Blog Articles About Family

Tinkified Christmas

As we walked down the street to my mother’s, it was snowing. A quiet evening, crisp and cold, with gentle snow falling from the sky, leaving just enough of a covering on the ground to leave marks of shoes and tires. It was a movie Christmas moment, the kind of perfect that doesn’t happen except…

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Family Visits

Remember AB? She’s been again and this time, she brought her family – her husband Bjarke and their kids Camilla and Chris. As usual, being with AB felt like home and despite not having seen the kids since 2005 and Bjarke for at least as long, it was like we hadn’t been apart for more…

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Family Dinners

Along with a good portion of other people in the Internet, I read Dooce and sometime last year, when Heather started doing momversations with other prominent mommy bloggers, I started watching that, too. They’re smart, funny women with interesting takes on issues of parenting and despite not being a parent, not surprisingly, I have opinions…

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Happy Birthday Mor!

I could write pages about the awesome woman who is my mother, but this photo sort of says it all. Warm, wise, strong and with a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, she is my rock and my inspiration. I have this notion that it could be fun for her to get as many birthday…

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Johs

Forty years ago, when AB and I became best friends we also adopted each other’s families on her side, that meant her dad Johs, mom Ebba and younger sister KL (who I may have mentioned we harassed mercilessly – forgot the link, sorry). They became a sort of second family to me, an extended safety…

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Family Day

This is the second Family Day long weekend (it was invented last year) and we did just that. Spent time with family. Although based on the photos, you’d think there were no adults there. For Morgan, one of the highlights of lunch at mormor’s (Danish for grandma) is french stick with butter.Liam liked sitting in…

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Thoughts of History and Hats: My Unlce Poul and Lessons on Nuance

Updated September 5, 2021 For several years, my uncle Poul — my mother’s brother — came to visit once a year. And it’s always fun. He has a seemingly inexhaustible store of really bad jokes…. hang on, here’s my favourite. It’s better told in person, so feel free to spread it around: You ask the innocent victim…

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a trip into memories of family and scents

In My Grandparents’ Basement: A Scent Memory

Updated March 11, 2021 My pharmacist is renovating and as part of the process, they’ve built floor-to-ceiling shelves made of pressed wood for their files. As I walked in the door, the smell of sawdust instantly transported me back to my childhood or, more specifically, the basement of the building where my mormor and morfar…

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The Blanket

I borrowed a blanket from my mother last week. It was my father’s, bought when he was young and working all over the British Isles. The blanket he bought in Scotland and I am pretty sure it’s the Royal Stewart tartan. It’s wool and large, larger than any other blanket we’ve ever had and there’s…

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Stories of My Father

Updated March 16, 2022 This is my dad, or as I (mostly) called him, far. Today is his birthday. My father was a pretty complex man. He was fiercely intelligent, generous, funny, quick-witted, proud, stubborn, had a wicked temper and a severe case of verbal diarrhea. With the exception of the last few years of…

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