Belated birthday messages

Many of our readers are probably wondering how I can dedicate so much time to writing birthday blogs yet miss one of the most important birthdays of all...Miranda's! It gets worse...since she shares a birthday with my Dad, that means I forgot to blog about his birthday as well. Talk about a disaster.

August 2nd really was a pretty crazy day without a spare second to sit down and blog, but that's not much of an excuse considering the importance of these two people in my life.

I'll start with the person I've known longer, so happy belated birthday Dad! Most of the readers of this blog probably don't know or have barely met my father. Until you get to know him, you'll never be able to understand just how much I look up to him. For the last hour I have tried to describe how he has helped shape me into the man I am today, and I now know that writing that such a story in this blog is an impossible feat. He is the man and the father that I hope to become. I don't know if I can put it any better than that, so I won't even try. I just hope he enjoyed the wonderful birthday that he deserved.

Then there's that girl in my life, what do I call her? Oh yeah, "min älskling." Off the topic, but do you know how much cooler pet names are when they're in a foreign language? I do now. Anyway, I can't write long enough to express how I feel about Miranda, and if I wanted to try I wouldn't do it in a public blog. I will state publicly that she is absolutely incredible. I'm glad that I will never know what I would have done had she made the choice to stay in Minnesota. Asking her to move here was not easy for me and I can only imagine what she must have gone through in making the decision to move to Sweden. I will never take her sacrifices for granted.

Every thought of Miranda brings a smile to my face, and each day with her is happier than the previous day. We have no intention of declaring permanent residency in Sweden, or even extending our stay here, but I have never been as happy as I am now. And while Sweden and all it includes gets some of the credit for that, I'd give Miranda the other 99% of that credit. Moving to Sweden with her has so far been one of the best experiences of my life. We're constantly learning more about ourselves and each other, and there's at least one moment in each day when I catch myself falling for Miranda in a completely new way. I didn't even know that was possible! I love her with all my heart, and was extremely happy that her mom and sister were able to help me provide her with the fun and exciting birthday she wanted. Happy birthday, min älskling!

There's no good way to transition into this, but for her birthday present, I gave Miranda tickets for a hot air baloon ride over Stockholm. The tickets are good for a year out and we have to book a few weeks in advance, but hopefully we'll have some cool pictures from the ride to post before the end of the fall. She also enjoyed an amazingly good traditional Swedish birthday cake, a prinsesstårta, otherwise known as a princess cake. If you ever have the chance to try a Swedish princess cake, jump at it. We all agreed that we'd never had such a good cake in our lives. I looked into the recipe and it looks like it might even challenge the best bakers, and the recipe also says that it takes three and a half hours over three days (translation, six hours for the average joe), so I shelved it. If any of you are up for the challenge, let me know and I'll pass the recipe along. I can almost promise a delicious reward at the end.