Settling back in

We are slowly but surely settling back into home. Before we left, we boxed up A LOT of our stuff to make room for our friends to live in our house. They boxed up more in order to babyproof for their 3 (yes, three) toddlers (14 month twins and 2.5 year old).

So, not only am I unpacking and doing laundry, I am moving back into my house. The thing is, I kind of got used to living with only 4 suitcases and 6 boxes of my worldly possessions and I liked some aspects of it. So before I move all my clothes back into my dresser from my garage I am trying to clean out and throw out. I am sick of having an overcrowded and cluttered house.

I have unpacked my suitcase and Katherine's suitcase. Sam's is still on the floor as is our duffel of miscellaneous stuff.

The great news is that our Fed Ex shipment arrived on Thursday. It actually came while we were at the grocery store and we had a nice little note that they would return today or we could pick it up. Well, picking it up is a pain. We have 6 HEAVY boxes. Plus our larger car was totally dead when we got back and we had it towed to the dealer to get fixed. We were not going to be home on Friday so I told Sam to call Fed Ex and nicely ask if they could come back. Before he had a chance to call, they came back to see if we were home. The driver said she felt bad that we were not here and knew it was important since it was 6 large boxes delivered to a house.

Katherine is a real helper when it comes to unpacking. She helps take things out of boxes and then climbs in the box to play.
Another not so fun task is going through 3 months of mail. We even had our friends trash catalogs and adds and anything that was obviously junk. I am about 90% sorting into piles of Sam's mail, stuff to file, magazines, stuff to act on (bills, etc) and "fun mail". Then I have to actually read the stuff. I hate mail.

We have had a little fun since being back. My very good friend Kathy moved to San Antonio while we were gone. She is back for a few days for doctor's appointments and such so we were able to get together yesterday and again today with our other friend Jen. Here is a photo of the three girls. Sammy was taking a nap and not in the photo. Sarah is 5.5 months. Evie is 10.5 months and Katherine is 20.5 months.
A side note is that Evie has a red bow and a pink outfit. This is not her mama's fault. It is mine. I brought a bow from Stay My Baby to see if it would in fact stay in Evie's faux-hawk. I did not realize that it was still in for the photo and don't want you to think Jen is color blind! :)

Toddlers and jet lag

Well, we all three went to sleep last night a little after 11 after my mom and all of our friends left. At 2:30, Katherine woke up! I tried to nurse her back to sleep but that was useless. I tried having her sleep with us and that did not do much either. Sam went to read to her to try to recreate our bedtime routine but no luck with that either.

So, at 4:30 am, we all decided to get up and start our day. She was perfectly happy and in a good mood. We ate breakfast and showered and were ready for the day by 7 when Katherine went down for a nap.

My strategy is that I will sleep when Katherine sleeps. It will not be the easiest way for me to get over jet lag, but if she is going to be off schedule and awake, I have to be up when she is up. So, the only way that will work is if I am asleep when she is asleep. Unfortunately the nap only lasted 45 minutes because Hooligan started barking at the trash truck.

Katherine was awake and happy all day and I finally put her down for a nap at about 3. My plan was for her (and I) to nap from about 3-5, get up for dinner and then back in bed at 9. This plan would get us back on schedule easily.

Well, the plan failed. We did not set an alarm so we slept from 3:30 until 7. When we woke Katherine up she would not get up. She was grumpy and kept wanting to go back to sleep. After about 30 minutes of trying to get her to wake up, I finally put her back to bed. So, I fully expect for her to be up in the middle of the night again.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to get a toddler to recover from jet lag, send them my way. Otherwise, just pray for us. We are pretty exhausted.

We're off and we're home!

I wrote this email as we were getting ready to leave but hit "save" instead of "post" so it is a little behind. I did update it though with how our travel day went.

Well, we are headed to the airport. So excited and yet also a bit sad to be heading home. Yesterday when I was coming back from Hilde's house I couldn't help but think it was the last Oslo bus I'd ride and the last time I would walk past all the shops on our street. I was getting a little sentimental.


Overall we had a great experience. There were things that were hard, frustrating or just different. But, we learned a lot about ourselves as we basically moved to a city where we knew no one and started over, if only for 3 months.


I feel like I made some true friends which I did not really expect. I will really miss them. I will miss certain aspects of urban living though I do look forward to having a yard and a car again.

I am not sure that we ever would want to move overseas for a long term assignment but it was a fun adventure for three months of our life.

As you are reading this, we are either at the airport or on the plane. Please pray for our day. I am dreading it.

Update: Well our day of travel was pretty uneventful considering we were traveling with a toddler. We had a great stay in our hotel. There was a wonderful buffet breakfast which was more than the usual toast and sandwich meat and cheese served as a Scandinavian breakfast. We ate as much as we could knowing that we would be surviving on airplane food for the rest of the day.

We saw online that our flight to Newark would be leaving an hour late so we took our time walking across the street to the airport. We figured we would rather spend the hour at our hotel than in the airport. That ended up being a little mistake as we were the last people to check in and even though there was a long line in front of us it seemed to be a problem for the workers. In the Oslo airport we changed most of our money back to dollars, got a few drinks and went to the gate. We had our tickets and passport checked five times between arriving and boarding.

It was a smaller plane for international travel with only 3 seats on each side of the aisle. We were not able to get a bulkhead row so it was a bit of a struggle to get the carseat in and to keep Katherine from constantly kicking the seat in front of her. Our flight left at noon and was 8 hours long so it was not really when you would be sleeping. Katherine did take a 2 hour nap. She really did well though she was active.

In Newark we cleared customs, rechecked our bags and traveled to the new terminal and gate. By this time it was past Katherine's bedtime. Did she sleep - NO! She was wired and wanting to run all over the airport. Our flight was delayed an our which made things worse. Luckily as soon as we got on the plane she fell asleep and slept the entire flight.

At the airport we were met by my mom and our good friends Jen and Richard. All of our suitcases arrived (unlike when we went to Oslo). When we got home, Hooligan was very excited to see us (be watching for a video in the future). Our friends who stayed in our house were still here so Katherine had fun playing with Jaden, Caleb and Andrew as well as all of her toys. It was like Christmas morning.

It is good to be home and to sleep in our own beds!

The Moving Box

We are busy packing up our apartment for our move back home. We are very excited about heading back home but we are also a little sad.

Monday we shipped 6 boxes via Fed Ex. It was a busy few days this weekend with all of our other activities and trying to get these boxes packed but they are off now.

While we have had all the boxes out, Katherine has enjoyed playing with them. We may have to build a fort with them when they are unpacked at home.



Tuesday a crew is coming to clean our apartment. It is very expensive - about $500 for a 700 square foot apartment. Apparently the standard move out clean includes everything from cleaning the ceiling, walls and windows to the expected bathrooms and kitchen. Then we will have a move out inspection with the landlord and we will spend the night at a hotel near the airport.



We come home on Wednesday. We are excited to sleep in our own bed and to see our dog among many other things.

An early Thankgiving celebration

Our church in Oslo had a Thanksgiving Celebration both to celebrate Thanksgiving in a few weeks and to celebrate the one year anniversary of the church. Our congregation is international with a large number of Filipino au pairs who also celebrate Thanksgiving (taken from the US influence) so we had an interesting assortment of traditional Thanksgiving food from the US and the Philippines.

We prepared a Turkey. This is the first time I have cooked a turkey in the oven. Usually for the holidays we are eating at a parent or grandparents house and they cook the turkey. The only time we did it, we used a turkey fryer which was not to be found in Oslo. So, I was a little nervous. I also did not have the right supplies. There was no roasting dish and no turkey baster. So, we were inventive as you see in the picture and we used Katherine's nasal aspirator as a turkey baster.
Eeeew - just joking. We laughed about the idea and posed the picture but decided to just use the spoon to baste the turkey.

Katherine grabbed an oven mitt to check the turkey. Good thing that oven is childproofed because even though she kept saying, "hot, hot", she still tried to open the door like mommy does.

In addition to the turkey, we made cranberries, gravy and sweet potato casserole. As you can see our kitchen is very small and tight on space. I think we had every pot and pan as well as all four burners in use. It seemed I was constantly cleaning up.

The food was delicious. We had turkey and all the sides - mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, broccoli, etc. This is in addition to the Filipino spring rolls, shrimp, pasta and rice dishes. The hands down hit and most commented on dish was the sweet potato casserole. Apparently sweet potatoes are not common here so most of the Norwegian and European guests had no idea what it was. They thought it was carrots. Then to cover it in marshmallows was an even more interesting idea. They all liked it though.

We had the regular attenders from our church family as well as many guests in attendance. It was a very fun evening for me as almost every friend I have made in Oslo was there. Sarah, her husband John and son Aiden were there, Hilde, her son Nikolas and granddaughter Lona attended and Donna, husband Stew and daughters Sophie and Isabella came. They all really enjoyed the evening and it felt a little like a going away party for me as it may be the last time I see all of these friends before we go home.

Lucky (our pastor) gave a short devotional on the history and meaning of Thanksgiving. The kids did a craft.

Katherine and her two best friends in Olso - Nikolas and Aiden

A very busy day!

I know we are leaving in only 5 days and I should be packing and getting stuff done. That is not what I did today however. I started off by going to the Little Gym in Sandvika which is about 20 minutes away by train. Katherine loves it there but we were running late and arrived after class started. She was a little slow getting into it but she finally did.

There are so many smaller museums in Oslo that I had not been to yet. There is nothing like the 11th hour so I decided to try to see some today. On the way home from Sandvika, we stopped at the Henie Onstead Museum. It is an art collection of a former Olympic skater and her husband. Katherine's favorite was the giant banana on the lawn. I forgot my camera and only had my video camera so sorry for the funny museum pictures.

Then we headed downtown and went to three free museums. First we went to the Stenerson museum where there were two exhibits, one on photography and one called Equatorial Rhythms which was about global music.

Next we went to the History museum where we saw exhibits on the vikings, arctic people, tribal villages in Africa and Asian cultures. It was actually a pretty good museum but I had not heard much about it. Katherine enjoyed the deer.



Last we went to the Art and Design Museum and I saw an exhibit on knitting and the design and fashion of furniture throughout the last few centuries concentrating on Scandinavian design. Some of the furniture was very funky. The first part of the video - the tiger and bear head as well as the off white living room are entirely knitted. The lamps are just a sample of the rest of the museum. This was the part with no security guard so I could video it.



I came home very tired and Katherine was asleep in the stroller. I had to hurry to cook dinner because our friends John, Anne Grethe and Amelie were coming for dinner. John is from Houston and is married to Anne Grethe who is Norwegian. They attend our church. Their daughter is almost 5 months old. Katherine loved having a real baby here for the evening.

Katherine has a dirty mouth

Finally, I have found something that Katherine will eat - SAND! We went to the park today and she would not stop putting sand in her mouth. So, I finally decided just to film it. It is funny because Katherine is pretty obsessive about being clean at times. She want to wipe off her hands and any mess she makes. Yet she loves playing in the dirt and even eating it. I think it is gross but somehow I know what sand tastes like so I guess I ate it at some point as well. So after eating it, she feels she needs to offer it to Isabella who is only 10 months old. Luckily, Isabella was not interested in eating sand.

Introducing Baby and Dada

Katherine has begun to attach herself to her dolls. It is really cute how she feeds them, tucks them in for their nap, strolls them around on "choo choo" (for a lack of a stroller) and nurses them. My favorite is when I see her leaning over to kiss one of her dolls. Her dolls do not have "real" names yet. The bald one is "baby" and the one wearing a sweatsuit is "dada" which is how she says "doll"



Most of the time she wants to carry both of them as well as their three blankets. Really they are Katherine's blankets but she insists that her baby and dada are wrapped in them. Sometimes it causes problems as she cannot physically hold all of this and walk around the house.

Katherine with Dada, Baby and their blankets

When getting ready to go out and meet Daddy for dinner, Katherine insisted on bringing both Dada and Baby with her. Since it was one of the few times that I would not need my cargo space under the stroller (where Dada and Baby usually end up after 5 minutes), I decided to let her bring them. It was rather cold outside so I tucked all three girls into the stroller bag.

Snug as a bug in a rug!

Too much fun

Tonight we had our pastor Luckey and his family, wife Christa and kids Kaitlyn, Aaron and Caleb over for dinner. They have been such a huge encouragement and help to us since we arrived in Oslo. The very first Sunday Luckey picked us up for church and they had us over for dinner afterwards. Our church here is so very different from our church at home. The largest difference is the size. We are used to a mega church. Oslo International Community Church is not mega. On a high attendance Sunday there may be 25 people. While I pray that the church does grow, it was kind of fun to go to such a small church while we were here.

Caleb, Christa, Kaitlyn, Luckey and Aaron

Katherine loves Kaitlyn, Aaron and Caleb and they love her. They are all in Sunday School together each week. The kids ate at their own table and had so much fun playing after dinner. You would never realize that she is less than 2 and they are 7, 10 and 12 (I think). They all played so well together. Almost every toy we had was pulled out by the end of the evening.

While the adults were still eating we saw that Katherine had climbed up into Aaron's lap to read a book. We all ran to grab the cameras because it was so sweet.

A dear friend visits

When we returned from Stockholm, we brought a dear friend of mine, Anita, back with us. I met Anita 20 years ago as a high school freshman when she was my Bible study leader at church. We met weekly for all four years of high school and have kept in touch ever since. She has been a missionary in Albania for the past 6 years so we don't see each other often. This was a special treat to have her come visit us for 3 days.

We got in very late on Sunday night so we slept in on Monday. Katherine stayed with her favorite babysitter, Cally so Anita and I took out across town to explore. We strolled through downtown, shopped, ate lunch and went through the castle. We were exhausted so we headed home and rested.

Tuesday we went to the Viking ship museum. Katherine slept through it when we visited with my parents so she enjoyed it more now. She kept saying, "whoaaa" when she saw the big boat.

We walked a short distance to the Folk Museum where we ate lunch. Katherine insisted on feeding herself and was quite proud of all the yogurt on her face.

This was my third trip to the Folk Museum so I knew where the best places to go were. We knew that Katherine was a time clock so we headed to the highlights. The Folk Museum is a great place to go with Katherine because she can walk around without getting in the way or destroying anything.

Katherine loved Anita. She would follow her around and at home crawl into her lap to read books. It was so sweet.

My favorite part of the fold museum is the stave church. It is beautiful and something unique to Norway. You can barely tell that we are all three in the picture, we are so small compared to the church.

It was so great to have Anita here. She felt like she had gone back to America being in Norway. There are a lot more conveniences and products here compared to Albania. It was a great encouragement to me to have her here. It was so refreshing to be with someone who knew me so well. I have really enjoyed all of my friends, but you can only go so deep in a few months. I sure miss having Anita around.

Sunday in Stockholm

We had another busy and fun day in Stockholm. It started by taking our luggage to the Central Station to store it in lockers for the day since we had to check out of our hotel. One negative to traveling with a toddler and therefore a stroller is that you have to use elevators a lot. For some reason people think that the elevators of the subways of Stockholm are public restrooms. They were horrible. Katherine and I actually got stuck in one when it kept stopping between two floors. I thought we were never going to get out.

We started our touring for the day at the Vasa Museum. The Vasa was a ship that sank on its maiden voyage in 1628. The Vasa was built top-heavy with insufficient ballast and foundered as soon as she encountered a wind stronger than a breeze, just a few minutes after first setting sail on her maiden voyage. Despite clearly lacking stability even in port, she was allowed to set sail. When I saw this ship, it was obvious to me that it would sink. The ration of height to width was scary and very unstable. It was however a cool looking boat and I immediately thought of Jack Sparrow and Pirates of the Caribbean. It was really difficult to get any good photos because it was so huge and the lighting was poor.

The back of the ship - beautifully carved.

Our only family photo in Stockholm and you can't see the ship in the background.

Cool map of Scandinavia.

Stockholm was a pretty town so we enjoyed walking around a little. This is by the water. Actually, there is a lot of real estate by the water because Stockholm is 14 islands.
This is the Nordic Museum. We were going to go there about 30 minutes before it closed but our tourist card did not include this museum. Oh well.

After the Vasa, we went to Junibacken, the Pippi Longstocking museum. You remember Pippi, the cute girl with red braids that go out to the side. I actually dressed up as Pippi Longstocking once, I assume for Halloween. Well, the author, Astrid Lingren, is Swedish and the character is very popular throughout Scandinavia.



The museum was really more of a kids theme park or play area. It was very crowded. We did not even get to go on the story train because the line was so long and I bet that was the best part. There was a sing a long and you can see Katherine is quite involved in "head, shoulders, knees and toes" in Swedish of course.

There were houses from the movie and play areas that were a lot of fun for Katherine to run around and play in. It did a good job of wearing her out.



Our last stop in Stockholm was Skansen, the open air museum. It seems that these museums are quite popular all over Scandinavia. They are basically large parks with a bunch of old buildings from around the country so you can learn about life.

Stockholm was a great city. I wish we had more time there to see more. Maybe we will go back someday.

Saturday in Stockholm

Having only 2 days in Stockholm we wanted to pack it in and see it all. Well, it seems that there is a lot to do in Stockholm so that was not possible. Traveling with a toddler changes things. I think I need to write a whole post just on that topic.

We started off going to the Kulturehuset or Culture House. A friend said it was a hit with the kids. They have a great children's library with all kinds of fun things to do. It was good to let Katherine run around a little to burn off some energy. Her favorite was the swinging basket.
Next we walked to Gamla Stan or Old Town. This is the medieval area and also where the royal palace is located. There are 4 museums to see at the Royal Palace and we made two of them. We went into the Royal Apartments but we went in one at a time. Katherine decided to fall asleep for her nap right as we arrived so I stayed with her when Sam went in and then we switched. It was full of stairs and not stroller friendly.
We just so happened to be there for the changing of the guard. In the winter they have a full parade two days a week and we happened to see it. Pretty typical of a European royal changing of the guard.
We wandered around the Gamla Stan area and saw the smallest statue in Stockholm (of over 6000). I am not sure the attraction but it was mentioned in every guide book I looked at and there was a crowd of people looking at him (hence the feet). So, I took the photo.

You can see this area is quaint with narrow streets and cute buildings on the square.

The second museum we went to was the Royal Armory museum. It had some armory, clothes, carriages and all kinds of things related to the royal family. The best part was that there was a children's area. Katherine dressed up as a queen and sat on her throne.
Sam put on part of a suit of armor. He said it was quite heavy and could not imagine the entire suit or how you could fight while wearing it.
They had a play carriage and horses. The horses actually rocked which Katherine liked.

An last we colored a coat of arms. I did not know our family coat of arms was full of scribbles.