Big day tomorrow

Is this a 78 model? It sure doesn´t look like it!

I´m going to bed early tonight. Tomorrow, on the first of February, I´ll turn 34. My 34th birthday. Wow!

Or... well, let´s just say, I´ve been through this before. But it´s nice now, with the family waking me up.
Yeah, I still like to celebrate my birthday.

But I couldn´t wish for cars for gifts. There´s my limit. This hobby is already too big and too crazy...

Tough day

We had a tough day today. V had a play therapist at the daycare center today. She studied him to see how he goes on. What progress he makes.
She seemed to do a very good job, and she found a lot of stuff to work with. But it makes us sad, it reminds us of what he can not. How disabled he is. I´m not in the mood to write more about that tonight.

Let´s focus on some more fun stuff instead. This is how A watches Cars 2. He bought Tomber and Finn yesteday. A big moment. He had saved hos own money and earned a few kronor by helping out watering the flowers in our house and stuff like that. So we went to the toy store and he bought the two pack. With his money. Proud!

Ha ha! Look how stupid they are! Tractors!

After that he had to show all his cars the movie. Look how he got them all lined up, like one of those cars movie theaters you´ve got in the US!

Another good thing. My wife´s mom and dad agreed to take care of the kids in May. New York! Here we come!
Any suggestions of a nice hotell near Soho or Chelsea are most welcome!

 

 

Yiiiiihaaaa!

Afraid of the future - part I

Last thursday when my package with my new pittys arrived I wasn´t at home. My wife got the mail and A and V was with her and when A saw a big white envelope he started to question her about it.
He wanted to open it and he wanted it bad.

She had to tell him in a very seriously tone that it was adressed to Dad and that it is a crime to open somebody elses mail.
She knew what was in the letter.

She is pretty used to it by now. Big white envelopes. With cars. Not for her kids.

But this time it was close. I had once let A open a letter that was for my wife and this was something that he remembered now. So it got hard for my wife. Why then but not now?

She did an extraordinary job and managed to stop A from further questions and when I came home later, he´d forgot all about that envelope.

But the whole thing ot me thinking of what would happen if A or V found out about the cabinet in the garage. And, the larger question, when or if I should give the collection away to them?

How will they react? It depends of course when I´ll do it.

This is how I´d like them to react. Maybe when they are 6 and 8? But then they´ll destroy all the cars playing with them. Kids can´t handle toys.

This is what´ll happen if I wait too long. When they are 14 and 16. But the good thing is that they´ll probably keep the cars in mint condition - since they´ll totaly ignore them.
But there´s a large risk that they´ll sell it all on the internet just to buy petrol to their mopeds.

 

If I wait even longer - say when they´re 20 and 22 - they´ll probably put me in a mental institution. 

V would say something like "Dad. I got a brain disease. I real diagnosis. What´s wrong with you?" 

Nah. I´d better keep this secret for good.

Collection update

 

Team Nitroade - 3 pittys and chief.

Up close with an angry team!

Yes - that´s exactly who he is!

 I got five more cars today, bought ´em on a swedish cars-site: www.playlek.se

An excellent place to find cars from both the first and the second movie.

 

Here´s my collection of pittys right now:

And here´s a picture of a Pitty lunch break :

 

Speed. We are speed.

Snowracers. That´s the swedish name for the sledges. For real. Great fun!

Finally the snow came. So me and V and A hade some fun this weekend. Racing downhill with snowracers.
The speed didn´t scare V as much as I was afraid it would. At least not when I sat behind him. But when I put A behind him and let them both go on theirselves he started to scream.

Bad dad.

But my wife took him for a spinn, she pulled him gently when she took a short winter stroll. And there! The smile was back!

Nothing beats hot chocolate after being out in the cold. Now we have winter as it should be in Sweden!

Hello Cars collectors of the world!

The supreme blog Take Five A Day asked me to write a few lines about my blog and how collecting cars works in Sweden. They´ll run the post tonight but for all the rest of you - here is the blogpost.

And to all Take Five A Day-readers that got interested - please scroll down or click on the links to the left to read more - and Welcome All!

A typicals swedish family. But we should have been Volvo´s. Could someone tell Mattel?

I started my blogg ”Collecting Cars” almost immediately after I started to buy cars. At first it was just a good way to display and keep orders of my cars, since I hide them in a closed cabinet in the garage. I don´t wan´t my two sons (2 and 4 years old) to see it.

The madness in that.

But I guess some people reading Take Five A Day could relate?

(And the kids got their own collection. Rather small ones, but hey, they´re not making money for themselves yet!)

But why start to collect childrens toys just to hide them from children? The answer was, as my collection expanded, suddenly clear to me. It was a way to create a part of my life where I still had control.

Me and my wife had some issues with our second son V. We were quite worried about several things and after almost a year we did a magnetic brain scan. It turned out he lacks myelin in his brain. Whiter matter. It means that his brain works much slower than normal brains do and it effects his development over all.

This was of course very bad news and it made med feel sad and distressed. But my new hobby gave my a chance to forget and breathe.

Now my blog is in english, I see that I have som readers outside Sweden and most of the collectors are in the US and I want you to be able to read my thoughts. I´ve also decieded to go public with my life and thoughts, being a dad to a son with a brain disease.

It´s in many ways a different life, but at the same time, it´s all the same. And the collection of cars is getting larger and larger for every month.

But it´s harder and more expensive in Sweden, I got some photos for you Americans, just to show you how lucky you are!

This is how an awerage toy store in Stockholm display cars. We have more or less monopoly in Sweden, there´s two major toy stores (BR and Toy´s R US) but they have the same owners so this is how almost every toy store in Sweden looks like. 

As you could see we have a huge surplus of Petrov Trunkov over here. Go visisti Sweden this summer and buy your own Petrov – a vacation you´l never forget!

This is a bargain. A two-pack for 100 Swedish crowns. Something like 14 USD. That´s what we nomrally pay for ONE car.

This 4-pack costs 379 SEK – 53 USD. But I got ´em already…

I buy most of my cars on the internet. We have a swedish version of E-bay called Tradera.com and there I use to pay like 75 SEK – 10,50 USD for a Rubber Tire Cars2 racer, including shipping.

But recently a new thing – yes it´s really quite a new thing – happened. In a subway station close to my - job a flower shop (!) started to sell cars.

A perfect mix. Flowers to my wife – cars to me!

The store has all kinds of cars, even the ones from the early series of Cars 1.

So I guess it´s not entirely true that this 4 pack is only available at Walmart?  (A store that doesn´t exist in Sweden, of course)

Just look at the beauty of this picture.  Jay in a perfect surrounding of orchids. Nothing strange at all about it.

Being the Not Disabled One

Too much attention? Or too less?

A few months ago me and my wife went on a lecture. It was about brothers and sisters to disabled kids. Swedish author and psychologist Christina Renlund spoke for almost two ours about familys she´d helped. Very often the brother or sister to the disabled had understood, at an really early moment, that something was odd. Something dad or mom was holding back. Something you could sense, see and experience. But yet, everything else seemed normal at the same time.

The danger not to speak about the disease with the sibblings could be that he or she starts to have delusions. It´s not rare that small children, being so self centered in their view at the world, starts to blame themselves. "It was because I kissed my little sister that she got blind" and thoughts of that kind.

So we started to talk to A. Tried to explain. "You know, some of the kids at kindergarten have brown eyes. Some have blue. Or green. It´s the same thing with V. He has a barin that works slower. And that´s nobodys fault, it´s just the way it is."

I know my wife had a great talk with him about something going wrong when V "was in the belly". And that we we´re very sad at first. But not anymore. Now we´re so happy and found of V - as happy as any parents could ever be.
When A heard that, he looked quite serious, almost grave. Then he cuddled up in her knee and just sat there for minutes.

Yes I know kid. It takes time to melt.

Today I told him to play some simple games on the internet. I hadn´t the time to help both him and V at the same time. So many times now. So many times when V shouts and we all have to help him first, pay him the most attention, get him what he needs before we can satisfy anyone else.

Who´s standing in who´s shadow?

So I sat down with A at last. Remebering the lecture, to pay attention to the Not Disabled One. We played a couple of levels on the Lego-site. And we had some fun going to bed. Hide and seek with V is getting more and more fun, now when he knows that we expect him to look for us...

It was a good lecture. But boy - there´s so many things we´ll have to learn. So many things we hadn´t the slightest idea of before V.

It´s relly a different journey now.

My new favourite - all categories

Look at this guy! I mean just look at him:

Minion Forklift  - Muggsy Liftsome - the picture is taken from Take Five A Day.

He is a bad guy. Here you could see him with his friends Professor Z (Based on the legendary Zündapp Janus from 1957) and Grem (based on the fail-car AMC Gremlin 1970, often seen as one of the worst cars in history).

I love that he is such a LARGE pitty. And the cap that gives him such a classical movie-thug look.

But he looks kind of like a large V...

...V better not grow up to be a crook!

Wild - Wilder - V!

It´s so lovely to see V develop new abilities. So lovely. And so frustrating.

He can can play for really long time with the dishwasher. When I need the dishwasher. Just picking up things. And putting them back down. Forks, knives, plates, dirty ones mixed with the clean ones. Up... and back down again.
Me... I try not to fall into tiny pieces of frustration and cardreams.

But, he´s getting so much better sorting the things, now he knows where the plates are supposed to be and where the forks have their places.

V´s three favourites. The dishwasher, the TV (he loves to turn it off) and the washer.

But he still hasn´t figured out exactly what the big button on the center of the TV is for. Or why the TV always turns of when he touches that button.
Luckily he knows that screaming high enough when that happens always get mom or dad to the scene, ready to put it all back to normal again. Perfect!
- What´s that? A big button on the center of the TV? I just HAVE to push it! Again!

But V´s biggest favourite all time high is the washer. Unfortenately our washer has an extremely bad kids lock - yes Siemens I´m looking at you! - so it´s not worth the three seconds it takes to lock it, V busts it open in no time. He throws clothes out, he starts the machine, he changes the heating of the water and he throws things in that clearly are not clothes.
The good thing - it can keep him occupied for almost 10 minutes at a time...

V is Curious George right now. Me? I feel more and more like The Man with The Yellow Hat...

Bilar 2 - Cars 2 in Swedish - Blockbuster!

Me and A made a movie today. Just like that. It´s a simple thing, really. i don´t get why it takes so much time for Spielberg or Lucas? All you need is two good actors, a computer, any camera (the one in my cell worked really well) and some cars.

The spoken language is swedish but here´s the plot in english.

Welcome to the big race! The two bog favourites are Fransesco and Lightning.
Fransesco is first in corner no 1! But something´s happened to Rauol! The pittys on their way to help him!
Lightning pulls away!
Now it´s time for the pit. And Lightning is quick! Yes!
But what´s THAT! Someone is shooting on Nigel!
And there - Lightning wins the race!

First trailer of Cars 2 ever!

Here is a trailer for an upcoming movie that will blast you halfway to Radiator Springs an back in just 49 seconds. Since my co-producer has some difficulities with the language we had to do it in Swedish but you´ll get the big picture anyway. I promise. Really.

Rubber Tires Cars - close to completion

Max Schnell - but in the German Cars 2 his name is Sebastian Schnell and Sebastian Vettel does his voice.

Lewis Hamilton - after the english F1-driver. The car is based on a McLaren MP4-12C GT3.

Take a look at my newest investments! One DTM-champion and one really fine sportscar! Max Schnell has the same body as the upcoming swedish car - Flash. And Lewis is one of a kind.

Now I´m only four cars from having all the Rubber Tires from Cars 2. Ooooo! Getting there!

I wonder how it will feel - when I reach completeness?

I guess it´s like the Y2K - a lot of fuzz but nothing really happens. But maybe not!

What if V could read this?

2024. V surfs the internet. On a "40 year anniversary Mac". And finds out about this blogg.

Me and my wife had a talk about publishing things on the internet. It´s so easy to just think of a blogg as a digital diary. And forget that people can actually see what you´re writing.
The whole idea is to comunicate, to reach out, to touch.
I want people who share my somewhat disturbed hobby too read about it and to eventually take contact.
I also want people who have experience of children with different kinds of disabilities to read.
And I want my friends to read.

But what if my own kids will read this? Am I writing things that I haven´t said to them? Wuold there be surprises for them to find out here?
Yes.

Is that something good?

I don´t now.

It´s not a problem yet. A has learned to count to three in english but he still can´t read and he´s just about to discover the alphabet.

V has almost the entire ocean of words left to learn. At least to speak and write and read.

But there will come a day when they´re ready. I´ll have to keep that in mind.

Hopefully they´ll find this site a good source of information. What have actually happened? How did my dad react? What were his thoughts?

My mother passed away when I was only 16. Cancer. Afterwards I read her notebook. I know she wanted me to, she said so. It was a great comfort. Mayby this could be something like that. Something that could make it easier to start an conversation with me.

Or just something to laugh about. Me? As a Cars-avatar? How old are you dad? Five?

A New Deal

I got two more cars yesterday on the swedish auction site Tradera. And to stop me from buying too many (what is the limit?) cars I´ve figured out a new system this evening.

It´s simple. For each swedish crown (0,14 dollar) I spend on a car I will put the same on my special savings account for vacations.
That way I´ll save more when I buy more. And I won´t have the money to buy more cars than what´s healthy for me (again, what is the limit?)

So yesterday I spend 220 swedish crowns on two cars. Today I transferred the same amount to the savings account.

More money to spend on the New York trip. But maybe that eventually will end up in me buying cars i New York for the savings instead...

Hopefully you´ll get the pictures of the two cars tomorrow, the swedish mail is pretty reliable.
What a cliffhanger!

Dreaming of sleep in the city that never...

Five days in New York.This may. The dream is alive!

Me and A went for a trip by ourselves last weekend. My aunt celebrated her 70th birthday and we drove 330 km south to my sister´s. She´d got a digital photo frame for christmas present and now she´d stuffed it with pictures of her family. Our family. And it was quite a few photos of me.

And here´s the strange thing. On every one of them I looked tired. On every single one!
I studied the photos for several loops. Yeah. I was right. All of the photos of me showed a tired man.

And that could mean only one thing. I am very tired.

And when I realised that I began to try to remember when the last time me and my wife were on a vacation together. Without the kids.
It was actually this summer, a short weekend on a nice hotell in the south archipelago of Stockholm.

But our honeymoon has been postponed. We had our wedding in august 2010. And the trip is still to be made.

But this spring, in may, we are going. Five days in New York. Just her and me. I´m longing. Really longing.

Memories of a chair

Right now V is very much alive. By that I mean that he lives a lot. He´s either running, climbing or jumping. The two first he´s really good at, the third... Let´s just say that he looks like if Stefan Holm tried to jump without knowing that somebody had nailed his feet to the ground.

This is something that you could get very tired of. Chasing your son around, trying to stiop him from falling, stop him from reaching that knife or that expensive christmas decoration, or just stop him from crying when you failed doing the other stops.

Jumpin´ Jack Flash - and a flash from the past

But I remember his rolling chair. And suddenly it all feels good again.

When V was one year old, or close to that, he had a walking chair. Actually it was the old one that A had used and learned the basics of walking from.
But V didn´t learn the basics of walking. He got taller and taller but the need for the walking chair remained. Finally he got to big and the chair was more of a trap than something to get aid from. So we went to the medical technical aid centre for help.

I still remember that truly divided feeling, walking in to the centre.
We were getting help. V had to have a better tool. It was going to get better for all of us.
But at the same time... This was a place for disabled people. I mean really disabled.

Should I expect this life for my son from now on? Hanging around with artifical limbs and wheelchairs? An what if... what if he´d never learned? What if he´d never stod up and walked?

I don´t know why that last sentence never stuck in my mind, but the truth is it didn´t. I´ve always thought that V would eventually learn how to walk. Maybe it´s just the way I see things. Maybe I have a strong ability to deny bad things in my life. I don´t know.

And later V did learn how to walk. And before that he had a great time in his medical walking chair. It allowed him to tag along with the rest of us and to experience the house by himself, as well. That was something really important when building his confidence and his independence.

The chair was, in all it´s hospitaliness, uglyness and sturdyness a fine piece of medical art.

But DAMN - it´s so good to be rid of it!

I giant leap in my heart

Me and A was at the local health centre the other day.

Drawings, eyesight control, balance tests - all a walk in the park!

It was time for his four year old control. I guess that most countries have some kind of childrens health care that keeps track of the kids growth, and in Sweden we have a yearly check up.
A did great.
His weight and length - good, his sight and hearing excellent, his abilty to understand pictures and separate colors - glorious.

This was altogether a very pleasant experience. Both for him and me.

I´ve been through a lot of health care checks with V that has been quite the opposite. On his eyesight test we discovered a squint. Around his first birthday, he ceased to gain weight and we discovered a dysfunctional gland. He is alergic to milk and eggs. This required a lot of blod samples to identify.
In short - we´ve done a lot of testing in medical surroundings with V - very often resulting in concerned eyebrows and worried looks at different doctors.

This day, at the health care center with A, we we´re very far from that. Quite a relief.

And just that - to appreciate something that most people take for granted - is something that living with V has brought to our lives.

But also, to appreciate small changes, to see the greatness in tiny steps of progress. Like this afternoon, when I drove the kids home from nursery school and V had a new, even better name/sound for A.
I became warm inside. Happy for a new sound.

Like a Neil Armstrong in his mouth, a small step for V´s tounge but a giant leap in my heart.

Wanted - dead or alive - WITH rubber tires

Missing:

• #117 Lil Torquay  
• #51 Easy Idle

Give me a note down below if you want to sell!

Racers and Team Chiefs

News from the always very informant and charming site Take Five a Day:
(note that this is both released, scheduled released and not actually released at all)

A not to bold guess is that we can count on releases of all the team chiefs.  But still no word at all about pittys.

New bold blogg

I decided to go "public" with the real reason why I´ve made this blogg.
Read in the links to the top left.

Feels good.

Why Flash?

Now, I´ve been following the news about the upcoming Ultimate Chase-series.
It will feature a few cars that are very rare. Nobody seem to know exactly how many cars there will be but a rough guess would be something between 2 000 and 10 000 of each one. In total. Worldwide.

That will make it hard - very hard - to get all of them, of course.

But my worries isn´t weather that is a good idea or not, or if I could get them all or not, no - my worries are about - Why Flash?

The Ultimate Chase cars are all based on real racing celebritys from all over the world. The spanish Formula One driver Fernando Alonso, is represented:

So is the russian F1-driver Vitaly Petrov:

And Lewis Hamilton, the british F1-champ, is already released as one of the originally 11 racecars that competes in the World Grand Prix:

And that´s all pretty cool and alright with me. I loved all the references to american racing history in the first Cars movie and I learned a lot from that (The King, Plymouth Superbird 1970, Petty and all that).

And now, Sweden got our own, very own, Pixar Diecast! That, ladies and gentlemen, that truly is something!

But.

Who do you think would have the honour to be pixar-diecast-izied?

Our best Formula One driver in history - Ronnie Petersson? 
(123 F1 races. 10 wins. Two times runner up in the championship, 1972 and 1978)

Or the second most famous F1-star - Stefan "Lill-Lövis" Johansson?
(106 F1 Races, 12 podium places, winner of the 24-hour racing classic Le Mans 1997)

Or Swedens most famous racing star in America - Kenny Bräck?
(Champion of Indy racing League 1998 and winner of Indy 500 1999)

Or, my personal favourite, he is always so nice and optimistic - Mattias Ekström?
(Two times winner of the German Touring Championship, DTM, and the only swede ever participationg in the american Nascar Series, three times winner of Race of Champions)

But no. Oh no.

The swedish diecast - that looks this cool -

is based on Jan "Flash" Nilsson. A swedish touring car champion. He´s never been even close to the other four in achievements on the race track. He started the Swedish Touring Car Championship back in 1996 and won the series 1996 and 1997. Besides a national title in Formula 3 that´s that.

Why, o why, Pixar, Disney, Mattel and John Lasseter, did you choose HIM?

It´s like... like... choosing between Agassi, McEnroe and Connors and finally decide for Brad Gilbert.