I've been a bit under the weather lately

quite literally, actually. The dark season of Finland has really been exceptionally hard for me to bear this year. I'm not sure why. But now I wanna share some of the brighter things that's been going on in our family.

In the late September I had some annual leave and I took the kids from school and pre-school for couple of days to travel to Oulu (about 600km from where we live, not a long distance in Australia, but a very long distance in Finland). I still have
quite a few relatives that live there and my grandma haven't been too well, so I wanted to see her too

On our way we stopped in the beautiful city of Jyväskylä to spend some time with a family who lives there on a farm. The boys were so thrilled about that. Adiel was very excited to feed the cattle.

Erno on the other hand loved this cat who would stay on his lap a long time.



The boys also loved this St Bernard who was almost as big as them.



There were also kittens and no, we did not bring one of them home with us.



This horse was ignoring me at first but suddenly tried to get very friendly with me.



After we left the farm I had a makeover done by a friend. I think she did a great job!



So from Jyväskylä we drove on to Oulu where we met some relatives and had a good time.

I saw both of my grandmas.

One of them doesn't remember me anymore but I'm sure she enjoyed our visit anyway. And I'll still have all the good memories of her with me forever. I'd like to share one of them. It was when me and my older sister were quite young, under school age, and we had a terrible nanny looking after us and we just hated her. So we decided to run away from her. We took our doll and a doll carriage with us and went outside. We lived about a 1 km from our grandmas house and started heading there. I remember a passer by stopped us and asked where we were heading. We replied: to grandma's house! And so we did. She welcomed us, as she always did, and we never had anyone else babysitting us again :)



This grandma remembers us and is always happy to see us and I'm sure she'd had a lot of things to say but unfortunately she can't talk. So we talk to her and she enjoys it. I can't imagine what it would be like not being able to express yourself to your loved ones. However, I've been so blessed to be able to spend my childhood and youth surrounded with such great grandparents. Not everybody has that. I only wish my kids could have known these awesome ladies when they were younger.



I also had my butt kicked in weight lifting by my 85 yo grandpa. He rocks!



Last week we celebrated Adiel's 9th birthday. It's hard to believe that my journey to motherhood has taken that long already. What a great journey it's been thus far.He liked the nintendo party he had last year so he wanted to have that again. This year we borrowed a data projector from a friend so the kids were able play on really big screen. They loved it!

Adiel also wanted to have another Super Mario bros cake for his birthday. This year it looked better but tasted worse than last year.



One more thing before I call it a day:

It was only matter of time before he got to the next level of nerdism:




Can you figure out what it is? More points if you can also figure what will be the next level ;)