for, because I earned good money so I bought things I wanted for myself.

Now I’m skint, so I can think of lots of things that I want 

So if any family members are stuck for ideas for my looming birthday, take a look at my wish list here.

When I lived in Hamilton, we used to shop at Big Fresh supermarket.  They had a fibreglass cow in the dairy section that mooed when you pushed a button, and sometimes you could buy big bags of chicken feet.  On Saturdays they sold goat meat, and there would be a big banner hanging up in the meat department saying “Saturday is goat day!”

Well, Saturday might be goat day, but Sunday is definitely moose day.  I have seen moose on the last 3 sundays in a row, so clearly I’m on a roll.  The first was when driving between Bjursås and Falun.  I spotted a moose standing just in the forest at the edge of the road, canoodling with a tree.  The following Sunday, we had just come back from a garden fair in Gothenburg and were sitting in Linus’s mother’s house when a moose went galloping across the open field in front of the house, pursued by a flock of birds.  And the next sighting was, we think, the same moose – we were there again, waiting for a taxi to collect Linus’s grandparents.  We saw the taxi pull into the driveway to the neighbourhood, and then stop … because a moose was standing in its path.  Once it had let the taxi go by, it came for a stroll back past the house.

So, if you want to see a moose, come to Sweden and hang out with me on a Sunday.

In other wildlife sightings, I’ve recently seen a fox (much nicer looking than London foxes – orange, with a bushy tail & everything), plenty of deer (who’ve been eating my tulips – more on that later), and two badgers.  Both of the badgers were road-kill, so Linus said that I wasn’t really allowed to count them in my wildlife tally.  But as my friend Ben pointed out:

“Dead Badgers are still badgers. If I saw a dead Dragon I would count that as seeing a Dragon.”

So I reckon they count.

On her first birthday, Anneli naturally got a few toys as gifts.  Several of them have become strong favourites, both for her and us, and they’re all the ones made of wood.

I think Anneli’s favourite seems to be the Brio stacking clown.  It’s a set of wooden rings that sit on a pole, and if stacked in the right order they make a wee clown.  The box said “19+ months” so I was expecting it to be ages before she had the coordination required to put the rings on the pole, however she cracked that part of it within about 2 minutes!  She still likes putting all the rings on, but of course they’re never in the right order.

My favourite has to be the Buzzy Bee.

Of course it’s a NZ classic and I’m sure she’ll end up with a lot more Buzzy Bee merchandise in the years to come!  Now that Anneli has started walking I hope she’ll realise soon that she can drag this little fella around the house and watch his wings spin 

Anneli also likes boinging the tail on this sausage dog, also from Brio:

Again, she’ll hopefully realise soon that she can take him for walks rather than just boinging his springy tail and flossing her bottom teeth with his leash.

Finally, there is this great wooden puzzle from Kärnan:

We go through the various animal noises together, but the only ones she seems interested in imitating are the lamb and the tractor (yes, the tractor counts as a farm animal).

It’s been quite a while since I blogged.  Anneli had a cold for the most part of the last 2 weeks, so was kept out of daycare.  Luckily she has a grandmother close by who really enjoys her company, so we got lots of baby sitting.   We also spent a weekend up in Falun, which was a great way to switch off for a couple of days.

On the way home from Falun, we stopped at a beekeeping store in Töreboda.  We are both keen to get a beehive, but it won’t be this year because we don’t really have the spare cash to get all the equipment.  Instead we bought some bees wax, and I had a go at making some hand cream.

I followed this recipe, and added a drop of lavender essential oil.  It feels quite oily for a few minutes after using it, but otherwise I love it.  Most of all I love that it has a really simple ingredient list and I know what all the ingredients are – no mysterious chemicals at all.

Linus then had a go at making a lip balm:

with bees wax and honey, and this is similarly lovely.  He’s also rolled some candles from the wax sheets.

In other crafty news, I finished a pair of socks last month, the “regurgitated parrot socks”.  I called them that because I think that if you chewed on a parrot for a while, and then spat it out, it would look at least a little bit like this yarn.

I really enjoyed the entrelac knitting though, which was something I hadn’t tried before.  These socks have a project page here.  I recently went through my archive of sewing and knitting projects, and started creating a project page for each one – you can see these pages by clicking on the “Craft” tab above.

Finally, things are coming along in the gardening department.  We are often spending our evenings digging up rocks in order to make the vegetable patches larger, and we have an army of baby plants gathering their strength inside in preparation for moving outdoors soon.

There are tomatoes, pumpkins, broccolli, peas, cabbages, green kale, and more tomatoes.

We had a lovely Easter weekend with beautiful spring weather, and we had an Easter feast with the family at our house.  There was smoked salmon, Jansson’s temptation, pate, exciting cheeses, cake, hot cross buns, and eggs with little hats on.

I thought I’d post an update on the performance of the cloth bag for storing mushrooms. I used some mushies last night, and they were much dryer and less slimy than they get when stored in plastic. The bag felt damp though, so I think I’ll swap it out for a dry one, in case something sinister starts growing on it. Mostly, I really like knowing that my food hasn’t been resting against icky plastic.

Oh, and in case anyone is wondering why I just don’t get a paper bag for the mushrooms, the availability of paper bags in the produce section is very random at our supermarket.  I think I’ve only managed to find them twice.  And anyway, a cloth one will last much longer than a paper one.

We’re on a definite plastic avoidance strategy nowadays.  We’ve been doing the easy stuff, like taking our own bags to the supermarket.  Then we got some lovely stainless drink bottles – two big ones for us to take to the gym, and one little one for Anneli.  We prefer our wooden chopping boards over plastic, and glass jars for storing food over plastic containers.

But this is a new level of plastic avoidance: fabric vege bags.  I didn’t like all the plastic bags that we collected our fruit & veges into at the supermarket.  So I thought, why not take fabric bags for that purpose too?  We use self-scanning at the supermarket, and almost always checkout without staff involvement, so I wasn’t worried about any raised eyebrows at the checkout.  I used some old sheet material, from some delightful floral sheets scavenged at Mum’s new bach, and made four simple little drawstring bags.

Here are the new bags, being modelled by some oranges, mushrooms and baking potatoes.

I have plonked the mushrooms straight into the fridge in their cloth bag, and I’m hoping they will keep better than they usually do in plastic.

I did a bit of baby sewing in the last couple of weeks.  Firstly a couple of simple singlets.  The one in front is from a very light jersey I picked up at Rotorua Spotlight while in NZ.  The one in back is from a cotton lycra that I bought at last year’s Symässa in Borås, from MG-Tyger.

Secondly I whipped up a pair of baby pants.  These are made from the legs of a pair of pinstripe pants that I picked up for free at a Freecycle meetup in Göteborg last month.  I made them in the 18-months size, and added a cute purple floral along the cuffs since they are way too long at the moment.  The pockets are also floral on the inside.