Vasa boy

I'm sorry I haven't posted in a few days; it was a full week, and I've been extremely tired in the evenings. Let me share a picture, and then I'll tell you all that happened this week (if I can remember it all!).

Our friend Joe turned up Monday morning for a two-day visit. He was our first visitor in Stockholm, and it was nice to have a friend around for a couple days. While he was here, we went to the Vasa Museum and ate dinner at a delicious vegetarian buffet. Joe left us for Prague on Wednesday morning.

But on Monday morning, we also received our personnummer(s) in the mail! This means we can do things that real people do, like open a bank account, get a mortgage, go to the doctor, enroll in Swedish classes, etc. I was shocked at how efficient the whole process was. We put in our application about ten days previous, and were told we'd have to wait 4-6 weeks. We called the tax agency last Friday afternoon to ask if they could expedite our applications, and we were given the direct number to the man handling our case. I called him to (politely) ask if he could speed things up (for reasons we'll get to in a future post), he said yes, and we hung up. I figured we'd have another week. Lo and behold, we got our letters in the mail on Monday! Meaning that he processed our applications immediately after he got off the phone with me and put our numbers in the mail!

Can you imagine calling the IRS after submitting an application for something, getting the direct number of the person handling your case, and then getting your result the next business day? Yeah, me neither.

Thursday afternoon we went back to the tax board with our personnummers to get ID cards. It was quite a hassle - you have to pay for the IDs somewhere else and then bring your receipt back, and they had misspelled the Elliott in me and Augie's names, so we had to do a whole runaround to get that fixed before doing the IDs - but all the employees were SO helpful and friendly, and they went out of their way to take care of us. I've never been treated so well at a government agency. It was as if they were pleased to be doing their jobs.

Two other good things happened this week: 1) we learned that there's probably space for Augie at the local preschool, so we may start taking him a few hours/days per week! I am so excited about this; I truly can't imagine what it would be like to have a couple hours a week to myself and I am almost manically clinging to this possibility. Expect big changes to the blog and to my overall sanity if this works out. 2) I've begun conversations with a woman to open a Music Together center here in Stockholm! It still feels like a far-off possibility, but it's very exciting to think about.

At last - time to crash on the couch. After all this week's activity, I need some serious screen time.