Viking in the Oven

Well folks, it's official: I'm expecting, with child, knocked up, in a family way, eating for two, up the duff, and my eggo is preggo.  Our little Ameriswede is due to make an appearance in mid-August, just in time for his or her birthday to be celebrated with loads of crazy Swedish crayfish parties! 

Since this is my first pregnancy I've been a little obsessed with over-analyzing every little symptom that comes along, but luckily everything has been pretty laid-back compared to some of the horrific morning sickness that some of my poor friends have dealt with.  I took a positive pregnancy test on the first evening we arrived in the US for my brother's wedding in early December....in a hotel room in Chicago, after sneaking one last taste of a sadly-missed Leinenkugel's beer.  We managed to keep the big news undercover during most of our trip to the states with the excuse of me designated-driving after my brother's wedding rehearsal dinner and reception, and luckily I wasn't feeling anything different at that point aside from a little jet lag.

Things started to kick in when I was around 6 weeks along...I was putting on mascara and it smelled really strong.  I thought, "Since when does mascara smell so weird and chemically?"  Then suddenly the smell and taste of coffee, which I usually love, just didn't seem appetizing at all.  Not like an instantaneous barfing reaction, just more of the sensation that coffee was suddenly a weird non-food that didn't interest me in the slightest.

By the time we made it home for Swedish Christmastime, I was feeling pretty blech and had developed a new skill of being able to nap on demand, anytime, anywhere.  I was also amazed at how offensive certain smells and foods had become, like pissed off that certain things could smell so revolting.  We went out to M's parents for Christmas dinner and I was a very quiet, green girl at the dinner table while a huge array of strange and strong-smelling foods were passed under my nose.  Most typical Swedish Christmas foods consist of salty cured meats, mini sausages and meatballs, salmon, pickled herring, deviled eggs, meat pâtés, and other delicacies.

Yum for some, yuck for me. (Wikipedia photo)

My best friends that day were plain potatoes, fizzy water, and bread.  I managed to sit through the dinner and hopefully be polite while all the time thinking that I'd pay someone a million dollars to hold a fan blowing minty fresh air on my face and feed me a plain fruit salad.  M's intuitive mother had a clue that something strange was going on and pretty much read the pregnancy signs all over my queasy face (she told me this after I broke the news to her a few weeks later).  Luckily I never got sick enough to the point of actual vomiting, and now that I'm into my second trimester I've been feeling close to normal for the most part.  Unfortunately I have a feeling that Swedish Christmas food might forever be on my list of "yuck" memories.

Early pregnancy is a weird time...you feel like crap most of the time, the happy-sweet-motherly feelings are far from kicking in, and you can't tell anyone what's going on because it's too early.  Now that the cat is out of the bag I'm starting to get more and more excited and things seem to be cooking up as they should be.

I feel unbelievably lucky to be giving birth in Sweden after watching movies like this one and learning more about the backwards way that hospitals treat pregnant women in the US. 

Here in Sweden, all prenatal visits and births are overseen by midwives instead of doctors, and the general attitude seems to be, "What can we do for you?"  They've been very hands-off with me so far and have treated me like the normal, healthy person I am instead of something that needs to be diagnosed and treated.  We'll have an ultrasound in a few weeks and I'm excited to catch a glimpse of our little squirt soon.  Needless to say this blog is about to get much more baby-fied, starting now!

Crayfish party!

Last Saturday I was lucky enough to participate in a traditional Swedish Kräftskiva, or crayfish party.  These parties originated back when it was illegal to catch crayfish until the crayfish trapping season started in late August. 

Our landlords here on the farm opened up one of the barns and invited all the tenants who live here to come and celebrate...I think there were around 60-70 people in total.  The barn was decked out with paper lanterns and a big stereo system with disco lights, which really came in handy later in the evening when the tipsy dancing began.  Unfortunately M was away at sea, but his brother was here to help initiate me on proper crayfish-partying.  The rules are pretty simple: grab a crayfish, crack it open and suck out as much meat and juice as you can, sing lots of rowdy songs, and (most importantly) drink snaps at the end of every song.  Some neighbors gave me a taste of dill-flavored snaps, which I don't think would work with very many foods in very many situations except for washing down crayfish!

As one might expect, there is not a hell of a lot of meat inside a crayfish.  And, it takes some work getting the little buggers open.  So, between singing at the top of your lungs and drinking a shot of booze every few minutes while having not-quite-so-much food in your stomach, you end up getting really drunk, really fast.  Here's the official version of the drinking song Helan Går, they way it's supposed to be sung:

Loosely translated, the words mean:

 

The whole shot goes
     Sing hop fa-da-ra-la-la-la-lay 

The whole shot goes 
Sing hop fa-da-ra-la-lay
And he who doesn't take the whole shot 
  Doesn't get the half shot either
The whole shot goooooooooes
[Drink the whole shot]
Sing hopp fa-da-ra-la-lay

Now, here's how the song ends up sounding toward the end of the night (not my video): 

It was a really fun party, especially since my house was just a few hundred tipsy meters down the road at the end of the night.  Next year I'll try to remember to eat more bread to balance out all the booze, my hangover will thank me in the morning.

Conclusion: I Love Midsommar.

I survived my first Swedish Midsommar this past weekend, and oh boy was it a good one.  M and I spent the past week out in the far archipelago between his parent's island and the island where our friends have a stuga (cabin) on the island of Tornö.  We arrived to Tornö around eleven on Friday morning...the boats were decorated, the lunch table was set, and the beers were flowing freely.

Everyone decorates their boats and houses with björk (birch) branches for Midsommar.

Lunch consisted of about 8 different types of sill (pickled herring), deviled eggs with caviar, new potatoes with dill, smoked moose heart, wild boar paté, cured smoked salmon and shrimp, several types of cheese and bread, plenty of beer, and a special drink called aquavit to wash down the sill.  Aquavit is spiced vodka, and the particular bottle we had was Linie brand aquavit...what makes this kind special is that all Linie Aquavit has been aged in an oak sherry cask on board a ship that has crossed the equator twice.  You can read details of your particular bottle's journey on the label; ours had traveled on board the M/V Tampa from Scandanavia to Australia and back.  Supposedly this 5-month journey combined with fluctuating temperatures and humidity causes the booze to become extra delicious.  My taste for strong shots of booze isn't refined any more than it takes to get the fiery stuff down my gullet as quickly as possible.

Once we were totally stuffed, warm, and happy, we took the boat over to the larger island of Möja to see the Midsommar festivities.  We brought along a cooler full of beer, whiskey, coffee, and traditional strawberry cake.

The midsommar dancing was just about the happiest sight you can see while you're half-drunk and full of delicious food under perfect sunny weather on a Swedish island.  Everyone has crowns of flowers and both grownups and kids dance and sing along to the silly songs.  Whenever I asked what the song was about, I got an answer along the lines of, "Uh...this one is about a priest and a crow who fall down in a ditch and start laughing."  Or, "This one is about frogs that have no tails or ears so they're funny to see, and then pigs have tails and ears so they're funny to see too."  My conclusion was that the songs don't necessarily contain great mysterious cultural significance, they're just fun to sing year after year.

Later on in the afternoon we went back to the stuga and continued our eating and drinking spree.  I had been warned by M that by nightfall on Midsommar, someone usually came up with a crazy idea like taking the boat farther out into the archipelago to skinny dip with seals, or something along those lines.  This year was no different, and our friend suggested we drive out to his grandfather's fishing cabin on Kallskär to watch the sunrise.  We piled into the boat with food and blankets and drove to the outer edges of the archipelago where we hiked to the highest point on the island to watch the combination of sunrise and sunset that pretty much lasts through the night.

Here are some photos of Kallskär the next morning.  The islands here are windswept and rocky, with low vegetation and no one to see for miles.  I'm not one to get sentimental about the beauty of nature, but there was absolutely something magical about this place.

Bring on the Midsommar

This Friday we'll be taking M's boat out to the island of Stora Tornö for the traditional midsommar celebration.  Midsommar is the most anticipated time of year in Sweden, celebrated in late June on the weekend closest to the summer solstice.  From what I've heard, the main elements of this party will include eating, drinking, wearing flowers in your hair, more eating, more drinking, singing songs about small frogs, more eating, more drinking, and dancing around the maypole (which some claim is a huge phallic fertility symbol meant to impregnate the earth).

  What's not to love about this?

Needless to say, I'm pretty excited to experience a proper Swedish midsommar in the outer archipelago.  I'm a little nervous to see how well I can hold up with all the snaps-drinking, but it sounds like there will be plenty of herring, salmon, potatoes, wild pig, and strawberries to balance everything out.  Here's a German Ikea commercial that was banned for poking fun at the Swedish midsommar traditions:

Looks like a good time if you ask me!

The little differences

Lucky for me and M, our work schedules have allowed us to spend a lot of time visiting each other in our respective countries.  Last year I visited Sweden twice, for a total of about nine weeks.  It's always fun to see the differences between countries, and this was especially exciting since it was my first visit to Europe.  I could go on and on about the major differences between Swedish and US foreign policy, taxes, health care, etc, but instead I'm going to talk about the surprising, sometimes brilliant, sometimes puzzling, little differences that I noticed.  I'm excited to start getting used to them.

• Bed Linens:  Fitted sheets do not exist in Sweden.  You just tuck the corners of a bottom flat sheet under the mattress.  Also, the bedspread is split into two separate, single-sized quilts: one for each person, so cover-stealing is never an issue. 

• Booze:  The sale of alcohol is regulated by the Swedish Alcohol Retail Monopoly, or Systembolaget.  All alcohol is quite expensive, but the fun thing about buying beer is that you can mix and match the different brands of single cans and bottles.  The not-so-fun thing about drinking the beer is that Swedes usually consume it warm, and always poured into a glass.  I plan to stick to my American roots when it comes to beer drinking: cold, and from the can....sorry guys.  (As a side note, all Swedish pharmacies were also government-owned until 2009.  When I brought M into a Walgreens he thought it was hilarious that you could pick up your prescription medicine along with a case of beer and a gigantic bag of chips all in the same store). 

•  Candy:  On Saturdays, all Swedish kids (and most grownups) are treated to Lördagsgodis, or "Saturday Sweets."  It's just like the pick 'n mix style of candy we have here in the US, but with a much bigger selection.  So, you grab your little scoop and go to town picking out the different flavors you want.  A lot of the candy flavors were a little strange for me...most of them were either big hunks of gumminess or licorice-based, while I prefer anything chocolate.  M's favorite is an absolutely vile invention called Jättesalt ("Giant Salt").  This stuff looks like little brown rocks and tastes like you gnawed off a chunk of one of those big salt licks my dad used to put out for the deer.  M calls it "proper" candy and was craving it the whole time he was in Texas.

• Christmas:  I confess, I could normally care less about celebrating Christmas, but I found the Swedish decorations and traditions to be tasteful and beautiful.  The houses are decorated with simple white candles in the windows and I didn't see a shred of the technicolor tackiness and materialism that vomits across the US during Christmastime.  It was almost enough to make this Scrooge feel all warm and cozy inside.

• Food: The four major food groups in Sweden are meat, potatoes, fish, and coffee.  I thought most of the food was delicious, wholesome, and simple, mostly due to the fact that M is an amazing cook who makes everything from scratch with meat that he's slayed with his own Vikingesque hands.   Once again though, some of the dishes were a little too salty for my taste.  One thing I tried that I don't think I'll ever develop a taste for was blodpudding, a type of crumbly sausage made from dried pig blood and other fillers.  My favorites were the endless piles of kantarelle mushrooms we picked in the forest.                                          

 

       Swedes love food that comes in tubes, whether it's caviar, bacon-flavored cheese, or crab-flavored mayonnaise.  The refrigerators in Sweden even have special little racks where you can hang all your food-tubes.

• Front Door Etiquette: When you come inside any house in Sweden, you MUST take your shoes off at the door.  Accidentally stepping more than a few feet into the house with your shoes still on will earn you immediate status as a dirty savage.  Don't do it.

• Grocery stores:  In order to get a cart, you deposit a few coins into a machine that holds all the carts locked together.  Sweden's dairy section was probably the most impressive...I have never seen so many different types of yogurt in one place.  I was also pretty excited about the mix-your-own-granola section.  In some stores, each child gets a free organic banana per visit.  Also, you pay for each grocery bag, so you have to eyeball the amount of stuff you're buying and decide ahead of time how many bags you'll need. 

• Laundry:  For some unknown reason, it takes over an hour and a half for a regular cycle of laundry to finish in a Swedish washing machine.  When M visited me in Texas, he was convinced there was no way clothes could get clean in a 30-minute washer cycle.  Also, you can't forget to empty out the big plastic water tank in the dryer between loads.  I spent about three hours trying to dry a load of laundry at M's house before I realized they were still wet because the water tank was full. 

• Nudity:  Compared to our uptight American culture, Swedes are not afraid of their bodies.  Butts and boobs are common sights on television, and are seen as normal as an arm or a leg.  Photos of women in magazines are average and healthy-looking without tons of airbrushing.   I picked up a typical housewife-y magazine at the gym and stumbled across an article blatantly illustrating different shapes to shave into your pubic hair, complete with smiling women and their landing strips, lightning bolts, and hearts.  No big deal.

• "Pizza":  Sweden has gotten creative with its pizza toppings, to say the least.  The normal pizzas were pretty good, a little thin on the sauce...but some of the more innovative toppings included eggs, peanuts, bananas, curry sauce, and tuna fish.  Thanks, but no thanks.

•  Urban sprawl (or lack thereof):  Within just a few minutes after driving outside the city limits, you find yourself amid huge, real forests with craggy rock cliffs and tall pines...not a bulletin board, strip mall, office complex, or condo to be seen.  After a few miles you get to the next town and back to civilization, but being surrounded by native forest reminds you of what the landscape is supposed to look like.  

Comments From Your Child About Holiday Shopping!

I know holiday shopping with me can be frustrating and difficult at times. I really don’t want to be a problem when you take me along. I realize you have a lot to do and you want me to be good so you can get it all done, but, my brain doesn’t always allow me to be perfect. I do like when you take me with you because my brain is curious and I get to see new things. I also love being with you!

So here are some ideas I have so we can have a good time together!

My brain doesn’t like to be bored and it also doesn’t like to be over stimulated. I need interesting things to keep it entertained, but if I get too much stimulation I will need you to help me to relax. My brain is not good at this on my own yet.

               (3 -6 year olds)

•   Give me a coupon with a picture on it. Make it a fun “treasure hunt” to find this item as we go through the isles together.

• Have me help you find the items you need by giving me simple directions. For example: Ask me to get the red box or pick the smallest size can, or the item on the bottom shelf.
  
  

               (1 – 4 year olds)

•   While waiting in line, name an item for me to find and point to. Or point to a picture on magazine and have me name it.

                                   

               (3 – 5 year olds)

• As we turn down a new isle name a color. Have me point out items of that color as we  go through the row. Or to add variety, name a shape to look for.

My brain also likes physical activity and using all of the senses. Exploring is how my brain learns. So, I will like touching and trying out things I see.  If you guide me to or provide things that are safe to touch this will be best.  Much of this is all new to me, and do not realize what might happen if I touch, push or pull on something without your guidance.

                (0-3 year olds)

•  While we shop give items to try out. Let me feel different textures or hear the sounds items  make.  Since my brain learns through repetition I may want to do it again and again. Use descriptive words for the textures and sounds I am experiencing too. My brain likes to hear lots of language from you about objects in my world.

                 (3 – 6 year olds)

• Have me close my eyes and listen to all the sounds. Have me tell you all that I hear.
  
  

• Have me help you put items on the counter as you get ready to checkout. We could count together as we do this.

            

I really like it when you give me positive attention . When we are having fun together I will feel good.  My brain will then not react in negative ways to get you to pay attention to me. 

                 (2 – 6 year olds)

• Let me tell you about all that I see and am interested in as we shop. I get excited about all of the new things I am learning and want to share it with you!

                 (All ages)

• Sing holiday songs with me while we wait in line.
  
  

            

When I am  hungry or tired it is more likely you will have to deal with acting out behaviors. I really am not trying to be “bad’, my brain is just reacting to what it needs. My brain is not developed to the point of being able to control how I feel yet. I need you to understand and offer support.

• Bring water and healthy snacks along.

• Begin shopping after everyone has had enough sleep. Plan shopping before my bed time or after my naps.

With all of this in mind, let’s have a wonderful time together!  My favorite thing to do is spend fun and loving times with you!

For brain development as perfect gifts take advantage of the "brain buster " special at braininisights this week-end!  (Friday, November 27th - Sunday, November 29th)

http://www.braininsightsonline.com