Rejoice! It worked! Sweet Millie came into our room at 7:01 proudly stating that the time on the iPad started with a 7. We all woke up in a better mood.

Last night I promised her a game of charades and she reminded me of it this morning. She drew all her clues and before we knew it we were trying to figure out how to act out “ceiling light,” “castle,” and some others that we could not decipher. We started labeling them as we went. Adorable and hilarious.

We ate breakfast at “home”, did laundry, and then packed up to go on a hike at the Viru bog. I’m not sure if I’ve ever been to a real bog before today. The weather was perfect and the walk was nice.

We got to the boggy part which had a boardwalk all across it. At this point our party slowed down significantly because Millie found a stick and insisted on poking the bog whenever she saw a mud patch, which was approximately every 3 feet.

We got to the tower and climbed it to see the view of the bog. It was a little wobbly which kind of freaked me out.

At this point we decided we were satisfied by our Estonian nature experience and headed back to the car. We drove the short 20 minutes back to the city and parked at KUMU, the Estonian Art Museum. KUMU is short for kunstimuuseum so I’m sure you can guess what I called it the whole time.

After a quick lunch in the cafe we headed up to see the exhibits. The building itself was awesome and felt like it was built into the side of a mountain.

You may notice the Ukrainian flag there. Support for Ukraine is EVERYWHERE in the Baltics: on buses, on flagpoles, on Ukrainian products in grocery stores, on clothes, on billboards… everywhere. I’ve never seen anything like it.

This museum held Estonian art and I loved it. My favorite exhibit was of art from the Soviet era. It was a perfect end cap to our time in the Baltics. The landscapes felt familiar after our long drives through them. The old homesteads looked like what we visited in Latvia. The market stalls looked like all the markets we have gone to. None of the old ladies were smiling.

Millie did great but eventually her patience ran thin and she dragged us out. We played some intense games of ping pong on a public table just outside of the museum. Then we walked to the park next to it.

Millie played on the playground for a while but kept getting upset that she couldn’t have an ice cream. She said “every other kid here has an ice cream and I’m jealous!”. An exaggeration but I get it. It is so hard to know where the line is… I don’t want to be a stickler for treats and give her any complexes around food, but we if we said yes to every request she would eat only sugar. We need some sort of consistent rule, so we are sticking to Ice Cream Friday for now. We have tried explaining that looking forward to a thing and having it as a treat is where the real joy is, but it falls on deaf ears.

I lured her away from the ice cream jealousy with the promise of a carousel we saw in the distance. The park had this weird perma-fair thing set up.

This carousel was the most expensive one yet by far, and also the weirdest. I’ll let the photos do the talking.

Vroom vroom! Yee haw! The bikes did wheelies. She loved it.

We walked slowly through the park back to the car. It might have been due to the perfect weather, but it was a beautiful walk. We commented for the hundredth time on how much better European parks are than American parks.

We got home and had plans for more charades and a home cooked dinner, but Millie seemed uncharacteristically lethargic and said she wasn’t feeling well. We took her temperature and sure enough, another fever. Ugh. We had really hoped the 2 weeks of sickness was us paying our dues and that we’d stay healthy from here on out. She took some Tylenol and went to bed early. Her mood was good and she was very talkative so I hope it’s a minor and quick thing. We have an early flight in the morning and a busy week ahead!