Summer camps and friends

After two weeks in Finland Sofia has already been to her summer horse camp in Ingå and we have taken Daniele to his sailing camp in Hangö, both at the south-west coast of Finland. In between we spent three days at our dear friends´ house and also had a nice day with my brother and his family. We are having an exceptionally warm summer here in Finland, so we really enjoyed our swimming pauses in lakes and in the sea while driving to the camps. Summer Finland is really beautiful and the coast is full of summer events and swedish speaking people, so the children kept saying, that it was a pity that their grand parents didn´t live there! Their problem here in Finland is that they don´t speak Finnish, I have only managed to teach them Swedish, so they find it a bit hard to make friends here and to comunicate with people.
There are lots of Swedish speaking people in Ingå, where Sofia´s riding camp was and the two ladies who hold the camp were Swedish speaking, but unfortunately only one of the girls spoke Swedish. Sofia said she enjoyed herself a lot with the horses, but felt a bit lonely in the evenings when everybody spoke Finnish. The Swedish speaking girl was supposed to help her, but girls in that age aren´t always that unselfish and it turned out she wasn´t so keen on helping Sofia all the time. Anyway, Sofia said she wanted to go back there next year, too, so all in all it was a good experience. On the last day they invited us parents to watch their little riding competition. Sofia rode her favourite horse, Cin Cin.

 Between Helsinki and Ingå we found a nice place to go swimming and we stopped there every time we drove that way.

A lovely dinner in the garden at our friends house.

 The children played so nicely together, no shyness at all, even if they hadn´t seen each other since last summer. This summer was also the first summer that Carlotta (almost 5 years) and Cassandra (2,5 years) were able to really play together.