martedì 31 agosto 2010

Breakfast in the garden

My lovely children sometimes are lovelier than other days. They suprised me yesterday by preparing the breakfast and serving it outside in the garden. What a way to start the day! I only had to make coffee, they did all the rest. And Carlotta made quite a toast to herself with butter, jam, ham, cheese and sausage and said it was delicious.

mercoledì 18 agosto 2010

Carlotta's summer in Finland

And this is Carlotta's list of things she liked doing in Finland this summer. These were the first things she thought of when I asked her. She liked things like buying candy, dressing up like a princess with scarfs, swimming in Laajakoski and Äijänniemi, going to the swimming pool in Kotka, the pick nick we had today in Kumparepuisto, horse riding with Aino and Sälli, watering the flowers in the garden and cleaning the terrass, playing with Hilma who is 5 like Carlotta and going to Getholmen where she went to the sauna and swam in the deep swimming pool.

martedì 17 agosto 2010

Trip to Fagerö - Kaunissaari


One of my children's favourite things this summer was our little day trip to Fagerö, an island about one hour from Kotka by ferryboat. We went there when their father was here in July together with our dear friends, Alexandra and Jari and their children Cassandra and Alexander. Our children get along so well and we always look forward to seeing them when we come to Finland. I hadn't been to Fagerö for many, many years and didn't remember where the best and closest beach was, so we just followed the signs to the public beach, which turned out to be a really bad choise! We walked and walked and little Cassandra got tired and her father who had an aching back got even more tired and when we finally arrived to the beach it was full of stones and not the nice sandy beach I remembered being to lots of years ago.

  After having something to eat and a refreshing swim there and after a woman told us there was a better beach closer to the ferry, we decided to move on and look for it. We didn't have too much time, because there was one ferry in the afternoon and the next one late in the evening. Anyway, after some walking we found the lovely sandy beach and it really was much closer to the ferry, so we will have to remember it next time! Time went too quickly and soon we had to run to the ferry, but we got some time to swim and have some more pick nick there before leaving.

Candy shopping

Last shopping here in Finland before going back to Italy. I don't buy candy to my children too often, but usually they get the Moomin box with candy in the airplane when we go back to Italy. This year they preferred to buy the candy here, the Finnish candy departments are so full of different kinds of candy, a bit different from those in Italy. So they all got to choose candy for the same amount of money as is the cost of the moomin box in the plane and it was quite a lot! I went to the Iittala shop and bought myself the Moomin cup of this summer. Very nice!

sabato 14 agosto 2010

Sofia's Best in Finland

And after Daniele had made his list Sofia quickly made one too. It includes the following things:
- swimming in Laajakoski and Pickala
- bying the hobby horse
- going to Getholmen
- eating blueberry and raspberry pie
- playing minigolf
- horse riding
- summer camp
- Fagerö
- and in some way also to go back home to Italy. She is waiting for our trip to Zoomarine, an amusement park with dolphin shows and water slides, where we have planned to go with our friends the next day after our arrival to Italy
Here's my lay-out for Sofia. The digital kit is a free one from Verena Karolyi designs.

Daniele´s summer in Finland

First of all here´s a list Daniele made of some things we did in Finland this summer:
- summer camp
- with Onny at Källa (a friend of his that he got to know at the summer camp invited him to his birthday party and they went to a place called Källa and slept there)
- Fagerö - we did a day trip to an isle about one hour by boat from Kotka
- Getholmen - we were invited to our friend´s summer cottage for one night and the children love it there
- Picking empty bottles - in Finland you get some money back if you take the empty bottles back to the shop and Daniele has noticed it's a good way to earn some pocket money
- sauna
- shopping
- picking blueberries and raspberries

Here's a digital lay-out about these things. The papers and material are from free kits from Jessica Sprague's site.

Days are getting shorter

We have done lots of things here in Finland that I haven´t blogged about yet. I will try to write and post photos about all the things we have done, so I can look back at them when summer is over. It´s still warm here in Finland, but the days have got shorter and schools have started, so there´s a little bit of summer is over feeling here and we are going back to Italy again next week, so it´s time for a little review of all the nice things we have done here. I have been working a little bit here and there have been days when the children have been a bit bored when no one has had time to take them some where or it has been so warm so my parents have not been able to go out at all during day time (not very usual for Finnish summers), but all together I think they have had many nice experiences. They also have learnt some Finnish and their Swedish has become much stronger again. They have learnt some Finnish Swedish expressions, too, (like including Finnish words in Swedish sentences) which I'm not too glad about, but it's part of the package.

venerdì 13 agosto 2010

New hair cut for the girls

Sofia and Carlotta went to the hairdressers today. This is how they looked before...

... and this is how they looked when they came home
And after they had opened their pigtails!

domenica 1 agosto 2010

Blueberries and raspberries

The children went out to pick some blueberries and raspberries in the woods nearby while I was working. We made a good pie and they ate some with milk and sugar.