Bouquets in My Kitchen

The other day when we went to the local grocery store Woodley surprised me with a lovely bouquet of roses on our way out! He said he was proud of me for doing such a good job transitioning over to life in Oslo. They are so lovely and have been brightening up our dining room table for several days already. 

On a separate trip to the smaller grocery in our neighborhood I picked up some lettuce for our sandwiches and salads. I was surprised to find that the lettuce came with it's own little pot of soil and was actually still alive! It is so cute and reminds me of a bouquet as well. After watering it and placing it in the windowsill it feels almost like we have a little garden. 

I noticed that some of the side leaves had already started to wilt so I'm guessing this type of lettuce really needs to stay in the soil as long as possible to stay fresh and crisp. How smart for them to sell it that way! It reminded me of eating fresh lettuce from my friend Tory's garden last summer. Sadly it's not a very big head of lettuce so I think it's life on my windowsill will only last for a few days. It is so nice to be able to pluck leaves off of it though. 

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~

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.

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~

Knitting for the Sweaglet

When I found out we were expecting, I decided it was high time I improved my knitting skills. There's just nothing like knitting for a baby and I figured baby clothes would go much faster than the blanket I had been working on for the past few months. 

I browsed a bit on Amazon and purchased a few baby knitting books with cute designs. One of my favorite, which I am working out of now is pictured above, "Vintage Baby Knits." It covers a variety of patterns from the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. 

Below is the one I am currently working on. 

It is taking me longer than I expected, but that could be because I hardly ever pick it up. However, I'm just about finished with the main part of the body and I'm ready to start shaping the arm holes. I think the arms and hood will go faster because they are much smaller than the part I have been working on so far. With just under 2 months until the Sweaglet's due date, I'm not sure I'll finish it in time. At least it's not a newborn pattern (I think it should fit a 3 to 6 month old), so I'll be able to continue working on it after the baby comes (if I have any spare time!). I'm glad I've already finished a little hat and a very cute pair of booties. 

Here's what I've accomplished so far. The color is actually a pale green although it looks rather gray here. I think I might need to sign up for another lesson from the local knitting store so that I can figure out how to do the rest of it. :)

~ElizabethRose~

Hello! Hello!

I'm back! And hopefully this time I'll be able to keep up with some daily posting. :) My goodness, we have experienced a lot of changes in our family since I last posted. First off, we're expecting a little bundle of joy to join us late this summer. We found out right around New Years and have been adjusting to the news ever since. A couple of weeks ago the baby was around the size of a navel orange which prompted this photo:

At the end of February we packed up all of our belongings, said goodbye to our house in Los Gatos, and moved up to our lovely Bellingham house. It was a long drive in a very large U-Haul.

When we arrived, our ornamental plum trees were blooming. Woodley took this lovely picture of one of the blossoms.

I was also thrilled to discover that many of the daffodils I had planted last fall were up and blooming. My favorites so far are the adorable Snipe tulips. They have been putting on a great display for a few weeks now and are still going strong. 

In addition to watching the garden and my ever expanding waistline, we've been trying to get a lot of work done around the house. Woodley installed an amazing pot rack recently: 

He also found us a new portable dishwasher so that I wouldn't have to spend so much time at the kitchen sink. Trying to figure out how to fit it into the kitchen prompted us to completely rearrange everything and, ultimately, to banish the bulky refrigerator to the entryway. There's a nice spot for it there and it isn't too out of the way. The updated kitchen is so much roomier and there is a lot more counter space. Yay! 

Our other big project has been fixing up our bedroom. My mother sewed us a beautiful quilt for a wedding present that we want to use on our bed. It is navy blue and portrays the night sky and the milky way as it appeared on the night of our wedding. She designed it all herself and it is amazing! Sadly I don't have a picture of it yet because she is still finishing up the embroidery work (adding more stars!). 

I was at a bit of a loss for awhile as to what color scheme would go best with a navy bedspread. I've always had lighter colored duvet covers in the past. We had also been planning to paint the room some shade of green and I wasn't sure how well that would work with the navy. However, after thinking about it a bit we settled on a color scheme of navy, kelly green, and white. I've seen several room designs online in those colors and they always look very sophisticated. The color combination reminds me of summer days by the ocean. Our first task was to pick out the perfect shade of green for the walls:

We tried out quite a few and we finally settled on the shade that is on the far left in the photo below. It was a mixture that Woodley made from several of the other paint colors we had tried out. 

Since I'm not allowed to help with the painting, I've been working on organizing the house and sewing baby clothes. The organizing is a bit overwhelming, but the baby clothes are so much fun!

I've also been trying to clean the house since much of it desperately needs it. I'm not sure if it was a nesting instinct that made me do it, but I spent a couple of hours today washing all of the walls in our small bathroom. They appeared to be growing a bit of fuzzy mildew and I just couldn't stand it anymore. Now they are shiny clean! Yay! I also mopped all of the hard floors in the house. They were so dirty! I am so glad that job is done for a couple of weeks! 

My clean but still pink bathroom. 

~ElizabethRose~