History, churches and the countryside

I grew up in southern Sweden, but moved to Uppsala (one hour drive north of Stockholm) ten years ago to study at the univeristy. A couple of years later I met Magnus (2004). We lived in Uppsala until 2007 when we both had jobs in Stockholm and decided to move there. We rented a house for a year, then we bought the house where we still live. It's situated halfways between Uppsala and Stockholm (as that's what we could afford - both Stockholm and Uppsala are too expensive for us), next to Arlanda international airport. We moved in here 2-3 weeks before Nora was born, so it took quite a while until we began exploring our surroundings (except for our closest neighbourhood - having a dog makes as get to know all streets and trees and paths close to home). Only six kilometers from our house is Sigtuna, Sweden's first town (now a small, cute "town" with 10 000 inhabitants). We often go there as it's very beautiful, and also because they have several really good cafés. There's a lot of "history" in this area, many old churches and also rune stones from the vikings. In an attempt of getting to know the countryside + a bit of history, I decided that we'd go visit the churches around where we live and also bring Zam and go for a walk at each place. Today we went to Odensala church.




The oldest parts of the church were built in 1100-something. It has a lot of beautiful paintings inside that I was looking forward to see, but unfortunately the church was closed. (Here you can see panaroma pictures from inside the church.) They have begun to lock the churches in the countryside when no personell is there, as they've had problmens with thefts. That's so sad, in many ways. We had a lovely couple of hours anyway. We looked at the church from the outside, we tried the swings, Nora picked two flowers, and we went for a walk.








(Do you see the airplane?)

Our kitchen: Nora's photo

Preparing for Easter

Boiling eggs with onion.

Making chickens etc with Nora.

Hunting: Spring flowers

It was a day with sharp spring sunshine and birds singing. We went for a long walk, brought biscuits, water and an apple. We were on a spring flower hunt.

Here's a tussilago. (Names in Swedish.)

Toddlerwearing ;-)

When Nora was a baby we used to carry her a lot. Nowadays she walks, and runs :-) But sometimes she wants to be carried in a wrap, but only for a few minutes. (The wrap is one I sell in my shop, it's a LennyLamb in bamboo/cotton.)

Spring in our garden

I'm back, and so is spring. There's a little bit snow left at a few places, but now we can find spring flowers and the birds are singing. We play and work in our garden. I want to show you Nora's little sandbox which we made last year. It's rather small, but our garden is small too.



There was a storm here last night. A tree fell down behind our house (luckily outside our garden). Our garden was once again covered in autumn leaves that the strong wind carried back to us ;-) We're outside playing and working a lot now, preparing our garden for the growing season. I fight with it every year as the soil is too muddy, the garden in the shadow AND in north east, and my vegetables are invided by hungry snails of different kinds every year. But I don't give up ;-)

Nora is cooking. This is food for the birds. She was so happy to see they had eaten of it. I didn't tell her it was the storm ...