Fun with a Box

Mary has been having a lot of fun lately with one of the boxes we shipped to ourselves from the states. I'm tempted to call it her first "play pen" but we don't leave her in it unattended and she doesn't really spend that much time in it. 

She loves to practice standing up and the sides of the box make great handles to hold on to and are pretty much the perfect height for her. 

They also provide a handy teething toy. 

She seems to be feeling her teeth more these days but there's no sign of one popping through yet. 

She also loves smaller boxes - see above. 

Woodley developed this play area which consists of Mary's favorite box surrounded by 3 chairs and the sliding door out to the porch. Inside the box is a pillow to cushion her if she falls. From here she can play with toys that we set up for her on the chairs or she can look outside. Best of all, the chairs keep her from tipping the box over.

And sometimes I can even manage to get some reading done while I sit next to her. She likes to help me out with the books. 

I never would have guessed that we would end up using one of the cardboard boxes even more than some of the things we shipped in it! 

What a happy girl in a box! 

~ElizabethRose~

Saturday Moment

Since I'd like to blog more regularly but don't have much spare time, I thought I would at least try to post a photo of a favorite moment from each day and list what I cooked for dinner/plan to cook for dinner. That is, if I don't have time to do a longer entry on a specific topic. 

So here goes, my favorite moment of today was watching Mary learn how to eat berry pie filling with her crepes for brunch. Let's just say she headed off to the bath directly after brunch and Woodley couldn't bare to look at her for much of the meal.

In other news, we went on a family shopping expedition today hoping to find a bike pump to fill up the air in Mary's stroller tires - no luck there. Apparently the tires require the type of pump that is used to fill up car tires. What we did find was the following:

Looks a lot like an iPhone! But instead, it is kitchen magnets. They don't really go with my vintage blue/green kitchen theme but I've been longing to put some photos up on our refrigerator and these were handy and amusing.

On the menu for dinner tonight:
Chicken Enchiladas - we'll see how those turn out. They are in the oven now but had to be made with "taco sauce" aka salsa instead of enchilada sauce, strange reconstituted corn that was soaked in water and wrapped in plastic, Italian canned tomatoes with basil, cheddar cheese, flour tortillas and taco seasoning since that's all Woodley could find for me at the store. Poor guy, he searched forever to find just what I had asked for. Interestingly, a company called TexMex appears to have taken over the Mexican food product market here. This doesn't inspire much confidence in the quality of the Mexican food I'll try to make... we'll see.
Refried Beans
Basmati Rice - the only kind I had in the kitchen
Green Salad
Sliced Tomatoes

Wishing you a wonderful Saturday!

~ElizabethRose~

Tran

Yesterday my precious baby girl turned 6 months old! Yes, 6 months... Where did all of those days and nights go? It seems like it was only yesterday I held her for the first time and marveled at the fact that, after dreaming about it all my life, I was finally a mommy. And now it seems to be going by so quickly!

She's just so grown up now! And so adorable!

So today we went to our local Health Station to meet with the friendly Health Sister (nurse) to find out about Mary's vaccines and to check her weight and height. She is now 16 lbs. 13 oz. and 26.75 inches tall!

It turns out it will be harder than we expected to continue on with our planned schedule of vaccines because they use different versions over here. I think we will need to try to order the continuation of the series she has already started.

In addition to talking about vaccines and Mary's general developmental milestones (she's sitting like a pro now!) The Health Sister gave me a bottle of Tran, or cod liver oil as it is know in English.

(According to Google Translate the message on the bottle says, "To help you stay healthy" and "Is important for optimal development.")

All Norwegian mommies give their babies a spoonful every evening so the Health Station provides bottles for free if you need them. My mother fed me cod liver oil as a child and I'm pretty healthy today so it seems like a good idea to me. Plus, with the lack of sunlight here I'm sure Mary could use some extra Vitamin D. I took a spoonful today to try it out and memories of my childhood came flooding back... not necessarily the most positive ones though. It did taste fishier than I remembered.

Unfortunately Mary fell asleep tonight before I remembered to give her her first spoonful of Tran. She seems to enjoy eating fish so hopefully this will be viewed as a tasty addition to her daily ration. We'll try it tomorrow.

I love this image on the front of the bottle. It appears the child is asking the fish to please give it some delicious liver oil! Yum!

I'll have to report back about Mary's response to her first taste!

~ElizabethRose~

My New Kitchen

As we are starting to get settled into our new house I thought I would post pictures of it. So far I've only managed to capture decent photos of the kitchen. It has a very nice layout and so far I've really enjoyed cooking in it. (I've now made 3 dinners!) Moving from left to right we have a refrigerator, dishwasher, sink, range, and microwave. I love the hardwood floors but we added the green mat for Mary to play on (on loan from Woodley's advisor). It is very nice and cushy and works perfectly since she is now mastering the fine art of balancing while sitting up.  

I especially like the refrigerator. It is very tall and narrow with lots of short shelves. I think it would be possible to store quite a bit of food in it, although I don't think I'd be able to reach anything on the back of the top shelves. 

The freezer also has a great design. I love that it is on the bottom and that it has four drawers which makes it really easy to organize the frozen food. 

One of the things our pre-furnished kitchen is missing though is dish towels. We've looked for them at two different grocery stores and so far haven't been able to find any, although we have purchased several things that we thought might work. As you can see below, we have quite a collection of "klut" or cloths. The one on the bottom was the first one we purchased. It turns out it is not very absorbent and is actually supposed to be used for cleaning the floor. We also have "universalklut" (multipurpose cloths), "parkettklut" (wooden cloths), and "fonsterduk" (which I can't find a translation for). Most of them appear to be designed to clean wooden floors (a good thing to have since we have a lot of wooden floors) and none of them are at all absorbent or good for use as dish towels. 

I think we'll now give up on trying to find kitchen towels at the grocery stores and we'll try Ikea next weekend. Mary really enjoyed playing with the cloths so at least they were good for something. 

Today I put Mary in the little jacket/cardigan that I sewed for her while I was pregnant. It fits her perfectly and she looks so adorable in it! It was the only girl item I managed to finish sewing so I'm glad I got around to putting her in it before she outgrew it. 

It might be even better if I get around to adding a button to fasten it in the front. 

And to finish up, a picture of one of our new favorite evening activities - skyping with friends and family back home!  

And now I'm heading to bed for what I hope will be a more peaceful night than last night was. Yesterday Mary slept pretty well from 6 pm to midnight (only waking up every 2 hours) and then woke up every 30 to 60 minutes from midnight through 5:45 am when we finally gave up trying to get her back to sleep. Where oh where did the days go when she slept straight for 6 hours at a stretch?! Is it teething? The new location? The time change? We are dedicatedly reading our "No Cry Sleep Solution" book and dreaming of longer stretches of sleep. Perhaps tonight will be the night! (I can always hope...)

~ElizabethRose~

Baby Mary

It's evening again here in Oslo and, after a long day out and about in the city, both Mary and Woodley have crashed early (7pm). We did manage to make it to church and enjoyed the English service very much. After that we spent the rest of the afternoon visiting with Woodley's advisor and his family. It was a wonderful snowy day and I just wish I had brought my camera along with me. 

Since I don't have any photos from today to share, I thought I would post a few of my favorite photos of Mary. Below is a brief recap of our past five months with her. 

Here I am around the middle of August, just 2 days before Mary was born. She arrived 10 days early so when this photo was taken I had no idea that my pregnancy would be over so soon. I thought I had weeks and weeks left to go. Judging from how large I was, it's probably a good thing she made an early appearance. 

The day before Mary was born was the first day of the Northwest Washington Fair. All through my pregnancy I planned to go to the fair and I'm so glad we fit it in before Mary arrived. Here I am less than 24 hours before she was born at the demolition derby! It was hot, hot, hot and I was pretty uncomfortable. I actually started timing contractions during the derby but since they were light I don't consider my labor to have really started until around 10:30 that evening. Looking back at the photos now, it's hard to believe how big I was! 

Hooray! After 11 hours of labor Mary was born at our home in Washington. It all went just perfectly and although labor was super painful, I couldn't have had a more wonderful birth experience. I was so thrilled when I found out she was a girl! Here's one of our first family shots. 

Mary Elizabeth was born at 9:26 am on August 17th, 2010. She was 19.5 inches long and weighed 7 pounds exactly.

About a month old

1.5 Months

2 Months

During her second month she really started smiling and we got some adorable photos!

Turning 3 months old

Mary's First Thanksgiving 

Enjoying the sunshine in California over Christmas (4 months)

Waving to her fans. :)

Wondering at the fish at the Monterey Bay Aquarium on New Years Eve

Sporting her fuzzy hat that the Norwegian mama commented on a few days ago. It's so perfect for the weather here!

Tired girl

Expert thumb sucker 

Back at home in Washington and almost 5 months old. She loves standing up these days!

She is such a delight and she seems to get cuter each day. Being a parent really is a wonderfully fun job despite all the hard work. :)

~ElizabethRose~

Hello from Oslo!

Hello! I guess I haven't posted for quite awhile and quite a bit has happened to our family since my last posting. The biggest events are that we had our baby last August. A girl! We named her Mary Elizabeth and she is now 5 months old. And the other is that we moved to Norway yesterday. My husband will be a student at the university in Oslo and Mary and I will be staying home and learning about Norwegian culture (and hopefully how to knit really well).

Above is a picture of the northern lights that we saw from the airplane on our way to Oslo. It was my first time seeing the northern lights despite having gone to Alaska to visit my grandparents for Christmas many times. Thankfully our trip to Norway went very well and Mary did a great job. We flew from Seattle to Iceland (7 hour flight) and Iceland to Norway (2.5 hour flight).

Unfortunately I'm having a bit of trouble posting photos so I'll have to look into that. As soon as I get it figured out I'll post a photo of Mary.

We didn't do much besides sleep today but since it was our first full day in Oslo we didn't want to push ourselves too much. When we finally got up around 2pm, we bundled up and walked down to the local grocery store where we picked up some essentials. I was excited to see a good selection of vegetables in the small produce department (including shallots and leeks). When we came out of the shop a Norwegian mother with a small baby stopped us a told us how much she liked Mary's winter hat and asked where we got it. We had to tell her it was from Gap in the U.S. I was pretty excited that Mary's winter fashions were approved of.

I'm happy to be back and hope to post a bit more frequently than once every 6 months. :)

~ElizabethRose~