31 October 2001: Pauli's birthday

Today it was Pauli's birthday. He's really old now.

28 October 2001: My lucky day

Elina: Today we unpacked my birthday present. It’s a rocking horse. It’s pretty cool.

27 October 2001: Where did all this stuff come from?

Elina: Today a truck carrying a container full of stuff arrived at our place. Three guys brought box after box into our apartment. We could hardly move. Then they spent hours taking all the stuff out. There were heaps of toys . I forgot I had all this stuff... I haven’t seen it for over two months! Mamma and dadda got all their stuff too. We had dinner at the table for the first time in ages. We looked through our photo albums.

23 October 2001: It’s getting colder now...

Elina: When we got here it was still pretty warm, but it’s really getting cold. Last night was -4°C and when we woke up it was 0°C on our balcony. I have to wear heaps of clothes when we go outside. They say it’ll get down to -20°C in winter… I bet I won’t even be able to feel my face then and my boogies are going to turn into icicles .

21 October 2001: Time to take the next step...

Elina: Over the last few days I’ve been working up to something special. You know I’ve been crawling for a while and it’s time to move on... time to take the next step. Ok ok, I used the blue crate for support, but I managed to walk from the kitchen to my room. Then mummy got me to hang on to her pants, and she started walking. I wasn’t too happy with her ‘cos she took off without warning me, but I didn’t want to end up flat on my face, so I had to keep up. Next time I’m sitting down before she takes off .

10 October 2001: Mummy went to the city so we went for a walk in the forest...

Elina: Today mummy went to the city to go to the market near the harbour. She bought some smoked trout and mushrooms which she turned into a really yummy dinner. She checked her email at the internet café because we don’t have internet at home yet. The library has internet for free but it doesn’t have MSN messenger so she can’t chat with her friends from there. While mummy was in the city we went for a walk in the forest. It was pretty chilly but I had warm clothes on so it was ok. I was amazed at how many leaves had fallen on the ground. Just last week the trees were still full of yellow leaves, but now they are looking a bit bare. We saw lots of doggies (a few brown ones, a white one and a couple of black ones). I really liked the small white one, ‘cos it went nuts when it saw me … I went nuts too :-) We saw some exercise equipment made of logs in the forest… dadda should have done a few chin ups but he is too fat . We met up with mummy at the KKK Supermarket in Leppävaara (we don’t know what the K means but the small supermarkets are called KK Markets, the medium ones are KKK Supermarkets and really big ones are KKKK Citymarkets).