Having covered the main events of our busy busy autumn, it is time for a little snow and winter, this time from Sweden. We spent the winter holidays in Sweden with my parents. Coming “home” is always a happy thing for me, and for my son as well coming to Sweden has become “coming home”. He really feels like my parents’ house is his, and he is fully embracing his Swedish language skills and finds great joy in speaking to everyone he meets. It makes me so happy to see that our Swedish endeavors is giving him confidence to speak and feel like he is no different from his Swedish cousins.
There are always so many pleasures coming to Sweden. Spending time with grandma and grandpa, playing with cousins, eating grandma’s delicious food, baking with grandma, playing games with grandpa. And then there is enjoying time in the snow! We almost never have any snow in Fukuoka, and if we get some it almost always melts as soon as it hits the ground. So to experience proper winter is something very exotic for our son and we were so lucky as to get a proper Swedish winter this year. It started badly, with a green Christmas and no snow in sight. But then suddenly after New Year’s Eve, it started to snow and get really really cold. If we had had to go somewhere we would have been hindered by this, having to travel the icy roads, but as we did not have any plans we could just enjoy playing in the snow at home.
Outside my parents house there is a little slope, perfect for sliding down on small snow mats. My son wanted to do snowmen too, but with this cold weather there was no chance to make them. We managed to create a few snow lanterns though, digging up the warmer snow next to the house, but the snowmen had to wait. Instead my son got to try something he had never done before!
In our little town there is a little downhill ski slope affectionately called soptippsbacken, the dump hill, since it supposedly was an old city garbage dumpsite. When I was a child I learned to ski there and I remember my childhood winters as always snowy. If that is true or just childhood nostalgia I do not know, but I am so happy that my son got to experience what it was like when I grew up, learning to ski in the same slope. He spent two days on skis. The first day I was walking next to my son who stood on skis for the first time, trying to get the hang of plowing down the children’s slope. The second day I also rented skis and we went up the lift together.
My son was a fast learner and by the end of the second day he rode the big lift as well as skied down the biggish slope all by himself. He was so proud and happy to have been able to have this experience and now we are both dreaming of going skiing together in Japan.
