The sick day was fun for us. He wasn't "sick" afterall, just couldn't go to school because he hadn't had the medicine for long enough. So we played store with the toys. He loves playing store! He is quite the upseller...maybe has a career future in sales of some sort. I went in with a list of a couple of things to buy, and he suggested almost double the amount of things, and had good reasons why I would need them! Thankfully, his store also took returns on consignment, so I was able to sell things back when I didn't need them anymore, and he returned them to the stock room back in the toy room -thus making the living room not look entirely like a toy room also.
Friday Jeff and Svea and I decided to have lunch at the burger barn outside the ABC. The folk school students had a big weekend of career preparation workshops, and on Friday several of them were in Copenhagen and several others were in Aarhus, so there wasn't lunch available for us. They make a good chicken sandwich at the burger barn! However, for the three of us, it was about $24. So it's not really a sustainable lunch option. We stayed home for dinner on Friday as well. The boys like to do that on Disney day, and also the students were eating late after their trips. I had just managed to get all the dishes and counters clean, and then we made alfredo sauce, pasta nests, garlic bread, broccoli, peas, and that was the end of the super cleanness. Sigh. But it was delicious! And it didn't take too long to clean up again.
Saturday we went to lunch at the folk school, and it was the delicious pitas again. It's such a fun day when it's pita day, because the tables are full of various toppings and you really can make lunch into whatever you want it to be. Due to it being a career preparation workshop weekend, there were a lot of former students here as well, about half of the fall group came back, as well as some others from prior years. The dining room was packed! It was fun to have that many people around, though the meals certainly took a bit longer. Svea's not very excited when our table is one of the last ones to be dismissed to get food.
The boys -Anders especially- have been asking to make chocolate chip cookies for a while now, and we finally remembered to get all the ingredients at the same time so we could make them this weekend. They don't seem to have chocolate chips here like we do back home, at least not at the ABC, so we bought a big chocolate bar and broke it into pieces. Jeff cracked several nuts to put in half the cookies as well. I had found a recipe on Pinterest that claimed to be the best recipe ever, and had been pinned more than 15,000 times, and they looked good so we decided to make those. It was in standard measurements, though, and here there are two liquid metric measuring cups, so there was a bit of guesswork. There are lots of tea spoons which Svea and Torben use for yogurt, so I estimated how much 1/2 tsp of salt and baking soda using one of the smaller spoons. And the brown sugar comes in a small bag, about the circumference of a one-cup measure back home, so I figured out about what height a cup would be of packed brown sugar, and the white sugar I used the deciliter cup and sort of guesstimated. The butter came in a package of 250g, we used an online conversion chart to figure out we needed 175g of melted butter, so estimated that as well. And for the flour we used the large liquid measure with approximation of cups to liters. It was a lot of guesswork! But they were absolutely amazing! I am definitely keeping that recipe around and making it again.
I was just looking through my pictures, and there are definitely more of Svea than the boys recently! They are so busy at school, and then come home and want to play with beads or relax, and I forget to take pictures of them doing regular things. Svea is really a ham, though. Such a funny and silly little girl!
She was having such a fun time wearing these princess shoes! She can walk pretty well in them too, I was sort of surprised.
Yesterday the weather was relatively nice, though cloudy, and we decided to take a walk up to the library to return some books, pick up another book, and see if there was still a travel book about Iceland in the for sale cart outside, that Jeff was wanting to get last week when he didn't have any change with him. I finished reading Bridget Jone's Diary this weekend, and now will be reading The Secret Life of Bees. I don't think I'd have a lot of luck finding books that aren't novels, in English here through interlibrary loan, so I am enjoying reading a lot of easy fiction. It's been so long since I read fiction! I will probably have to figure out how to add that into my schedule back at home, among the other non-fiction books I like to read. Torben and Anders took turns riding the scooter, because they decided it was too far to take the bike. I think Anders didn't want to ride the pink bike that far.
Ooh, still finding random unwrapped tea bags from when Svea thought she'd help me open them all. Not quite sure what this one is today; it might be licorice. I thought they were gone. Blech. Might have to go make another cup of cappuccino!
Jeff read this morning that the weather pattern is supposed to change and come from the south here pretty soon, so maybe the warmer weather will come with it. That will be nice. It's been around 40, but still quite damp. We are quickly filling up our calendar for weekends for the rest of our time here. Planning to go to Copenhagen in May -Anders keeps asking when we are going to take the train, "we were supposed to go a REALLY LONG TIME AGO" back in October. Working out a trip to Berlin at some point. We still have the gift certificate for Gram Slot that the Horstmanns gave us for Christmas, so trying to decide between April and May to go to that, when the weather is nice and we can tour the castle grounds a little bit. And our friends start arriving next month already. What fun! So far there are four sets of visitors on the calendar, with the tentative plan of others as well. It's hard to believe it's been thirty weeks already. It sort of seems like we just got here, and also seems like we've been here for a very long time.
It's nice that the sun is up when we wake up in the mornings now. Today, everyone was out of bed by 6:45, and while I made breakfast for the kids, the boys sorted all the clean laundry! We were all ready to go by about 7:50. For the last couple of weeks, Jeff has pretty much been taking the boys himself in the mornings because we can't seem to get our act together to get everything done and get out the door at a reasonable time. Svea and I haven't been getting dressed until lunch! Ha! But today we did. And it's so great that all the laundry is ready to be folded and put away when the boys get home, too. They had a long weekend of playing and making all manner of untidy messes, but managed to get it all cleaned up, showers taken, hair cut for Torben and into bed by a reasonable time on Sunday night. They really are growing up. They are growing taller, too. Some of the long sleeve shirts Anders has are getting too short in the arms now; and they are size 7 or 8. Torben can't wear the 6s anymore. Svea is fully into size 2, though she's definitely smaller than they were at her age. She cannot walk under the desk on the porch or the counter in the kitchen anymore, and she could easily do that when we got here. Now her head is an inch or so above it. Good thing we go home in summer when they can all wear short sleeves and shorts!
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