loved

I was on a play date today with my friends and fellow Swedes. It was very nice as usual and I'm really happy to have them here. I've known them for a little over a year now and their kids are amazing and I love them and they love mine. There is something overwhelming to me about the feeling that comes over me when other people love my child. It's a mixture of pride, love and happiness and it just fills me so completely. I love my child so much and to see other people love him feels like confirmation that he's great and fantastic and amazing and it makes me happy to know that other people see it.

W is pretty mellow when he plays with other kids, he's not really the hitting or biting kind with other kids. He keeps that for me (oh joy). He's not the best at sharing but he does occasionally give toys to the other kids he plays with and he doesn't really mind other kids snatching toys out of his hands. He's also very vocal right now, picking up new words left, right and center. He also knows all the animal sounds like I think I've mentioned before here.

It's always good hanging out with other Swedes, we can bitch about how everything is better in Sweden and our kids actually get to hear real Swedish being spoken, not just what I say to him which is pretty limited to "in the mouth", "NOT in the mouth", "NO don't do that", "Very good, you're so smart" and "Let's change your diaper".

Now I'm going to stop avoiding my Wii fit and try to get in shape.

family

Today was all about family. I packed up my little family in the car and away we drove to my extended family. We spent the afternoon with Grand-Papa, Matante Marilou, Uncle Stef and cousins Fadia, Lia and Noah. It was very nice.
We're a very international family with me being Swedish, hubby French-Canadian and Uncle Stef is from New Zeeland. We try to incorporate all the different traditions of holidays into our celebrations and it usually turn out really nice. All the kids are at least bilingual and in the case of Wilh, even trilingual.

It's nice spending time with family, the nieces and nephew are growing so much and it's so much fun spending time with them watching them grow into their own little people. See them interact with Wilh and watch him admire his cousins. He loves Lia, he was hugging her all day today and every girl he sees he calls Lia. It's one of his favorite words. He also started saying Daddy properly this week and he gets the word right too. He says daddy and points do daddy or when daddy leaves he holds his hands up palms facing up and says daddy meaning daddy gone. He's getting so much more verbal these days he actually uses language to communicate and he uses words along with gestures to make himself understood. It's great. I love that he one morning was a bit cold so he said "brrrr" while hugging his chest and shaking a bit so I would cuddle him under the blanket.

I've read a bit about multilingualism and we were a bit worried that his language skills would take longer to develop due to the many different languages he has to learn but so far so good. He understands Swedish very well, he understands French pretty well but his English comprehension is not as good. We read a lot of books in English though so I'm sure he'll pick up on it soon enough.

He's so amazing and fantastic and I feel so privileged to spend so much time with him, watching him learn.