i think she'll need a band-aid...

this little booger here?


...gave me the SCARE of my life yesterday. like, horrible, bad, shook-me-up-for-hours scare.

so, i'm watching the kids while annelie is out playing golf, and i'm up in the kitchen emptying the dishwasher. the kids were all downstairs in the family's lower basement playing in the theater room. typical.

all of a sudden, i hear a bloodcurdling, 'SEANNA!!!!'

well. if you're a mom, or ever watched children, when you hear a kid scream like that...it's like your blood freezes and suddenly you're in overdrive; on a one-track mind to GET TO THE KIDS. i race down to find them, practically falling down the stairs, and Kasper meets me in the hallway, his eyes as big as pies. i start frantically asking, 'What?? What? What's wrong?'

he tries to tell me what is wrong, but he's so shook up that the poor thing couldn't even get it out in English, but all i heard him say was 'Klara, Klara...'

i'm still on my trek to the basement (it's actually a good distance from the kitchen) and i can hear klara screaming and crying. my heart is absolutely pounding at this point. i bust into the room and my heart drops -

my sweet little 5 year old is sitting on the floor crying, and her whole entire face is covered in blood. her hair is matted with it, it's on her clothes, it's everywhere. i scoop her up and am trying to find out what happened as i run her upstairs, blood just dripping all over the place.

getting her up to the kitchen, i locate the wound - on the corner of her forehead, and it is gushing blood. i'm trying to get her to tell me what happened, but she said she didn't know what it was 'in English'. how thoughtful of her...although at this point i think i probably would have understood in Swedish. she stops crying and actually settles down, and i'm putting on wads of paper towels on her head to try and slow the bleeding, but it isn't working.

call Annelie, can't get ahold of her. the bleeding isn't stopping, so i do the only thing i can think of...run over to the neighbors. they've got 3 kids themselves, and actually had a similar crisis about a month ago. the dad sees me running up the yard, also covered in blood and holding a crying child, and immediately runs over and takes klara from me.

klara's settled down (i think she was actually in shock) and is telling them what happened, and it turns out that this family's 5 year old daughter was playing with klara in the basement and pushed her as she was standing on the couch. klara then fell off and hit her head on the corner of the table.

these wonderful parents end up taking klara to the emergency room and i had finally gotten ahold of annelie at this point, so she was going to meet them. in the end, it turned out that they only had to glue her wound together (did anyone else know they did that?!?) and put a Band Aid on it.

so, klara came home from the doctor with a band aid and a popsicle, and she was just fine, thank God.

my favorite white shirt i was wearing? notsomuch.

a travesty

it should be absolutely illegal to be wearing jeans, a long sleeved shirt, rain boots AND a trench coat anytime in the month of JULY.

geez...no wonder the whole city is dead right now. everyone has to leave Stockholm to get to some warm weather. it's been raining for the past few days, and we're on our way to the summer house in a few days here...did i mention there's no internet, no phone and it's in the middle of nowhere? another reason why i'm counting down the days - 23 - until i come home.

you'll be in my heart

when i came to Sweden back in September, i remember praying all the time that i would make just one friend. just one. that was all i knew i would need to survive the year. because the Lord loves to answer our prayers, i was blessed with many great friends who i know that i'll be in touch with long after i've left Sweden.

however, there's two girls that i've spent hours upon hours with, and i've had some of the funnest and craziest times of my life with these two:

meet Philly and Nikki.


Nikki is from Texas and is very much a southern girl - loves partying, sports, looking pretty, and boys. Philly (Philippa, actually - how beautiful is that?!?) comes from New York City and is as much a city girl as you'll ever meet. She's smart as a whip, can talk to anybody with an ease i could only hope to have, and is one of the classiest and naturally beautiful girls i've ever met.

i can't even begin to imagine what this year would have been like without the two of them...i have laughed with them, cried with them, traveled with them, experienced life in a brand new city, country and continent, and most importantly, made two really, really great friends.



so, girls - here's to us, and this amazing year! i love you both, and can't wait for our reunion!

this is pitiful.

as i write this, i'm sitting in the terminal pictured above, which is actually Stockholm's main train station. no, i'm not going anywhere...I'M JUST USING THE INTERNET. cause we don't have it at our house right now. that includes a working telephone line.

(sounds like i live in the ghetto, or the boondocks. however, i live just 5km from Stockholm...but because the area that we live in is slightly rural in that it's on a lake and a dirt road, apparently the internet and the phone service has a tendency to get interrupted. don't even get me started on the service providers complete lack of service. another thing i hate, hate about Europe).

see, i've noticed that, the more and more my time winds down here, the more and more i could care less to be here. this reflects nothing of my life here, or my family, or anything, and has everything to do with the fact that i've got a case of 'senioritis', or 'au-pair-itis'. i'm absolutely itching to get home. so what do i do? spend all my time on the internet looking at jobs, places to live when i get home, making plans to meet up with friends, etc.

the fact that i'm having to use the Internet at the train station this morning has put me in an I HATE STOCKHOLM mood. i cannot even express how freaking annoying it is that coffee shops - coffee shops, for the love of God - don't open until 11am here. please just imagine my disbelief when i took the train and walked through town at 8AM to find one. i ended up at McDonalds, the only place open. i ordered a bagel and coffee and prayed that the Internet would work. nope...so then i walked, and walked, and walked and finally someone recommended that i try the train station.

good thing i have church in 45 minutes, cause i NEED an attitude adjustment....

lazy saturday

made it back to Stockholm safely this morning after a looong flight - as i said below, it was a 10 hour flight, but it left Bangkok at 1am (you can only imagine the bright, cheerful kiddos we were hauling through 8 concourses at 12:55am...my family here tends to wait til the last minute), so once they served our meals, which took about an hour and a half, they shut the lights off for the rest of the flight. sounds ideal, right? but seriously, i have such a hard time sleeping on airplanes, especially when the random man behind me is snoring loud enough for the entire plane to hear him. add to that about 3 straight hours of steady turbulence - no matter how much i fly, i still think the plane is crashing when it starts to shake - and sleeping is just not an easy thing.

but i suffered through, and here i am, sitting at a coffee shop in downtown Stockholm and charging the internet to my cell phone. which i don't pay for. but the internet is again broken at the house, so that leaves me few options.

anyway, let's see...here's a few pictures from Bali -

the villa - everything was outdoors, except the bedrooms

this is me being really, really excited at the great big bathtub that awaits me :)

there really were palm trees growing out of the ceiling in our bathroom

sixten in his swimming goggles

me and my Swedes. i love them. even klara, when she refuses to smile, or even look at the camera.

this is at the monkey forest - the humidity was ridiculous...which leads me to the question, why am i wearing my hair down??

me with the little men - sixten would not quit making kung fu moves during this picture

annelie with klara. she's a great mom.

these men were playing for a group of young Balinese dancers

a woman carrying her daily offering to the Hindu god through the market

i have more pictures, but these are the ones on my computer. all in all, it was a great trip, but i think i liked Thailand a lot more. i'm a beach girl to the core, and the beaches in Bali were nowhere near as beautiful as those in Thailand.

well, i need to wrap it up here. my hair is seriously about to commit a mutiny on my head if i don't get the ends trimmed, so that's my goal for the weekend. and to get my resume/cover letter/transcripts/references together...ugh. i hate doing stuff like that.

hope everyone had a great 4th of July!

independence day...in bangkok?

i'm sitting here in the bangkok airport, checking my email and waiting to get on my flight back to Stockholm. i can't say i'm looking forward to it, except for the fact that this job does afford me the luxury of flying business class, which i can't even begin to express the wonders of it...at least on these long, long flights.

my mind is jumbled up with thoughts and words, and i've got an antsy little 5 year old sitting on my lap (not sure what she's waiting for...probably to play Barbies or do her sticker book for the eight millionth time. in the last hour), but i just need you all to know -

i miss home. home, as in, America. i can safely say after spending a year abroad that lots of people hate the US, but without fail, time and time again, i am constantly hearing how people are interested in America, want to live there, think it's great, etc, etc.

i have been to a good number of countries this past year, and all i can say is, (in my mind) -

America is the best dang place in the world. the land of the free, and the home of the brave, it truly is. hallelujah and amen.

this will be me today - i have my first surfing lesson here in Bali! it's something i've always wanted to try, so me and Nikki (the other au pair along with me) are giving it a shot. the school we're going with guarantees that you'll be standing up on the board by the end of your first lesson or your next lesson is free, so i have very high hopes. Brad - bless his heart - keeps saying, 'it's hard, but just keep with it' and other sentiments that are meant to encourage me from quitting after the first knock off. cause i have tendencies to do that....i hate getting hurt.

Bali has been great. had a short bout with a stomach flu yesterday that i'm still fighting a bit today, but it's much better. we had some Balinese masseuses come to the house yesterday evening, and since i was the last one to go, i got a glorious one hour massage on the rooftop under the stars. it was fantastic.

by the way, it's July 1st. and that means i'm home in T-30 days! i absolutely, totally, completely cannot WAIT!