Alrighty amigos y amigas, the radio silence is over!

For the past 2 weeks we have ‘planned and executed’ the last phase of our move to Sweden and we are now finally in our new IKEA-digs in Kallhäll, Stockholm, Sweden! Thank you all for your patience and for phoning and messaging us, asking for blog updates! We appreciate that you are interested in finding out what this crazy bunch is up to! So, let’s recap, shall we?

Monday (2 weeks ago)
Monday was the official moving-out-of-our-flat day when the movers came and cleared out all our furniture, keepsakes and knick-knacks. The guys from Britannia Movers entered the flat on Monday morning and instantly blitzed every room with cardboard boxes, wrapping paper and packing tape. In the words of a news anchor or crime reporter: “The attack was deliberate, targeted and well planned.” It was really an experience to watch them work and how even the tiniest item was carefully wrapped and put away in (mostly) labelled boxes. The loading of the moving van was a side-show in itself. Boxes and furniture were stacked like Tetris blocks from floor to ceiling. Very impressive to observe! For insurance purposes, we were not allowed to help so we just had to stand aside and watch the guys do their thing. I guess that in itself wass a luxury but it felt a bit weird as we have always been used to doing everything by ourselves.

In hindsight we’ve realized that the guys were just a little bit too efficient as they should have documented everything they wrapped and packed in an inventory, which they didn’t, so when we got the stuff delivered at our new address in Sweden there was no record of what should or should not have been delivered. We are still trying to work out of we’ve received everything. Naughty naughty!

Shaena started feeling really unwell on the Sunday night (turned out later on that she had a bad case of Tonsillitis) so she was of course happy that we had these guys doing all the legwork. Speaking of being awesome and doing all the legwork; while the moving guys were working away clearing out the flat, we also had our Lovely Lesley deep cleaning the kitchen for us. Lesley is an amazing cleaner and had kindly helped us to clean our oven and our kitchen! She did a fantastic job and the oven and the kitchen looked as if it had just been installed!

When we were done for the day we took a taxi over to Jen & Mike’s with all our suitcases as they had kindly offered to house us for a couple of days before flying out on the following Thursday. Thank you very much for that guys, and Jen; in Mike’s absence you held the fort awesomely awesome and were a great hostess!

Tuesday – Time to get the place spit polished!
Once the flat was empty it was time to get the rest of the flat spit polished so I headed down Tuesday morning to start scrubbing the walls with Lesley’s miracle cure for stains and dirt; a mix of bleach, water and Fairy. Worked like a charm and once the walls were sorted, cleaning the floors and carpets was a walk in the park. Where was Ethan throughout all this you ask? At Amazing Anne’s of course! :) We are going to miss her!

Wednesday - Flat inspection day.
As we had rented our flat from a letting company, it is customary to do a move out inspection in the flat with a property manager before handing over the keys to that all parties can review any dents and scratches. We hope and think we passed with flying colours but I guess we’ll find out eventually if we get our full damage deposit back or not.

Thursday - Leaving on a jet plane…
With our one-way tickets to Stockholm in a firm grip, we headed out to Edinburgh airport for the last time. Definitely a bittersweet feeling to board that plane and leave the United Kingdom as we have really enjoyed our time in Scotland but we know we are leaving for greener pastures and that it’s all for the greater good. Flying with a fully developed, aggressive Tonsillitis is not pretty or pleasant and Shaena looked like death on the 2hour and a bit flight over but we made it over in one piece. At Arlanda airport we had a rental car waiting for us (and thank Jebus for that!) as we had over packed on purpose just in case the moving van would be late, get lost, stolen, torched, or all of the above. It was also great having a car to schlep us around for the first couple of days in Stockholm! It just made things a lot easier. The rented station wagon took us to our Swenadian couple friends Erin & Svante’s south of the city, who had kindly agreed to take mercy on our homeless souls for the next few days before we got the keys to our new home.

Friday – Contract signing day
On Friday morning, Ethan and I took the train to Solna just outside Stockholm city to the property management company’s office where we had an appointment to sign the contract for the new flat. Even though we knew we had already secured this truly awesome flat, it was nice to meet our property manager in person and go through the contract and sign it. It just made it even more real. Ethan helped by creating a post-it note drawing through stabbing it with a pen repeatedly. The property manager said she was mighty impressed of course, but secretly she probably thought: “Oh God! Those poor freshly painted walls!” After the appointment we over to my office just to nip in and say hi and bum a cup of coffee. By this point I could not wait for Tuesday and my first day in the office! Kind of like waiting for your first day in school and I was very excited to get my teeth stuck into this new challenge!

Saturday – ‘Fika’ and belated Christmas present opening at John & Mikaela’s
We decided that we had been jetting around, getting things sorted and organized enough for a couple of days so Saturday was kind of a day off for us where we had nothing on the to-do list. We drove our trusted rental over to my brother John and his girlfriend Mikaela’s for a ‘fika’ (a Swedish expression for when you sit down to have a cup of coffee and assorted coffee bread). John had brought Ethan’s Christmas presents from Grandma Gertrud and Roland’s up north down with him when driving home after Christmas and Ethan finally got to open his gifts. He hasn’t quite figured out how to open gifts yet so we did most of the opening but he really liked his new fleece coat and new books!

Sunday – iPhone 4 secured!
After about 2 years of persuasion, black mail, scare tactics, sales pitches, Chinese water torture, white noise, sweet talking, negotiations and deliberations; Shaena finally got her iPhone 4. As per usual, we’d done thorough research and had a pretty good idea of what kind of deals and plans were available and when we walked in to the 3 store, it was over and done with in a matter of minutes. I have to admit though; the iPhone 4 is absolutely amazing! It is so powerful and intuitive it is almost scary and some of the apps available are real lifesavers. For example; Shaena has downloaded an app that can give her exact travel instructions and directions for the Stockholm public transport system, which means that she’ll basically never get lost and can get around Stockholm so much easier when she is out and about by herself. That combined with Google Maps which functions as a GPS for walking and driving, and a constant internet connection where she can play YouTube clips to keep Ethan entertained when he is getting cranky before meal time = success!

Since we knew that we were going to have a super busy week ahead of us with getting the new place sorted and with a new job and everything, and as Shaena was still not feeling well, we decided last minute just before the weekend that it would be a good idea to get a pair of extra hands for the week to come. Therefore, we came up with a wild and crazy idea to fly someone over to help us for a few days and asked my former Swedish work colleague and now full time nanny/childminder in Edinburgh, Antonia, to fly over and stay with us and be Ethan’s nanny for a couple of days. Antonia already knows Ethan and was delighted to get a gig back home in Sweden for a week. We booked her on the Sunday morning flight from Edinburgh to Stockholm with a return flight on Friday morning and before we knew it, we were out by Arlanda airport again, picking up a Swedish nanny! Imagine that!


Monday (One week ago) – What better way to spend a Monday afternoon than by queuing at the tax office?
As I’ve been away from Sweden for so long, Ethan has never been registered in Sweden and Shaena is not yet a Swedish citizen or resident; we were required to register with the tax office in Sweden to let them know that we are back in the country with the intention to stay for longer than 1 year. The way it works in Sweden is that you, as a resident or citizen, have a ‘personnummer’ (social security number) which is attached to absolutely everything from your video club membership registration to your taxes and benefits. If you are away from Sweden for more than 1 year you have to re-register to get back into the system in order to get access to social insurance, etc. So we did.

The tax office in Stockholm city centre is a busy place, let me tell ya! There were about 60 people in queue in front of us and we patiently waited while the digital number board slowly moved upwards from numbers in the 20’s and upwards to the 70’s. It took a long time and the tax office is not, as you can imagine, the cosiest and most inviting place ever but once it is done it’s done and hopefully we’ll get registered back into Sweden without a snag.

Tuesday – The Big Day! Moving in day and 1st day at work!
It was finally here, the day that all the planning and organizing had been leading up to. Tuesday the 1st of February. This was the day that we moved into our new flat in Stockholm and also the day that I started my new job in our Stockholm office, so lots of nerves as you can imagine! Almost a bit surreal to think that we were finally here and that everything had worked out so well this far. This day had been mapped out and planned with military precision to ensure everything would fit into place without any major glitches. Major Glitches! (thought I’d throw in a ‘How I Met Your Mother’-joke for those of you who appreciate that show.)

The moving company in the UK had told us that they would deliver first thing in the morning and that we had to be at the apartment, keys in hand and make sure that their path would be cleared from snow and such. As we only got access to the flat keys the same morning, we had asked our friend Lasse to do us a favour and pick the keys up from the property management company and drive them out to the flat so that Shaena, Ethan and Antonia could focus on getting out to Kallhäll and meet up with the moving guys and stall them, if needed.

Let me tell you; it was not needed. Despite being sent detailed directions, a picture of our new house and the newly developed road as well as a screenshot from Google Maps, the moving guys arrived at the flat around 4pm that afternoon only to realize that their 18-wheeler would not fit on the newly developed residential streets around our flat and had to figure out a way to get the stuff offloaded and transported the last 100 or so meters up to our flat.

So what do they do? Well, let me tell you: The administrator in their UK branch office had the audacity to phone Shaena in the middle of all of this to suggest that we should find and hire a local moving company to transport all our stuff the last little bit! Shaena responded by saying: “You gotta be kidding me!” and after a bit of jigging around, they managed to find a van that they could load our stuff onto and that would fit on our narrow streets. After 6pm, all our stuff were safely (bar a few breakages) in our new home. All in all a very long day but the help from Lasse and Antonia definitely made things a lot easier! A letter of complaint to Britannia Movers is being typed up as we speak.

…Oh and when Shaena, Ethan and Antonia got to the flat early in the morning, the management company had mixed up all the keys as well so instead of #39 we got the keys to #35 and another new neighbour had been given the wrong set of keys as well… honest mistake I guess and the management company came out as quickly as they could to rectify the situation. Meanwhile, while all of this above was going down I had a fantastic first day at work and for the first time in a very long time I felt really energized at work! Great feeling and I am very excited about the weeks and months to come!

Wednesday – IKEA, we love thee!
Not only had we just moved in to the most amazing flat in the history of flats; when Shaena and the guys walked through the door, IKEA had also kindly left us a 3000 SEK (£300) gift voucher to spend as we please in one of their stores. Not what you’d expect when you move in to a rented flat, eh! With no time to waste; Shaena, Antonia and Ethan headed over to IKEA (which is conveniently located just 15 minutes away by bus/train) to shop, shop, shop! They came back with some really nice stuff to make our home look pretty. Thank you IKEA!

Friday – Opening of the time capsule from John’s storage
Whilst I’ve been away abroad, my dear brother John has kindly stored some of my belongings from my previous flat in Stockholm and on Friday evening John, Mikaela and little Elias came by to drop off these ‘banana boxes’ containing my stuff. I had completely forgotten I had so much stuff left here in Sweden and funny enough, the crockery and pots and pans I had had in storage kind of filled the gap of what we were missing, like a full set of wine glasses and way too many drinking glasses. I also found an old VCR and a flatbed scanner as well as my very old HTML-books from when I first learned how to build websites… and my old ‘Homer Simpson “Doh!” poster’ and school photo books from high school! You know; essential items that a flat nowadays just cannot function without.

Saturday – More unpacking and organizing
Saturday was mostly spent unpacking and organizing and the flat is really starting to come together and look really good! Still a bit of work to be done of course and we still have to fit a few light fixtures as well as install curtain rods and hang curtains but it already feels like home. We love everything about our new home, its surroundings and how well thought through everything is inside the flat as well as outside. We love how the BoKlok concept makes it so easy to live in a child friendly as well as energy efficient environment and how the surrounding area is already fitted out with numerous playgrounds and recycling stations. One step for man, I guess!

Sunday – Swim time!
…and by the way, this is a very long blog entry! ;)
Yesterday we decided to just take a day off from unpacking and organizing and headed out for an afternoon at Eriksdalsbadet, which basically is a huge complex of swimming pools. Someone recommended their kiddy pool section to us and it was really nice! It took Ethan a bit of time to get used to the water and get used to walking in water and on the tiles as he has only been to a swimming pool when he was a bit younger and didn’t walk. We had a great time splashing around and when we were all lookin’ like prunes, we got up, got dressed and headed over to Pizza Hut where we met up with John & Mikaela for dinner.

Monday (present day)
Today was the start of another work week (stating the obvious here) and again, could not be more excited to go in to work!

If you made it all the way through this blog entry in one sitting; well done to you! Pictures to follow…