The biggest little one

I was going to name this post "the big one". But she isn't really big, although she's the biggest of them. She's only two and she growing up so quickly and I think a post about where we are at at this age was well and truly overdue.

She's got a current obsession with Dora the Explorer, much fueled by the Dora show we saw in Sea World in January (there is actually a link to it on you tube - it is the same show but filmed a few days before we saw there: part 1 and part 2). She sat still for the whole 25-minute show and was absolutely mesmerised by it. It is in moments like that I realise how we now have a toddler going on little girl. I mean, this is a new and exciting stage for her and for us. And so many things feel brand new and I am just so happy for her, and not just a little bit proud to see how she is growing into little-girl-hood and how she is just such a beautiful little person. But I digress...this post was about HER, I understood just how deep this interest for Dora goes when I heard her counting to six in Spanish in the car one day. Other telly interests at the moment include Peppa Pig, and she also likes shows with "real people in them, like the "Hos mormor" (At Grandma's) show where a little girl gets up to mischief while spending time with her grandma. It makes her giggle. And Astrid Lindgren movies she can sit through from start to finish. I loved them when I was little and it makes me happy that she seems to appreciate them too. Such a nice change from all the animated and unrealistic stuff they make for kids these days. (These days? Oh, I sound old now).

We are currently living with my parents while renovating at home so instead of bringing all their toys here, the girls have been enjoying a selection of toys from when I was young, in the 80s. The Lundby doll house is a big hit and there have been no protests that there are just playmobil men and women living in it still. I never got those dolls that actually go with the house. I am thinking of doing a small renovation job on the house - it is a little dated and looks a bit worse for wear. It might be a nice project to do together with big sister when we get a bit of time here and there.

Every weekday she goes to kindy, and I am just so happy she loves it there. She skips from the car to the entrance, kisses me goodbye and drops her lunchbox into the lunchbox basket. She sings songs and both in the songs and in her speech her pronounciation is getting better and better. She hasn't been an early talker, but she will now speak both Norwegian and English and she also says when I speak English on the phone to her daddy "mamma snakker engelsk" (mummy is speaking English). So she clearly gets that there are two languages spoken in our family, although I don't think she reflects too much upon it at this stage. It is interesting to watch her aquire more and more words in both languages, and how seems to switch between the two quite effortlessly.

She loves to sing, and we often get out her cd-player with microphones and speaker (or shouting machine is more suitable as it only has one volume for the microphones: LOUD) and we will sing a variety of songs, usually she requests the Norwegian version of Ba, ba black sheep and we also sing a song about goats crossing a bridge where a scary troll lives underneath - just spooky-thrilling enough for a two-year-old's imagination.

When we live at home we read lots of books. Here, we don't have as many to choose from and yet again we turn to the ones I had as a kid. A favourite at the moment is "Jason og Sinnaguri" by Camilla Mickwitz, it's a story about Jason who lives in a building and an angry lady who gets mad at anyone who makes a noise in the building. I remember the book being a favourite of mine when I was little too.

As a big sister she is just tops. She is her little sister's biggest role model already and she is so good at including little sister in playtime. She understands that little sister isn't trying to be mean or naughty when she pulls her hair or grabs her, and she just moves away rather than retaliate, although she sometimes cries because it hurt when little sister pulled her hair. I am so proud of her for being so mature in these situations, and it makes life so much easier for us knowing she never does anything "back" when her sister gets a little too close for her liking. When they are at home she wants to be with her baby sister all the time, and she gets so happy when I get the little one after her nap. The joy and appreciation they show for each other is just so heart-melting to watch. It makes those and lousy nights' sleep and tired mornings so, so worth it.

I could write more, and I will write more soon, but I want to post this before it becomes another "forever draft" in my blog's posts list.

Here is a photo of my darling, enjoying an afternoon in our friends' garden in January.

Dreams were made of this

I recently read a quote that struck a chord with me. Unfortunately I cannot remember where I found it, but it went like this:

The waves of the sea help me get back to me.


I have always loved the sea. I grew up only a short drive from the rolling waves and the fresh air. My summers as a child were spent at the beach, playing in the sand dunes with messy ocean breeze hair.

I remember the smell of the salty air made me breath deeper, reflect more and dream of far-away horizons.

Still when I come to the sea now as an adult, watching the waves roll in, hearing the constant hum of the salty water hitting the sand, I feel leveled, balanced.

I instantly allow myself to drift off a little and dream of those destinations out there I am yet to discover. When I read that quote above I thought it was such a beautiful way to put how I feel about the beach into words.

So when we stayed for a few days near the beach on the Gold Coast, we just HAD to take the girls there. Little sister is still too little to be impressed, but big sister squealed of joy, tossed her iceblock and grabbed her daddy's hand and lept into the waves, got completely soaked by the 25-degree water and sand got in everywhere. But how she loved it and how happy it made me to see her joy at the place where I find such pleasure in being. Here's to many more beach trips in the years to come.

Breaking the drought

It's been so long since the last post, I don't really know where to start. A list of events since 20 Nov 2011 perhaps? Or maybe I should dive in and elaborate? OK, I'll do that. Since last time we've been halfway round the world and back. Grab yourself a cuppa and get comfortable. Here goes...

So early December we booked tickets for our holiday, which generated a to-do list like I've never seen before. Planning such a long trip and long stay with two little ones is no easy task. Applications for visas, passports, buying little bits and pieces and working out how to pack it all without being swamped in luggage took all my experience and then some more research in travel-with-kids logistics.

When I had all the travel stuff fairly under control and we were approaching Christmas, we suddenly got a call from the people we'd contacted a while ago regarding digging and fitting new drain pipes for the house. They had capacity to start before Christmas and we got a good price and figured it wouldn't be such a huge hassle having someone dig while we were preparing to go on holiday. This was before the Rain started in January (which I am SO thankful for not being here to experience) and everything turned into Mud. Well, they started digging and they just finished digging last week after needing to take more than a week off in January due to Christmas holidays and the Rain.

Then another unscheduled thing happened. We (I) had a moment of insanity/made the deal of my/our lives and bought a display kitchen that we needed to take down and bring home ourselves. This proved to be a bigger job than first anticipated since they'd installed the kitchen to make it pretty much earth quake safe. I spent hours taking out hundreds of screws and bolts before my strong man and a few other strong men drove it home taking many trips back and forth to the kitchen shop. It was a whole other type of Kitchen Nightmares. And before the kitchen was all home it was almost time to leave so I was packing and looking after the kids while the house slowly but surely got more cramped and filled up with kitchen cupboards, drawers and doors. But we needed a kitchen as this was next on our renovation list anyway, so we're getting a new kitchen (with the best whitegoods, including a fridge drawer - the coolest part of the whole kitchen, literally) set up and our huge lounge room halved in size to make room for it. Taking the space is no problem though, we have more than enough lounge room to play around with still.

A few days before we left big sister started coughing a little. Nothing too serious we thought, and these things always come around this time of the year, so we left it. A trip to the doctor wouldn't have helped anyway we found out later. So we left eventually, and my dad was the hero and brought the bench tops home for us the day we left, so that was the last of the kitchen done for now. Huge sigh of relief.

Here's a tip to parents travelling with kids and wanting to gate-check their stroller when you have a long transit time during your travels. Make sure you tell the people at the gate, the stewardesses or anyone else who will be there at take off and landing and can get a hold of the baggage handlers to tell the baggage handlers on arrival to offload and put.the.stroller.at.the.gate.  Otherwise you may find yourself in a similar situation as we were in: ten hours transit at Heathrow's terminal 3 with two tired kids, three pieces of hand luggage, NO baggage trolleys to use inside airport (they don't have them) and NO stroller, not your own or a rental one from the airport (they don't have them). (This means nowhere for the kids to sleep comfortably, which was the biggest issue for us as they both needed a nap during the day since we got up at 4.30 that day.) Luckily I'd packed two baby carriers (one baby bjørn and a ring sling for big sis) and these literally saved us when little sis needed a sleep and big sis got tired from walking around and we made the most out of being stuck in terminal 3 for so long. Our original plans had been to get our double stroller at the gate, take a train to London and spend a few hours there. Instead we had Starbucks and long walks inside the terminal building. We were happy when we finally got to board that Etihad plane later that long day.

We had booked two nights in Abu Dhabi on our way down as we figured putting the kids through what would have been a close to 40-hour trip wasn't a very nice thing to do to them. The flight went relatively well considering we had a two-year-old ticking tantrum bomb and a baby getting a stuffier nose by the hour. Arrived in pleasant 20 degrees and sunshine in Abu Dhabi in the morning. Walking out of the terminal building into that goegeous early hazy sunshine and into temperatures that felt like a Norwegian summer's morning was just so good. Marvelled at the gorgeous architecture of some mosques from the taxi window on our way from the airport and found our hotel without any problems. We were a little early for check-in but they held our luggage while they prepared our room for early check-in and we went for a stroll so the girls could get some sleep in the pram. We brought our big tandem baby jogger city series, which has been an absolute life saver by the way. Don't know what we would have done without it during our holiday.

As we stayed in Abu Dhabi little sis also got a cough and they both got runny noses and I wasn't feeling so crash hot myself to be honest. I found it was nothing a paracetamol and ibuprofen couldn't keep at bay for me, but the girls got worse and worse. When we boarded the plane to Brisbane from Abu Dhabi we were a little worried about how they'd cope, but again they were pretty good and both slept a lot on the flight. On arrival they were pretty bad though, and the little one was glassy eyed and lethargic. It was great seeing the family again though, and we were welcomed with a big welcome-home sign and plenty of balloons when we walked out into the welcome area, which big sister loved and she finally got to run around after being confined in the small space of her airplane seat for so many hours.

We went to a hotel we'd booked for the first week. We figured it was best to have our own space for the first few nights while we got over our jetlag and found our footing. The first night I woke up in the middle of the night and didn't feel so good. I got up and had some water thinking it was fatigue from the long trip and maybe a lack of water that caused the nausea. I was so wrong. A few hours later and I was the sickest I'd ever been with a stomach bug. I have never ever been so sick before, it was simply awful. And the little one was sick too, not with a stomach bug but she just wanted to sleep and sleep and big sister was no better either. In between running to the bathroom and sleeping I told their daddy to ring a doctor to get them checked out. Through the haze of sickness I heard he called the doctor, got an appointment, put both girls in the pram and took them to the doc. Then they came back, he came to me and told me I had to get up and we had to take them to the hospital! The doctor was worried about little sis and said she needed to get checked out for pneumonia. I pulled myself up with strength I have no idea where came from, and we found a taxi and went to the hospital. And can I say how incredibly impressed I was with Queensland's public health system? We were seen to immediately, given a bed in the observation room, waited maybe twenty minutes from the doctor and little sis got thoroughly checked out and thank goodness there was no pneumonia, just a viral infection. The lethargy came from her little body being so exhausted from coughing and she slept a lot because of that. In the mean time we breathed a huge sigh of relief. The hospital staff were so nice I even got a bed to lay on while they brought me water. I was so sick still although the vomiting had stopped, I had no strength left. All in all the experience was very good, although it was an experience we'd rather be without. But with the reassuring that none of the girls were in any big trouble we could get on with our holiday.

Over the next few days the girls kept coughing and coughing and their temperatures were high at night. Unfortunately their daddy also picked up their virus, then the stomach bug hit him too. All in all we spent about a week and a half being sick (not me though, I recovered quickly and walked all over Brisbane with the girls in the pram, enjoying coffees and visiting "old" places and feeling my heart beat a little faster at the sight of familiar places and feeling my mind slowing down for the first time in months). The sun on my skin, the warm air surrounding me, my summer dress floating around my bare legs. Walking barefoot in open shoes. I tell you, the place is soul healing.

When everyone had recovered we really started enjoying our holiday. We went all around town, to the parks, botanical gardens, to South Bank to swim, to playgrounds that took big sister's breath away (they were pretty awesome compared to what we have here, I must say), went up and down the river on the City Cat (catamaran as a means of public transport, super fun and really cheap).

We stayed outside the CBD after a week in the city and we walked the suburban streets while the girls slept in the pram, we had coffee and lunch and we dreamed of one day owning a beautiful Queenslander (house) and we remembered places and we saw friends and spent a lot of time with family. I truly felt like it was filling up that part of me that had held so much missing for the place, the people and the life there. The missing was bit by bit replaced by new memories.

I was so glad to see that although it was far more hectic and although we didn't get around to do half the things we wanted to, we could still enjoy Brisbane, sometimes in the same ways as before, and sometimes in new ways, seeing it from a our girls' perspective. It was perfect and I miss it already. I didn't mean to make this update all about illness. I will post little stories about the photos I'll be sharing in the coming weeks. We had so many nice moments there I feel they deserve their own posts.