February in one fell swoop

As Aaron pointed out, we've fallen a bit behind this month. But I'm using the excuse that February is such a short month to justify the measly number of posts. So we'll just settle for one mega-update.

Myrna is a chatterbox. She narrates everything, and it's our job to put the pieces together and figure out what she might be saying. Favorite words are "delicious" (like the lasagna I made from scratch last week), "disgusting" (thankfully not referring to food we serve her, but to Moose Brothers drinking out of the toilet) and "ridiculous" (referring to anything we do). She has picked up a few Swedish words (probably more than we know, but our Swedish vocabulary is limited to about 4 words). But more entertaining is the British English she's learning. She is fully aware that Lizzy has different words for things, and Myrna to add a twist to her daily routines by enjoying a snack of biscuits or riding in her pram or pushchair. Myrna knows I'm no fan of the word "nappy," but likes to remind me that "Lizzy calls a diaper 'nappy.'" Speaking of annoying reminders, every time Chris helps her into her coat he's warned, "not like at Elliot's house," referring to a one-time incident over a month ago when Chris caught her chin in the zipper.

After a "package" came from her Grandparents with a Thomas the Tank Engine DVD and a Percy train, we took a trip to Ikea, specifically to buy her some train tracks from Ikea's line of Biro knock-offs. She's spent the last week enthralled with the train set. It's kept her so busy that I think we even had two mornings without Charlie and Lola. I'm slow to learn about the curvature of the train tracks (I didn't grow up with any) and I'm really good at forming a closed loop, only to have one or two tracks not in the configuration. Pretty soon, we'll be turning this in to a good math problem.


The trains haven't replaced the blocks. Recently they have been cookies (baking paper was necessary for that one), sometimes they can be baby strollers, and then there's the usual "churches" and "houses." It's fun to see the world through her eyes - all her "houses" are clusters of vertical apartment buildings. As most kids, there are some things she picks up on and you wish she might just forget about. The other weekend we were coming home on the bus and Chris and I were amazed with the long line of people waiting outside the System Bolaget (Sweden's State-operated liquor store). It was 10 minutes to two on a Saturday, which meant there was only 10 minutes left to buy your beer and wine before Monday. Later that afternoon Myrna was playing with her blocks, lining them up as she often does and then declaring them to be a "System line." She frequently now wants help making a "System."


That's at least some of February in a nutshell. We might hit 30 degrees today, a pleasant surprise after a few weeks of single digit (F) degrees and a snow storm in which a foot of snow came overnight and shut the entire city down by canceling all the buses (though the subway still ran).