Summer Job at Kahvila Siili

We are spending our summer in Helsinki as usual, and for the last year after opening 6 years ago, are running our café, Kahvila Siili, which in English means "Hedgehog Café".  It is named for the many hedgehogs that run around the neighborhood where we live, Käplyä. We had been fearful that they had been suffering because of last year's drought, and we hadn't seen very many, but we found a tiny baby hedgehog in our backyard, the size of a potato. 

The best part of the café this summer, besides the hedgehogs coming back, is that our daughter is working at her first job there. In Finland, you can work as a "trainee" from the age of 13, and so the week after her 13th birthday, she started working at the café, alongside all the other servers and baristas she's known for a long time, some of them for 5 or 6 years. Learning to dress for work, to get to work on time, to wash her uniform, to have a boss, and co-workers, to earn money and to spend money wisely--all of these are great things she is learning this summer. In Finland, workers are paid only once a month, so it's also a lesson in delayed gratification.

Summer jobs are a rarer and rarer phenomenon, and she is lucky to have this job. I'm not sure she knows how lucky she is. You can't explain it to people: "you're so lucky!!". Uh-huh. Hopefully in the future she will realize it.