Our family is bilingual, and since I write a lot in English, I switch between three languages all the time, every day. Every language is special in its own way, and each of them portray my personality in a slightly different way.

Even my voice is a little different depending on whether I’m speaking Finnish, Swedish, or English, let alone the style of my speech. A good American friend of mine once noted that while he was getting more fluent in Swedish while living in Stockholm, he always counted money in English. I seem to be doing the same, only, I count in Finnish.

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Seems to me that life is a chain of small races, competitions. I’m sure there are people out there who don’t care about competing that much, and who are happy just to participate, but I’m not one of them.

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“Hejdå, good old apartment, thanks for everything,” I said, and if you had been standing where J was, you would have heard what she heard: that my voice did crack a little. When J took a step back inside she saw the same thing I saw, looking at her: A tiny little tear in the corner of the eye.

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Today I learned that sometimes just a small change can turn an ordinary thing into a very funny one when my son, the bilingual genius, accidentally turned the word “eyebrows” into “broweyes”.

I also learned that sometimes even the funniest things don’t translate very well from Finnish into English.

Sitting at the real estate agent’s office today, the nice lady selling her old house to us was telling us what a pain it was to move. But that, fortunately, she hadn’t had to do that very often. That’s when my wife jumped in with the facts*.

(* Still unverified).

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