The robber of daylight

One eye creaks open, stuck with sleep, and spies a bright star twinkling through my curtainless, naked bedroom window. The night (or is it early morning?) is like heavy velvet. Without my glasses on, the lone star is just a bright blur. What time is it? It can't be time to wake up yet, it is still pitch black outside. I check my phone. It is 6:05 am.

It is late October and not even Daylight Savings Time—the antiquated rationalization to save energy—can stop the oncoming Swedish high-latitude darkness that defines winter. Click here to continue reading over at Medium.

Fall Snaps in Sweden

Our favorite non-Halloween spooky books

[UPDATED] It is so nice to get into the spooky spirit when the days are getting colder and darker. The gray skies are slightly more ominous and as the trees lose their leaves, a regular forest suddenly turns into a haunted one.

There are tons of fun fall books on the shelves but these are just some of our family's favorite books for this season. They are not Halloween-based but are perfect for this time of year. We love reading them throughout the year. Click on the book icons if you want to add them to your own child's library.

1. Room on the Broom by Julie Donaldson

This book, by far, is our favorite of all. The witch is a gentle witch and takes in castaways of all kinds. Netflix has an animated short that brings this book to life.

2. One Witch by Laura Leuck

Another witch book - this one collects odds and ends to make a burbling stew in her large cast iron pot. Though a bit spookier than Room on the Broom, the kids love this one and enjoy counting the spooky creatures on each page.

3. Spooky Old Tree by Stan and Jan Berenstain

Not surprisingly, the three bear cubs find themselves in a Spooky Old Tree and running for their lives! So much excitement!

4. Horns Tails Spikes and Claws by J. Elizabeth Mills

This is a board book that is segmented into flippable pages to allow your child to mix and match body parts to create a ton of new monsters. No words means that your child can enjoy it on their own.

5. The Snatchabook by Helen Docherty 

Who is stealing all the stories? There is a mysterious creature in town and everyone's books are going missing. The fall setting and element of surprise and mystery is perfect for kids who want to play detective. 

6. Even Monsters Need Haircuts by Matthew McElligott

The main character in this book is not only fearless around monsters, he cuts their hair! This book introduces typically scary characters by revealing their more "human side." Just don't look at the Medusa page or you may turn to stone!

Happy reading! 

Buying a Swedish house - eBay style!

We did not want to purchase any property in Sweden until we thought we "understood" the market a bit better. I placed understood in quotation marks because I don't think anyone truly understands the Swedish housing market. After speaking with numerous real estate agents, they all shake their heads and say, "I don't know. It's just crazy." I guess that's the easiest way to describe it: it's just crazy.

After doing some quick calculus, it dawned on us that we have moved 3 times in the past 3.5 years - Atlanta to Stockholm, Stockholm to Lidingo, and Lidingo to Akersberga. Moving so frequently is not only an expensive logistical nightmare but it is also difficult on the children. Now that our children are old enough to create friendships, uprooting them to the next rental for another year seems irresponsible. Living the gypsy lifestyle seems somewhat pointless when we have no intentions to leave Sweden any time soon. No, we had to purchase a house. It was time to figure out how to do so.

The Swedish real estate market (it's just crazy) is fairly streamlined on two websites - blocket.se and hemnet.se. After monitoring both, we found it easier just to focus on hemnet as there were mostly duplicate listings on blocket.

Jon spent every Saturday for a month driving around to the 4 quadrant neighborhoods outside of Stockholm to see if there were more affordable, livable options for us besides our current neighborhood. We didn't feel good about any of the other options for various reasons so we lasered our focus to the homes posted just in our town.

Here's how the process works for 99% of the houses in our neighborhood - a north eastern suburb of Stockholm:

• House is posted on hemnet.se with beautiful pictures, description and asking price
• Within 10-14 days of posting, there is one viewing on Sunday for 45 mins and possibly another on Monday for 45 mins in the evening
• Bidding (bids accepted anytime after the house is posted) generally begins on Monday
• Bids are placed via SMS to the realtor
• Once you enter a bid, you receive an SMS update every time there is another bid. Never has hearing your phone's text message BING been so stressful!
• After the bidding stops, the realtor calls every single person who attended the viewing(s) and/or placed a bid to see if they want to place another bid
• Highest bid (usually) receives the house 
• Home is removed from public listing after contract is signed
• The end!

There are different bidding styles, not unlike eBay, that we encountered:

• The Big Spender - places a first bid high above asking price to scare off competitors
• The Smidgen Upper - stabs your soul in small tiny bid increments within 5 mins of your own bid placement
• The Sniper - comes in at the last minute to outbid the highest bidder before the contract is signed

Example bidding - note the time stamps
All of these bids were received within 4 days of the house going on the market. It was sold before it's first viewing

The eBay-like bidding process is what makes the entire market unpredictable. We have watched houses that need serious renovation increase 37% in price due to the bidding. 37%! Also, sellers moving from pricier Stockholm are willing to bid up the price in the suburbs to secure whatever neighborhood they want and consequently, the prices are rising 14%-20% every 4 months. 

Jon and I observed this absolutely absurd housing market activity and said, "We may not be able to afford a house in this neighborhood if we wait any longer!" What a scary thought considering just 2 years ago, when we moved, this was a little suburb with a big commute.

What throws yet another wrench into this horrible process is that bids from the buyers are not binding and the seller does not have to sell to the highest bidder. Nope - if you are the highest bidder but bidder 2 is a friend of the seller's then you're out of luck. Also, someone can place a bid that raises the price, you counter, they remove their bid (it's not binding after all) and you are now stuck paying an inflated bid price. Too bad, so sad. 

You can see why we approached this housing market like a roaming lion out on the savannah. We hid, cowering behind a wall for many years so we wouldn't have to deal with it. Now the lion is moving much faster and is much stronger and we have to enter its domain. 

We possibly chose the most stressful way to buy a house and we placed a bid on a house that we had never seen before. We had missed the Sunday viewing and had only seen the pictures on hemnet. After going to enough viewings, we knew how realtors hide very big flaws in pictures so we negotiated for a private viewing. Jon was at work so I took him on a tour of the house via FaceTime. The house buying decision was based on how I felt while in the house. Is this somewhere we can make a home? Yes.

We were the top winners of a long and drawn out bidding war (so many SMS bings!) with our ultimate $605 bid (we had to be a Smidgen Upper at the end). With such a narrow margin of victory and the acknowledgement that at any point someone could outbid us, we raced into the realtor's office the next morning and signed the contract. Phew! 

We will officially move into the new house mid-December and instead of opening brightly wrapped Christmas presents, we will be unpacking boxes! 

The new digs

And back

Apologies for the identity crisis

The name of this blog has changed from, "Life is Good Ferland," to "Life is Good," to "Glögger," to "Knocked Up Abroad," and now back to "Glögger." Thanks for sticking through all of these changes, if you've been following from the beginning in 2011.

We originally started this little blog as a means to document our son's milestones without bombarding folks' inboxes and it transitioned into a "Life in Sweden" blog when he turned 9 months old and we moved internationally. I am working on a book, "Knocked Up Abroad," and had an ill-formed idea to utilize this existing platform as the book's website. That was not such a good idea so that project is separate from this blog over here. My intention is to keep the posts in Glögger about our own personal experiences and as a place for our American perspectives on very "Swedish" things.

In general, our lives in Sweden have normalized quite a bit but I do still have cultural epiphanies that I enjoy sharing. Sometimes they arise from being a parent, sometimes from being an American in Sweden and sometimes they are just observations that I make because I am me. Like, 2+2 and 2x2 result in the same number, 4. You can't do that with ANY other number. Isn't that cool?

Going Full Swedish in the Sauna

Most Americans have issues with public nudity. I don't know if it is because we were founded by Puritans who were too tightly laced or if it's because our society loves to judge a person's worth by their body shape. Regardless, the fear of being naked in front of others is evident by this video where female best friends boldly drop their towels to reveal that they have the same body parts. It's a cute video but it reinforces the idea that being naked in front of someone is a big deal. There is a large movement in the US for body acceptance - not caring what others think of you but also embracing what your body looks like. Complete body acceptance in Sweden is one of the biggest cultural differences that I have come to accept. Like anything that is culturally different from what you're used to, being naked in public is a fear I have and I must swallow my insecurities so as not to pass them along to my children.

Last weekend I took Calvin to the local swimming pool. There were naked bodies everywhere in the locker room and showers. Like a good little Swedish boy, Calvin didn't bat an eye and we headed through the showers into the pool area. After we were done swimming, it is tradition to hop in the sauna to warm up before showering and heading home. No bathing suits are allowed in the sauna - this is a naked body only zone. Calvin's excitement level for sauna time was matched by my equal and opposite feeling of dread.

Every insecurity I had about my body were racing through my head and I could feel anxiety rising in my throat. "Maybe nobody will be in the sauna." I thought hopefully. I peeked through the foggy glass door to see if someone was already there. I saw a foggy outline of a mom and her two children sitting on their towels. Bravely, I stripped off my bathing suit, grabbed a towel to sit on, and headed into the sauna with Calvin. Calvin had no reservations about any of this and he eagerly climbed to the top bench. I sat across from the other mother and wondered how I should sit. Should I cross my legs? Should I lean back, exposing my naked self in all of my glory? How can I make myself comfortable when I am so incredibly internally uncomfortable at this moment? Eventually, I just closed my eyes and did the ostrich move - pretend nobody can see you. There. Easy. The other Swedish mom smiled at me kindly and I didn't feel she was judging me. Her children were chatting and goofing around on the bottom bench and Calvin was sitting quietly and relaxing. It's just a sauna. Calm down, Lisa.

Saunas are hot and I really couldn't stand it for very long. I essentially had to drag Calvin out of the sauna as he could have stayed in for much longer. Another little family came into the sauna as we were leaving and I hoped that they weren't staring at my naked rumpa as I held the door for Calvin.

I felt as if I had chipped away some of my irrational fear by embracing the nudity in the sauna. I survived the ordeal and managed to hide my anxiety from my son. My children have no reservations around nudity and I want them both to have positive feelings about their own bodies, however they may look. Not passing along my aversion to public nudity (in an acceptable space like a sauna) is important to me as I want them to integrate into society. Sauna is a Scandinavian cultural and social norm and there will be many saunas in their futures. There will be more opportunities for me to overcome my aversion to public nudity and hopefully each sauna experience will help me relax and embrace what it is like to be Swedish. Body acceptance and all of the other health benefits sauna offers.

Sauna - one small step for a Swede, one giant leap for Lisa.