Thanksgiving

This was our second Thanksgiving away from family. We were unsure what the celebration would be like since Thanksgiving is an American holiday, not observed here. But luckily, the Elders Quorum decided to plan a Thanskgiving retreat for anyone who wanted to come in our ward. They rented out cabins that the NATO base owns and we were able to stay in a cabin in Sirdal, a more mountainous area about an hour and a half away from Stavanger. It was SO much fun! 

Here is the little cabin we stayed in with another couple in our ward.

And this was the main gathering place where we ate Thanksgiving dinner.

It was cold when we arrived, but not snowy. However, we woke up to this beautiful layer of white.

After breakfast we wandered around the cabin area and got some gorgeous pictures. The air was so clean and crisp. It reminded me how much I LOVE being outdoors in the mountains. It was very peaceful. I was grateful we had even a short time to spend together in the serenity.

 All of the water had a thin layer of ice on the top. Barrett and Lily started throwing rocks and as you can see above some broke through and some just stuck, ha ha. They would try to break the bubbles like in the picture below.

Here's a short video.

After some socializing and naps we got to enjoy our Thanksgiving dinner :)

I got the recipe for a Czech apple cake from my landlady who is from the Czech Republic and decided to take this with us.

We've had fun swapping some recipes with all the holidays lately.

I decided to do a small Thanksgiving dinner on the actual Thanksgiving (we were in Sirdal the weekend before). I didn't buy turkey, but did brine a pork roast that turned out yummy. Almost traditional, ha ha...

And a little Thanksgiving activity we did with Lily.

And a picture to document our Thanksgiving!

Barrett also had a Thanksgiving meal at work, plus we were invited to one the following Sunday with some of Barrett's coworkers. (Which Lily and I ended up not going to due to missing the bus by literally 10 seconds as I was running to the bus. So frustrating! The annoyance of buses sometimes!) There are a lot of international people in Barrett's group so that dinner turned into a collection of turkey, stuffing, spinach lasagna, chicken curry, curry tomato soup, rolls, etc..... Kind of fun though. For not spending the holiday in America, we definitely got our fill of Thanksgiving, which helped to take away the homesickness, a little anyway.

Rainbow day

I am sure going to miss barnehage when we move from Norway someday. Just before Halloween they had a rainbow day with fun activities for the children. I dressed Lily up in all sorts of colors and she had a lot of fun. Here are some pictures.

One of the activities was face painting, which was a little interesting. As you can see, there is a huge "butterfly" on Lily's cheek, well half of her face really, ha ha.

Another activity was eating all the different colorful fruit and vegetables.

I'll have to remember this idea if I every do a joyschool someday.

General Conference

General Conference was definitely a different experience in Norway. I didn't even remember there was a General Women's broadcast the week before because it shows in the middle of the night here. I was able to watch online a few days later. Growing up in Utah I never really thought about the adjustments other members of the church had to make to watch because I watched it on a local channel, live. And it is so much easier now than it used to be because of the internet. Last year we adjusted to watching it two hours later than normal, but since we're 8 hours ahead here the times are confusing. So we started the first session at 6:00 p.m. Saturday night, then watched the second session in the morning on Sunday. We attempted to watch the priesthood session too, but it wouldn't work for some reason, so we had to postpone that. Then another late session for Sunday morning and later in the week we watched the last session. At least we were still able to stay home in comfy clothes and make our couch as comfortable as possible to enjoy the sessions. I'm also grateful we can read the talks whenever we want because I already need a refresher on the amazing talks that were given!

Going out to dinner... memories of Norway

Before we moved to Norway we had heard/read that people don't really go out to eat here because it is so expensive. We hardly went out to eat in Baltimore so we didn't think it would be a big difference, but you definitely get used to having that easy option in the states. Especially after we had spent the whole summer with our families and friends eating out. It is relaxing, fun to try new places, yummy, and kind of a social thing to do. We did get milkshakes one time for a date night (which was about the price of going out to eat) but other than that we hadn't ventured out. One Saturday I wanted to get out of the house and I REALLY felt like going out to eat. We looked at options, prices, and with more deliberation that you would imagine, decided to go to a pizza place in the mall near our house, called Al Forno.

We ordered a pizza, that we easily finished in one sitting, and shared a soda and spent about $45. The pizza was very yummy so we were glad it was worth it. But we definitely won't be going out again for awhile, ha ha.

Visit to the Norsk Oljemuseum (oil museum)

Oil is a major part of Norway's recent history. Oil was found in the North Sea in the 1960's and has been a huge source of income for Norway since. We had heard about the oil museum and decided to go one rainy Saturday and it was actually a lot more interesting and fun than we thought it would be. And in true Norwegian family-friendly fashion, they even had a kids' play area. Here are some pictures from the day.

Lily by the kids' play area.

Halloween in Norway

I don't think I realized how much I like holidays. It breaks up the mundane and it's really fun to celebrate with Lily. I can't wait until we have a house (and our stuff) so I can decorate more. I was a little worried that we wouldn't be able to celebrate much here since it's an American holiday. But I found out that it gets more and more popular here every year. And my landlady said she passed out candy to kids walking around the neighborhood for the last couple of years so I thought we'd give it a try.

Lily's Halloween outfit :)

Pointing out each of the witch items on her shirt.

I got some great poses, which were mostly blurry, ha ha. Toddlers can't hold still.

Carrie invited us over in the morning to decorate some Halloween cupcakes.

 Her mom brought a Halloween funfetti mix from the States. And if you look closely at the green cupcake you can see the Christmas sprinkles. No Halloween sprinkles in Norway. Yet.

And then after dinner we practiced Norwegian "Trick-or-treat", which is "Knask-eller-knep" Here's a video of Lily saying it.

She got her princess dress and "tiaria" and we were off to trick-or-treat.

 One nice thing about it getting dark here so early is that you don't have to wait until late to start going out. This is how dark it was at 6:00.

 In fact, it was so dark I couldn't get any good pictures. But she looked adorable! And was darling walking around with her bag, which got so heavy it dragged on the ground. But she wouldn't let me carry it for her. And she even attempted "Knask-eller-knep" and would say "Takk" after they gave her the candy. There were quite a few groups of children out. It didn't really feel different for us than usual. And a perfect close-together neighborhood for a toddler to walk around for a short time.

 Eating the candy after. She cried over candy the next few days everytime we told she'd had enough. The growing up has started.

She wore her princess dress for the next few days and still occasionally asks to put it on. Love this age!

I love Fall!

I love Fall more and more every year. I'm so grateful for the transition from summer to winter and for the holidays it brings. And now that we have Lily and her birthday to start off those holidays it makes it more fun. Plus, I'm home now to make some of those delicious treats that include pumpkins and apples. 

Here are a couple pictures of the beautiful fall in Norway.

I was so excited when I heard there was a pumpkin patch in Stavanger. Ever since Lily was born I've been dying to make it to a pumpkin patch and to take some pictures of her there. Plus I found out that the Americans in my ward like this specific pumpkin patch because it has "cooking pumpkins". Just like most things around here, it's cheaper to make it homemade. I had never even thought about making homemade pumpkin puree before. They told me it was easy so I planned to do this with the pumpkins we found.

It was a little out of bus range so a girl in our ward offered to pick me up from the bus stop with her children and then drive me back home after.

The pumpkin patch was amazing. The weather was not. It's behind a cute house right by the ocean with a beautiful field behind it. But it was SO windy that Lily was basically getting blown over the whole time. 

She helped pick out a couple pumpkins and then was done with the activity. Especially if I pulled out the camera, ha ha. This was her most of the time :)

There were also some carrots you could pick which I thought was fun, and would be fun for Lily, but she preferred watching while holding on to my leg so as not to fall over.

We made it out of the field and I started taking quite a few pictures of Lily with the pumpkins and she cooperated for awhile. I took our nice camera, even though I'm intimated by it because I've never learned how to use it. When I got home and put her down for her nap I was so excited to see my highly anticipated pumpkin patch pictures.... only to find out that 90% of them were overexposed. AHHHH! In the craziness of it all and the hurrying I hadn't even checked the pictures I was taking. That's probably the first lesson in photography. LOOK AT THE PICTURE TO MAKE SURE IT WORKED. It's a little embarrassing how sad I was. I threw a little tantrum trying to edit the pictures and frantically texted Barrett telling him how stupid I was and that he needed to come fix them. But to no avail, they were that overexposed that it was irreparable. :_( Barrett came home and gave me my first photography lesson and I am doing better now and have been trying to practice to avoid another disaster. So maybe next year I'll get the pumpkin patch pictures I've always imagined to have with Lily? At least I was calm by the time everyone else started posting their amazing, very well taken pumpkin patch pictures, ha ha.

But we did end up with these fun pumpkins and although Lily didn't like the experience, she was so excited about "Lily's pumpkin" and "Mommy's pumpkin" and "Daddy's pumpkin". She carried her little one around for a couple days. 

They came in handy for her birthday party. And at least the cooking of the pumpkins was a huge contrasting success compared to the pumpkin patch pictures. I decided to make these pumpkin cookies I got the recipe for last year. Here's the process.

Cut the pumpkin into fourths, which is no easy task. Then cook them in the oven for about an hour.

 The pumpkin comes off really easily from the skin with a spoon.

 Blend it up and you're finished. Surprisingly easy. And it tasted SO much better than canned pumpkin.

 The finished product. Way more moist, not as strong of a pumpkin taste, and everyone raved over them. I think that we'll be our new Fall tradition, to puree our own pumpkin for the cookies and any other pumpkin baking we want to do. I still have plenty left to try out pumpkin bread and pumpkin pancakes. Mmmm.

Now that Halloween is far past and Thanksgiving is approaching I've been trying to focus a little more on gratitude. I'd like to start adding our own family traditions in now that we are away from our families and on our own to celebrate. But I was reading a blog recently about how to incorporate gratitude and family traditions into this time of year and came across a link to this great documentary photography project (book) by James Mollison, called Where Children Sleep. He travelled the world and took pictures of children and their bedrooms from all different countries, ethnic backgrounds, incomes, family status, etc. It really touched me and filled me with gratitude for ALL the blessings I enjoy. My life has been so easy compared to a lot of people out there who fight everyday to meet their basic needs. It was a good reminder. Anyway, I thought I would share the link. Click here. Happy Fall!