Blogging is a hobby that becomes an expectation.  I began this blog to help me cope with the adjustment to stay-at-home fatherhood as I relocated to Sweden with my family.  It was a way to connect to the greater world, to remain active while staying home.  From there, I developed a relationship with a few other bloggers, I would read their posts and they would read mine.  Connections were made, regardless of how fleeting.  Soon, I found myself looking at everything I did through a blogging lens where everything was treated as a blog post.  How could I share what M just did in a way that could really capture the humor of what he did?  More to the point, how can I tell a version of what he just did that would be funny to others?  As I don’t show pictures of my family where their faces can be seen, suddenly there was a prolification of photos in my iPhoto’s album with the back of my boys heads.  And over the first year I tried to capture all that I could and share it with you.  I worked hard to meet your, and my own, expectation that I would actually tell these stories.

Then, it stopped.  The connection ended and the attempt to cast everything in a humorous manner became a burden of time I could no longer afford.  For those of you that regularly visited this blog to read about these misadventures of parenting abroad I apologize.  But, life happened, which it tends to do to most of us.  I went through another transition, one from being a hemmapappa to being employed full-time in a new and challenging career field.  On top of the new job, I also enrolled into an on-line program to acquire a more complete education in this new field; and with all of that, and working to remain a caring father and a loving husband, I stopped updating this blog. 

The funny thing about stopping the blog is that I never stopped using my newly acquired blogging lens.  Every trip or experience I have had with my family, I have mentally examined how I could write that up for this blog.  The number of photos with just the back of M or K’s head has remained at the same level.  Even my wife has commented now and then that I should really write up a particular experience for this site.  So now, I have a huge backlog of experience to document for you…or perhaps just for me.  Cause it is hard to say how these virtual connections work and whose expectation I am meeting.  Is this a blog for a regular readership, just the occasional visitor, or just myself?  Who is my audience?  As I look back at my posts, I see that infused throughout these stories of parenting abroad is a focus on what to do when in Sweden, and more specifically Almhult.  That really limits my audience; but a few weeks ago, I received a notice from a reader who found this site and told me that they found it very useful for them as they were preparing to make the move to IKEA land.  And it is for those readers, who are looking for some help in adjusting to this part of our small world, especially with children, that I need to update this site with all of the funny little antics that this nomadic family has experienced over the past year.  So, with out committing to anything and setting up no expectations, I hope to return to this venue of story-telling and share more of what has happened to family nomadic over the past year.