Catching up on the last two months

Things have been a little quiet on here over the last few months.  This has been because things have been pretty hectic for us.

We have finally managed to settle in to Sweden again, getting into a steady routine of work, school and, of course, rugby (see the next post).

We had a few issues initially, mostly to do with getting Tomas back to school.  Unfortunately things had been a bit of a mess for Tom over the last year.  We were expecting to be here in March, so we did not enroll Tomas back at his old school for 2023, but when things were delayed we had to change plans.  Kristine homeschooled Tom for a bit, but this was difficult around prepping for travel and the usual thing of kids not wanting to listen to their parents. In the end, when we were delayed yet again, we enrolled Tomas into the local public school part-time.  He did this for a few weeks before we travelled to Sweden.

Knowing that we would be returning, we had filled out enrollment papers for the international school that Tomas had attended when he was last here. We had been told that they were full, but they would reassess midyear, as they often had students coming and going.  

Our first problem was that we arrived right in the middle of the big Swedish break, Semester, where the schools were shut down for over a month.  We tried to chase the school, but had no luck, so instead we applied at the other local international school.  We didn't hear back from them until the first day of school term, where they informed us that they were also full.  As a last ditch effort we tried an international school in the nearby town of Lund, but the hour travel times on public transport made that one not possible.

So we found ourselves on the first day back at school without a place for Tomas to attend.  Since he had already had a shaky start to the year's schooling we needed to move fast and in the end we were forced to enroll him in the Swedish public school system.  We'd been avoiding this because the subjects are taught entirely in Swedish and Tomas had very little Swedish language skills.  By the time he learnt the language he would already have fallen behind. But we had no choice, by law he was required to be in school and we had no luck with the English language schools. There was then a delay of two weeks until we had an appointment with Skolastart, who interviewed Tomas as to his school history and filled out registration to three of the local schools.  Another two weeks later and he was assigned a spot at a nearby school and started there.  Its been an interesting start, as the school adapts to providing him translated notes and some assistance, but it's going to be a challenge.

So, what else have we been up to since we got back from Germany?

We started by playing a board game with one of our friend, Gloomhaven:

This has been a lot of fun and is played over multiple sessions, so it had taken up a few free afternoons and weekend.

After a few home weekends recovering, and plenty playing Gloomhaven, we decided we needed to get out and about. Kristine had done some research on Swedish Mushroom (Svamp) picking and was keen to go and see what we could find. Friends at work had warned me that, while Allemansrätten meant that we could could freely access any non-private wilderness, Swedes could be fairly protective of 'their' mushroom patches.  Also there had been a story in the Australian news of several people being poisoned by Deathcap mushrooms, so I was a little cautious. But in the end, the need to get out and about while the weather was still sunny won out, and we head out to Häckberga, about a 30min drive east of Malmö

Before we headed off, Kristine had done plenty of research, looking at what mushrooms we could expect to find, which ones were edible and which ones we should avoid.

We dragged the boys along, they were a little reluctant to leave the PlayStation and computer behind, but some fresh air would do them good.

The Häckeberga area was a nature reserve surrounding a lake.  The area appeared to have been pretty heavily harvested for mushrooms, and we decided we would look but not take any that we found.  In the end we found quite a few, but none of the more exciting edible ones.

The following weekend we had our first games of rugby - I've captured the details of the rugby games in my next post.

Moving into September, we had a visit from our Norwegian friend, Thomas and some friends from the USA. They had been travelling around and came down to Malmö for the weekend to visit us and see Malmö and Copenhagen.

We spent the Friday night walking around Malmö, catching the main sights - Malmö Hus, Malmö Live, the Turning Torso, Town Hall, the churches etc.

On Saturday we headed into Copenhagen for our usual walk - starting at Kastellet, we headed to the Mermaid.  It was packed with tourists and Kristine slipped on one of the rocks trying to get a good picture and ended up with soaking wet shoes. We then headed down towards Amalienborg and caught the end of the changing of the guard. A quick walk past Frederik's Chuch, Nyhavn and then down Strøget took us to the Lego Shop and a few of the Faraos Cigarer stores.  We then headed down the back of Christianborg and into Freetown Christiania before heading back to Malmö.

Our next weekend was another rugby game, this time in Norrköping.  We drove up for the game on the Saturday morning (a 5 hour drive):

After the game, we rented a cabin at Kolmården Zoo and spent the Sunday visiting the Zoo (see the Kolmården post).

Next weekend was USM (The Swedish Youth Championship) competition for rugby.  Tomas was playing P16s (Boys, under 16s) and Cameron was P18s (Boys, under 18s). I was asked to help coach the forwards of the P16 team, so we made a family trip of it.  More details are in my rugby post, but it was a long drive for the weekend:

Keeping with the rugby theme, the 30th September was another rugby game (this time a home game luckily), and 7th October was the final home game for the men's team and another Danish tournament for Tomas.

So that's what's been keeping us busy. Lots of rugby and board games, and probably not enough sleep.

I'll finish up this post with a few of the pics we've taken of the Turning Torso: