I hope everyone had a fun new year – we roasted a chicken and watched “Dark Knight”, then stood on the deck and looked at everyone else’s fireworks. Swedes don’t have a Guy Fawkes type event during the year, so new year’s eve is their big chance to play with fireworks, and they really go for it. It seemed like every house around us was setting off rockets, and a few were coming from the beach and further away. Across the water we could see a line of fireworks marking the other side of the fjord. The sky was lighting up all around us – I’m pretty sure I have never seen so many fireworks all going off at once!

We’ve been hard at work preparing the baby room at home. The wallpaper was in pretty bad shape in some places, so we patched it up here and there before painting. We’ve done two coats of paint, and one more should finish it off. Today we also ripped up the old carpet and bought some ridiculously cheap laminate flooring from Ikea. We were thinking of just putting down cheap vinyl, but the laminate was SO much cheaper that we decided we’d use it. It’s only 35 kronor per square metre – that’s just over £3 for you English folk, or about $7.50 in NZ dollars. It’s not too handsome – you get what you pay for – but we are planning to do major building work in 2-3 years time so it will do the job rather well until then.

We also attempted to buy a changing table/cabinet thingo while at Ikea, but it was out of stock. We did get a changing mat and fleece blanket though, and I was allowed to buy some fabric from one of the sale bins – I love Ikea fabric!

The big achievements of the day were that we managed to order a sofa (although we can expect to wait up to 10 weeks for it!) and we managed to get mobile phones. It was a real struggle to get phones, and we ended up having to get L’s mum to order them for us as she is already a customer and we are lowly new residents with no credit history. But apparently in 6 months we will be responsible enough to be the masters of our own telephones.