Winter vacation part 1

Schools are closing one week in february every year in Sweden, thankfully the teachers are also off work. Every weekend I take a stroll through my garden to do some snow shoveling, feeding the birds and checking animal tracks. The photo below shows my backyard. It looks empty besides a few trees but it's because the vegetable beds are covered with snow.

I wanted to show Alfons the mountains and go skiing with him and Oskar so yesterday, I drove for 3 hours to get to Sälen, wich are the closests alps here. It was an amazing and fun day with my boys. On the top of the mountain, the icy snow blasted our faces. It hurt but it had a wonderful taste and smell of the ocean. Some of my strongest memories are connected with a smell, so now I have another one.

I call this post part one, because we only have been from work a half week. This weekend will have some really great things happening so, to be continued..

Return of the light

Wow. Time flies so fast that I hardly have time to catch my breath. I'm about to wrap up  my graduation from University and finally become a certified teacher. Boy it has been some exhausting three years. I'm exhausted and tired of school. Right now, I'm also a bit tired of my work as well, because the work weeks are soo busy. A full time teacher works a lot more than others, thats why we have these long vacations at summer, for hibernation. I have a short trip to Edinburgh to look forward to soon. If you have been there and have some good tips, please write me a comment.

Winters have become shorter, thats sad (global warming alert). We had a few weeks with lots of snow and coldness along with sunny days and those conditions are perfect for outdoor fun. I love skiis and skating and I'm thankful that my son still want me as a companion on skii picknicks in the forests. He's soon becoming a teenager.
I'm trying to persuade him to follow me on a daytrip to the mountains for down hill skiing, we'll see.

One reason that I don't write here that much anymore is that I've started journaling the analogue way. I jot down small thoughts and use the journal to process things that makes me sad.  I've had some bad things happen that made me fall back in a depression last summer, but writing everything down helped me a lot. I also print out, glue in photos and decorate the journal with washi and paper scraps. The inspiration comes from instagram and youtube videos about Midori Travellers Notebook and junk journaling.

Here's a short list of inspirational and favourite videos, there are both flip through, tutorials and journaling videos. I really need some quiet time with my papers and glue to cope. Oh and throw in some glitter too!

Andrea G Scripture junk journal

Tiffy butter How i make my Junk journals

Amity Bloom Midori Journaling

Tutorials of Ephemeras Garden

 The photos below shows an example of a junk notebook I made for a coworker as a birthday gift. She likes flowers, green and orange, as you can see.

Things that happens right now, bad desciscions and cruel bills are written and affect people world wide, it makes me worried. The facebook feed fills up with political articles by a particular face. My challenge this week is to log out from facebook for a week and avoid the news. 

Remember that if you are at the bottom of the well and look up, you will see the light in the tunnel.