Finland!

It has been such a long time since our vacation in Finland - I almost can't remember the details anymore. But this has clearly been the perfect summer vacation for us!

We spent a whole week at this beautiful lake in Southern Finland (not far from Helsinki), in the summer cottage of our friend Mikko's parents:

Cottage, beach, dock

The weather couldn't have been better: warm and generally sunny, with a few clouds against the heat, and almost no mosquitoes. The cottage had two small bedrooms: each family of four squeezed into one of them with basically no space to walk between the beds. It also had one big living room/open kitchen and a little enclosed terrace where we had most of our meals. Thankfully, the weather was so good that we didn't have to spend much time indoors other than for sleeping and eating. The terrace can be seen in the next few pictures:

Kids reading

We brought a stack of German books to pass the time

Oscar inside - Venla outside

Crawler!

We didn't have any "plans" for what to do during our vacation, and that was exactly right. We spent most of our time in and around the lake: swimming, rowing, cayaking:

Tanja and Chris cayaking

Sealily with kids in background

Oscar had his own little pool with water from the tap, since he found the lake water too cold!

More reading:


Every morning, Chris or I had to get up at 5:45am or so with Oscar, the early riser. In order not to disturb the others, we took him for long walks. Usually, he would fall asleep again in the stroller after a while, just before the other kids woke up around 8 or 8:30.

First walk with Daddy

Otherwise, we didn't do much special. We used the sauna, even Clara and Sampo, almost every day. The kids played in the sandbox and threw stones in the water. They got into a few arguments ("You're bad!" "No, YOU're bad!"), but mostly they got along really well.





It was wonderful.