aunt ida

I'm in my brother's place right now, in Gröndal, Stockholm. I baby-sat for my nephew Theo yesterday, the youngest one, because Annelie had an important meeting so Fredrik had to be with Milou (they're moving her to another daycare that's closer, so she's being integrated or whatever it's called, right now, which means a parent is with her the first week until she gets used to the new surroundings and the kids and the teachers) it was fine, I guess, seeing as we both lived to see today and we both have all our limbs left.. but I'm quite out of practise. But then again, he'd been running a fever all night before and he's getting a new tooth, so it wasn't one of his best days, so he was tired and cranky on and off all morning and didn't want to eat and stuff like that.. but we played with lego and watched TV and went for two walks and all in all I think we did pretty good.. I made a few embarassing blunders though, two at once in fact. When he was napping, which he does in his pram out on the balcony, I sat out there too and had a cup of coffee and worked a bit.. and then when he woke up he did so bawling so I just dropped everything and took him inside.. well, about an hour later, I realized I left my papers outside, and by this time it'd got windy out, so of course my papers were all over the balcony and the ground below.. and of course I could just put him down, plus he was crying again, so I tried to balance him on my hip as I gathered up the papers from the balcony floor and as I was doing so, a breeze shut the door. Which is fine cause it doesn't close all the way - only the latch dropped down, so I still couldn't open the door again, and the gap was too small to reach in with a finger and manage to get to the latch... so basically, we were locked out of the apartment. And at least four pages of my novel with notes and such on were fluttering around on the courtyard below.

I sat down and put Theo in my lap and the two of us started laughing, and I figured Fredrik and Milou should be back soon enough and let us in... but then a cold breeze struck us and Theo started crying again, so I realized it was ridiculous to just sit there with the poor thing when he was fighting a fever as it was. So I put him in the pram and tried to get the latch off using my pen instead and it worked and we got inside. But I felt really stupid about the whole thing..

I was supposed to go and view a room available for rent today, but for several reasons I called and cancelled. My brother knew the area the house is located in and said it's really far from City, and it's in fact a suburb outside of Stockholm, which would be fine, if a bit inconvenient if I have to take one bus and one train to get to school, but also I started getting a weird feeling about going out there with the guy all by myself, apparantly it's a half hour commute, and Fredrik said he wasn't going to take the time to go with me, so I decided to cancel. I've been in contact with this woman as well and today I spoke to her on the phone for the first time and she seems really nice, she's got as room available from July, the rent is the same and it's fairly close to the school in case I should get into that after all, and the fact that she's female makes me feel a bit better too even though I know it's sexist of me to think that way..