After coming back from Vancouver Island we checked in to the hotel, which served as a base-camp for all the visitors of the wedding of Natalie and Bruce, an old school friend of Annika. The wedding was the initial motivation for the trip, so it was really nice to spend some time with Bruce and his friends every day we were there. And the resort hotel was fantastic. The suite we were staying in was actually bigger than our apartment back in the days in Leppävaara :)As this was our second visit to Vancouver, we didn’t feel pressured to do all the sight-seeing, but could enjoy the nice parts of town instead.

The last week was full of nice activities. We went to Kokkola last Friday to meet Annika’s family and to help a bit out at the cottage. Annika stayed the weekend and me until Wednesday afternoon. Even though there were a lot of mosquitoes in moments without any wind, it was wonderful to be there and enjoy the sun. Moreover Linnéa could spend a couple of hours with her aunt and grandpa, while I was painting and building up IKEA shelves.

Sitting at home, drinking an evening beer while Linnéa is sleeping. This might be the right point of time to look back a little and to think about the first part of my paternity-leave I longed so much for. So, while Annika is fighting with the European decision processes, I center my life for a short while around our little one. But it didn’t start as expected, as I got a fever during one of the first nights, which didn’t let me sleep more than an hour during that night.

In two days Linnéa is already two months old, and she is already so much in the center of our life, that I can’t really remember how it was before she was born. She is the cutest thing ever. Ui, still feeling that some hormones put me on a constant high. But in the last two month I learned a lot about myself and I’ve never felt as happy, worried, confident, weak, needed, tired, strong, insecure and loved before.

Now it’s already more than a month ago, that Linnéa was born, but still it is hard to believe, that she is actually our little one we longed so much for during the last couple of months. As hard as the headline is to understand for a non-Finnish-speaker as hard it was for us sometimes at the beginning to understand what she is telling us. It took a while to get into it, and I’m really grateful, that I could stay the first two weeks at home, so that we could support and learn from each other.