Snow Scenes

This past weekend it snowed a lot and Woodley captured some lovely photos of the snowy scenes around our house. Today it warmed up though - maybe as high as 45 degrees F and a lot of the beautiful snow melted. Since I'm not sure how much longer the snow will stick around for, I thought I'd better post these photos right away while we are still living in snowy Oslo. : ) 

Above is the view of the soccer stadium from our front corner window. Mary and I sit on the floor by this window for awhile every day and watch the T-bane trains go by. 

Above you can see the snow piling up on the picnic table outside on our porch. The birthday banner is still up from my birthday earlier this month. We thought about taking it down, but it makes the living room so much more festive. Mary is enjoying her box. 

Here is a house that we look down on from our living room windows.

Yay falling snowflakes!

And below is a view out of my kitchen windows. I love looking at that house. It is so classic and timeless with its white picket fence and blue trim!

Up next is my favorite photo of the snow. So pillowy and soft looking! I think I want to print this one out and put it up on my wall! 

And last of all, here are some photos taken on our way home from a fun dinner and games night with Stephan and Liv. I have to admit, when I dreamed about being a mother, I never imagined pushing my baby through the streets of Oslo around midnight, dodging drunk pedestrians (really, just one very drunk pedestrian) in the middle of a heavy snowfall. 

Thankfully we made it home safely and Mary was a little angel. (I do hope that one very unsteady man was able to find a taxi or something to take him home - or at least made it across the road. He seemed to be trying to make up his mind to venture out into the crosswalk when we went by, but he didn't seem to be able to make up his mind to actually try it.) 

Mary seemed so happy to have finally arrived back at her own comfy bed. She didn't cry a bit as I changed her diaper and put her back to sleep. Instead, she couldn't stop smiling as she settled down to go back to sleep. She seemed to say, "I'm so happy to finally be home. I love you mommy." I'm so lucky to have such a wonderful flexible girl! 

Ahhh beautiful snow! I think I'm going to miss it when it all melts, but I'll enjoy not having to bundle Mary up so much to go out and about. 

~ElizabethRose~

Summer Cars?

On our outing today we noticed several cars that we assumed must be used mainly in the summer months. Or at least they haven't been used for a few weeks now and the owners have some serious digging to do.

And the worst by far...

I wonder if they will just wait for the snow to melt or if they will try to dig out their cars before April or May. Personally, I think that if I had a car I'd definitely want to use it in the cold snowy weather when I don't enjoy walking around outside as much.

Hmmmm. I'm using our new Norwegian keyboard which allows me to make special Norwegian letters, but it's hard to find some of the normal American keys. Perhaps my new signature will be:

±ElizabethRose±

(but I'm not sure I like how that looks)

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~

Go' Morgen

It's now our third full day in Oslo and I can't say we've made much progress towards adjusting to the time change. We've decided on a new bedtime routine for Mary and we put it into place each evening - bath, p.j.s, goodnight songs, nursing, sleep - but she's still awake much of the night and it is oh so tempting to sleep in with her in the morning (when her body is finally really ready to sleep). Yesterday we managed to get up by 11:30 but today she and I slept in until 2:30pm. Mary has been waking up every 1 to 2 hours during the night for the past several weeks and since she has been sleeping for longer stretches (2 to 3 hours) in the mornings since we have arrived, I just can't pass up the opportunity to get a bit more sleep.

We do keep trying to get up earlier though. Each morning around 7am we gather at our new dining room table to eat our breakfast of Go' Morgen together. Go' Morgen is a delicious yogurt and muesli combo available in Norway. It comes with it's own tiny plastic spoon and a hearty mix of muesli. 

After peeling off the plastic cover and assembling the spoon you bend the container along the perforated line to dump the muesli into the yogurt. Delicious! This morning I had the melon and passionfruit flavor which was quite good. 

I contemplated waiting until daylight to get photos of the Go' Morgen with better lighting but I figured that that would be much less authentic. These days the sun rises around 9 am (I have yet to be awake at that hour) and sets at 4 pm. So our 7 am Go' Morgen fests always take place with artificial lighting.

Tomorrow will be our first Sunday in Oslo and we are excited to visit The American Lutheran Church of Oslo. To get there we will need to walk a bit and then take the T-Banen (Oslo's metro service) and then walk some more. Thankfully the service starts at 11 am so we won't have to wake up too early. God has been so good to us on our travels and everything has gone much more smoothly than we anticipated. It will be exciting to experience a church service in a new country with believers from around the world.

To Norway? Or Not?

A little over a week ago Woodley got the news that he has been accepted to a PhD program in Oslo, Norway to study computational linguistics (helping computers better understand and process human language). Needless to say, this has created quite the stir in our house.

He applied for the program earlier in the summer so we knew an answer would be coming at some point. All summer we've been saying things like, "well, we'll decide what we're going to do next year once we find out if Woodley got accepted to graduate school" or "maybe we'll be in Norway next year." Now that the answer has come our tune has shifted a bit but, since Woodley hasn't yet decided whether or not he should accept, I spend my days wondering, "will we actually be moving to Norway in a few months???"

Woodley has now visited Norway twice. Once to do some research with the professor who would be his advisor (about 4 years ago) and with me on our honeymoon (which is where these pictures come from).

On our honeymoon we spent a few days in Oslo and visited the university (since even back then Woodley was considering going to graduate school there) and then took the Norway in a Nutshell Tour. Our visit to Norway was my favorite part of the honeymoon trip, but then it was summer, and we were on our honeymoon. :) I imagine it would be quite a different thing to move there for 3 to 4 years. Since Oslo is roughly at the same latitude as Anchorage, Alaska, we know that it will likely be quite dark and cold in the winter.

But it does sound like such an amazing adventure! And I think if the decision were just up to me I would say yes right away, perhaps without thinking it over as much as I should. Woodley is much more careful about big decisions like this though. I am anxiously awaiting his decision!

Who knows, this time next year I might just be figuring out how to be a classic housewife in Norway!

Here I am with a four leaf clover that I found on a hike while we were staying at a lovely hotel at the edge of one of the Norwegian Fjords. It must be a sign right? Good luck for us in Norway?

I just love the Norwegian countryside! (some of my ancestors came to America from Norway so I think it would be tons of fun to get to experience Northern Europe a bit)

Oh! It's time to go on a walk with my lovely husband. I'll have to post more pictures and musings about Norway later... I'll keep you updated!

~ElizabethRose~