Here in Berga, Linköping...

We moved to this neighbourhood 4 years ago, just a few weeks before Ivan was born.  After living 3 years in the last apartment, we decided to move but still in the same neighbourhood.  There are many reasons why we like this area.  It's a kids neighbourhood, where the kiddos have a lot of friends living close by, we're just about 5 mins walk to the kiddos' school, and most importantly, nature is literally just at our doorstep!

We just need to walk out of the building and we have a small forest, which happens to be a nature reserve, next to us.  And come Spring time, the surrounding is really blooming and green!  See for yourself!

And there is plenty of wild lives here as well, it's very common to see deer, hares, squirrels and hedgehogs nibbling around especially during summer.

And of course, the kids are really enjoying themselves here! How happy? This happy! :D

Nature is the perfect classroom which inspires creativity.

Budding photographer!

Chris is crazy about stones right now...

Ivan is just happy to do whatever, like always! 

Climbing tree...

Posing for a picture...

Or chasing after a ball-snatcher!  

And not forgetting my friendly and helpful Taiwanese neighbour who is sending treats like this over now and then!

She wasn't actually sure what this is called but it's like mochi with green bean paste as filling, yum!

Life has been good to us! ^.^

Our New Apartment

Finally I have time to return to my blog.  I'm not sure what I've been busy with recently, time just flies by! Housework, tending after the smaller kids, nagging at the bigger kids, (yup, all 3 of them!) Japanese course and homework, working for my hubby (not complicated stuff but tedious!!!) and I have no idea what else I've been doing! I'm not the only one who is so busy, hubby is working late everyday till around 11pm or more. Besides the many projects he has on hand now, they're also seriously short-handed... Wish I can help him more but just the thought of me being some sort of engineer cracks him up.... =.="

Ok, enough complaints for now.  Here are some updates of our new apartment! Let's take a look at some before pictures....

Hallway

Dining area 

Living room 

Balcony 

Jovan's room 

Angel's room

Now the after pictures! (Not much has been improved actually.... :P)

Hallway

Kitchen - Angel sewed the little curtain to make a cozy corner so that the small ones can have a place to play while I'm making food.

View of the dining area from the sink

Dining area

Living room - looks the as messy as before.... and it almost always looks like this! >.<"

Jovan and Ivan's room 

Angel's room

Balcony - it needs some plants...

This is our new apartment! Still living in the same neighbourhood but slightly more space now.  We live in a great area where there is a lot of nature around us, and it's absolutely beautiful and we get different looks with the different seasons.  Hmmm.... maybe a tour of our surrounding in my next post? 

Wallpapered!

The weekend before we moved, Lars and I finished a project which was a first for me - putting up wallpaper! The old wallpaper in Jovan and Angel's room was ugly and gloomy, and to make it worse, the room for Jovan was PINK! See for yourself!

We're not going to let Jovan's first room be pink! Well, unless he picked it himself...

And Angel's room was blue and gloomy...

So in the morning, I made some egg tarts so that the kids will have something to munch on while we're away and we can have some for tea break.

And then we walked over to the new apartment to get started.  It took us about 2 hours to put up the first 3 panels because it has been a long time since Lars did anything like this and I had never done this in my life! But after the first 3 "learning" panels, we picked up speed...

The corners were the tricky bits and to make it worse, the tools we used were totally crap.  There were a couple of times when Lars "growled" in frustration and walked out of the room, but after some coke and egg tarts, he felt ready to get us out of the corners! Yeah! =D

It took us 2 days to do those 2 rooms and I think we did a good job! See...

Angel now has a lavender room!

And Jovan's room is light grey/silver! 

.... not bad right? ^.^

We moved!

Yes, we have moved to a new apartment that is just a block away from the old one.  The layout is basically the same except that now we have an extra room and a slightly bigger toilet in the hallway.  Finally Jovan and Angel can have their own room! They have been sharing a room for some time now and they almost do everything together - attending the same school, sharing the same friends, and even attending the same after school activity (they learn to play guitar every Wednesday after school.), this has created a lot of stress and tension among them because of the lack of personal space.  Jovan used to complain that l just wouldn't leave him alone, although Angel has no problem at all having Jovan's company all the time...

Lars and I have been pondering about this issue for a long time, but given the space constraint in our old apartment, there wasn't much we can do.  So we have been looking to see if there was any bigger apartment in our current neighbourhood because we don't want to move Jovan and Angel to another school.  However, it seems like this area is quite popular and there was never any apartment available for us. And there was a series of events which happened that led us to having our new apartment....

It started last summer when we realised that the plumbing in our old apartment was acting up.  The water couldn't drain properly in the bathtub and even the pipes under the kitchen sink seemed to be blocked as well.  Since water couldn't be drain properly in the bathtub, the floor would get "flooded" everytime we took a shower, and as a result, the bathroom was always wet and the ceiling started getting moldy.  We contacted the company managing the apartment and they first sent a plumber, who upon looking around, said that they needed to get a specialist to take a look.  The verdict from the specialist was that there was water damaged on the floor and the walls in the bathroom due to the drainage problem and to fix that, they need to do major renovation in the bathroom.  Our neighbour opposite us had the same problem about a year ago (the apartments were built in 1960s, so most of them do need major renovation) and it took them about 4 months to get it fix! As since we can't shower when they are renovating the bathroom (well actually, we can't live there at all! We can't have small kids running around while they drill and bang! Think about the dust and noise!), we were given an alternative apartment to move into for the time being or just use it to shower if we don't want to move. We were dreading about moving back and forth when the following happened...

We had a young single mother with 2 small kids living underneath us in the previous apartment. She likes to have her music on LOUD during the day and she would have parties during the weekend which ended around 1 am (that is if nobody calls the security company to complain).  Her friends like to gather in the stairway and talk loudly and the most annoying thing is that she smokes a lot and we can't really use our balcony during the summer because Lars and I are super annoyed by the smell.  But we tolerated her and although Lars had called the security company several times because of her parties which never end, we never seriously thought about moving out (well... we were praying that she would move though...).  Then, a couple of weeks after Christmas last year, she had a party which again, continued till the wee hours.  Lars called the security company at 12am because not only was the music super loud, they were banging on things and laughing and talking in the stairway. A few days later, another elderly neighbour who was living in the next house (different entrance but still the same building) came knocking on our door. Since Lars was working late, I answered the door.  She asked me what we thought about the neighbour downstairs and I told her that she likes to have loud parties and doesn't when to stop.  She then took our some photos of the outside of her apartment which looked like someone has been hurling lots of eggs on the wall, door and windows.  She told me that around 4 something am last weekend (the day when my neighbour had her party), she and her husband woke up to banging sounds and they saw that someone had been throwing eggs at their apartment! Her husband went out to the balcony to try to see if they could see the culprits and he got eggs thrown onto him, which almost caused him to have a heart attack!  She said that they saw 2 persons outside, 1 girl pointing at their apartment and another guy throwing eggs and she claimed that both were the friends of my neighbour.  So her purpose was to gather up the surrounding neighbours who were fed up with her parties and her immature friends, and bring a case to the company (Riksbyggen) who manages the apartments and demanding them to do something. I talked to Lars later that night when he got home and he went over to the elderly neighbours place to talk to them and we all agreed that if this was what happened, then we really should bring it up to Riksbyggen.  Lars and I thought that the elderly couple would do what they need to do and that would be the end of our involvement.  But we were wrong....

After her first visit (the elderly neighbour), I think her name was Mia (or something like that), she started visiting us more often! Telling us about what she found out about our neighbour, she even found out the license plate of her father's car and the full name of her father! She gossiped about how our neighbour was also friend with another girl living in another house and there was a guy who lived in another house who was kinda together with that girl and he stayed in her apartment overnight....! OMG! Lars and I never likes to get involve in any neighbourly gossips (well, we simply don't care about other people's business.  They mind their own, and we mind ours.) and knowing that there is someone in our neighbourhood who spies on everybody just creeps us out big time!!!  And so after some consideration, we decided to talk to Riksbyggen to see if we can switch to that "alternative" apartment permanently instead and luckily they agreed!

So we moved! ^.^  Here's a couple of pictures of our view behind our new apartment.

We have playgrounds in the front and at the back!

And we can see a little of the small woods next to the neighborhood.

More pictures coming up soon! Now back to unpacking.... =.="

Valentine's Day

It was snowing the whole day yesterday, winter is in full force now.  Thankfully the temperature is not extreme, I think between 0 to -16 degrees is quite reasonable Swedish winter.  I do like winter because snow can really transform a landscape.  When everything is covered in white, even the usual normal landscape can become quite dramatic and very pretty.

And braving the snow yesterday, I went back to school after 5 years.  I signed up for a 3-month Japanese course because I needed to get out of the house, away from the kids and do something on my own, and also, I've always been interested in the Japanese culture and language.  I attended Japanese course about 20 years ago when I was in the polytechnic.  At that time, one foreign language (I think there was French, Japanese and German) was offered for free for business students, and since Japanese cartoons and tv series were ragingly popular then, I signed up for it.  But now 20 years later, all I can remember from that course was the auntie-looking teacher with immaculately pressed clothes and extremely tight hair bun.  She had a permanent scowl on her face and the only Japanese phrases I took away with me was "wakarimasen" ("I don't understand").... well, come to think of that, I was probably the only one she scowl at, since I always asked questions which were outside and way beyond what she was planning to teach (and most of the time very irrelevant as well....) and when she asked me something, most of the time I'd answer with "huh? wakarimasen...." ^.^

The first lesson was quite ok.  We took turn introducing ourselves in Swedish and then about an hour into the class, we re-introduced ourselves in Japanese, nothing dramatic, everything was cool.  My tongue just needs time to re-program itself to speak Japanese.  Towards the end of our first lesson, the teacher distributed out our homework.  Hiragana!!!! We have to learn 15 characters until next week and a lot of them looks like pretzels.... *groan* now I totally understand what Jovan and Angel are going through when they're learning new Chinese characters.....

When I got home, I had dinner (I made dinner before I went out) and got Ivan to sleep.  Hubby was already home then.  He had to come home earlier then usual (he's working late almost everyday... too bad I'm not technically-inclined in anyway, otherwise I can probably help him a little...) because I was going out.  I know, I'm so lucky to have a considerate husband, who lets me get away with almost everything! And when Ivan finally fell asleep, hubby brought out gifts for me! I didn't expect that he'd go hunting for presents given his crazy schedule! And I received these!

The mug and book ("Start painting watercolor) are from hubby, thank you for always indulging me in whatever crazy hobby I have! The 2 cards are from Jovan.  He wrote one (The red one) for me and signed it off as "hubby" and he wrote the other one for hubby and signed it off as "baby", so sweet! Although one look at the handwriting I knew they were from him, but the thought was very sweet!  And Angel sewed the 2 small bags/pouches for me.  Love the fabric!

I am blessed to be constantly surrounded by love and I am thankful for that everyday.

Happy Valentine's Day to all! 

Goodbye 2011!

2011 has been a very challenging year for our family.  After a long period of hard work and stress about finance, hubby and I have reached a point where we are physically tired and mentally drained all the time.  He really wants to see result now after all the years of hard work and I, I don't really know what I want anymore.  2011 is also the year where things starts to pick up for hubby's company. He was interviewed by a well established online tech magazine during the summer, and after that the response he got was just overwhelming! Suddenly many other tech magazines started writing about Rotosub even though he only got interviewed by one... =.="  And in autumn, he was invited by a respected expert in ANC (Anti-Noise Control) to present Rotosub technology in the annual ANC convention.  The Swedish embassy also helped Rotosub to set up a few interviews with some large MNCs to explore possible projects together.  This was a great opportunity to help break into the otherwise very difficult Japan market. So now he has a few projects going on and since the company is still small, he has to put in long hours to complete these projects.  Hopefully he can start hiring soon when the money starts coming in on a regular basis.

2011 had also been good because we have finally saved enough money to go back to Singapore! It was a long-awaited trip but unfortunately, Jovan broke his leg about a month before we were supposed to fly,so he didn't get to do much but I think all the good food made up for that! :D

As always, we sent off 2011 at home.  New Year's eve party is not really for our family especially when we have 2 toddlers, so we choose to just take it easy at home.

We had chicken pie with store-bought puff pastry on top and salad for lunch.

Nice to sit down to have lunch together!

Then the bigger kids and I popped some corn and made caramel popcorn with almond! Yum!

For dinner, we planned to have sushi and my marinated chicken wings (yeah, I know it's a weird combo but as long as we like it, why not?).  So the bigger kids and I wrapped some sushi and I threw in the chicken wings into the oven to bake.  

Angel folded the paper napkins into some interesting forms.... a shirt for daddy and Jovan.....

 .... a tie for Chris and a "square-ish" looking flower for Ivan....

.... and a flower (I think) for me and herself!  So creative!

Then dinner was served! Home made maki sushi rolled by Jovan and Angel!

We also made "mock-tail" with orange juice and cranberry juice! Nice!

Cheers! Both Jovan and Angel complained about how the grapes and umbrellas were making them looked strange..... hahahahahahahaha! They did!!! :D

And while most of us were enjoying our mocktails....

 there is one of us who was totally focused on eating the umbrella.... =.="

After dinner, it was snacking time.  So out came the caramel popcorn and some chips and we watched tv and were just having a cozy time in the sofa....

.... forcing the baby to smile for the camera.....

And then we decided to take a family picture using the timer on the camera!  And after about five hundred tries and countless weird picture, we finally got it! ^.^

After the small ones fell asleep, the bigger kids stayed up with us waiting for the countdown and watching fireworks from our living room.  After the countdown, "King Kong" was on tv, Jovan and I watched till 3.10am before we finally went to bed.

Goodbye 2011.  We are thankful for what we received over the past year and the mistakes we made and lessons learnt.  We hope that 2012 will bring us more family and couple time together, more personal growth, well-deserved rewards for our hard work put in, be it in school, at work or our own personal character improvement.  Most of all, we wish that we will all be able to find peace in our hearts despite our hectic lives , don't sweat the small stuff and appreciate the little things in our lives.

Happy New Year!!