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!

A few outings close to home

One Sunday (general conference Sunday: and I'll have to write about experience general conference 8 hours ahead of broadcast time) our landlords noticed we were still home in the afternoon and invited us to go to the beach with them. So we decided that sounded more fun than naptime for Lily and headed out with them. It was chilly, but a beautiful day. It's surprising seeing people swim, but even at the lake near our house we've heard that Norwegians swim all year long. Not many, but there were a couple older ladies returning from their swim when we arrived. We drove to another small dock/beach on the way back. It is so beautiful out away from the city.

On a rainy day we went with the twins to an indoor playland. Most of the things were for older children, but Lily still had fun.

Jumping is her very favorite thing right now so she LOVED the trampoline.

Another trip with the twins was up to the top of a hill in Tasta where you can see a beautiful view of Stavanger. So I took Barrett for a walk up there one Saturday morning. The pictures don't quite do it justice and the light wasn't great, but another great view just a short walk away from us.

We took a trip to Sandnes (the Southern part of Stavanger; maybe 20 minutes in a car, but an hour on the bus :)) right before Lily's birthday to pick up some cake supplies at a cake store a friend in our ward owns. We intended to take a walk around some popular hikes, but we've found that may of these sites are really hard to get to without a car. So we walked around their center of a town for a short time but the rain was pretty bad so we spent some time looking around inside their mall.
It wasn't rainy when we left to get on the bus so we decided to go to their port, and had a funny experience with some swans.
As you can see in this picture, there were just a few swans and ducks close to the steps we were at, so Barrett started throwing some pretzel pieces with Lily for them.

 Then as we look out at the port we see a bunch of swans in the distance and realize... they are swimming towards us!

 Here is their progression. It really was hilarious. It looked like a swan army coming for us all lined up. We have no idea how they even knew we had food, they seemed so far away from us at the beginning.

 It was hard to capture in one picture, but there were TONS of swans, ducks, and birds all around us by the end.

 We walked around the port a little more to see the view before heading back home.

Our little Norwegian apartment

I finally got around to taking some pictures of what our apartment looks like. I had a lot of people ask at the beginning for pictures, so here they are. Plus a couple more differences of apartment living at the end :)

In case you've forgotten, here is a reminder of what our house looks like, and the entrance to our "basement" apartment.

From the front door is our mud room. It's so nice to have this since we are often coming in with our wet gear.

When you walk through the second door and turn right there is our living room.

Sitting on the couch.

The kitchen from the door by the mud room.

Turning around from the kitchen to the front room.

The other 3 rooms in the house are to the side of the kitchen.

First door on the left is our bedroom.

 We feel a little like college students living in this small apartment because we've had to be creative with where to fit all our stuff. So there's our half-exposed clothes and whatever else we can't fit, ha ha. Luckily we didn't bring very much because there is NO way we could fit even a third of all our things we have packed in our storage unit.

Second door on the left is Lily's room.

 Our landlords' were so kind and finished this second bedroom with what furniture we wanted because it hadn't been used before. Then they showed up with a picture, Winnie the Pooh rug with  matching box, and a small Ikea chair that Lily loves. It feels like a child's room now.

The last room on the left is our bathroom, which is very nice.

Most of the apartments we looked at didn't have a bathtub, and we had even started practicing having Lily shower in preparation, so we were really excited that his apartment didn't only have a tub, but this nice big one with a jacuzzi option.

 (Notice that my washer/dryer is back!)

 Shower to the side of the tub.

We have been really lucky to have this nice apartment with great landlords and a quiet neighborhood that is family friendly and close to the lake.

One thing that I don't know how I forgot to mention about living Norway is the garbage system here. It was probably the first thing we learned about Norway when we ate dinner coming home from the airport our first night. We separate all our trash into a paper container, food container, and then all other trash (there are other places you can drop off glass and plastic but it's not picked up at your house) and there is a sophisticated schedule of what week each of the garbages are picked up. They have a 3 container system you can buy everywhere to put in your house. We've gotten used to it (although I do really miss having a disposal), but Lily always looks at us confused when she opens the cupboard after we've asked her to throw something away, ha ha.

And the absolute BEST thing about our apartment is the heated floors! I don't know why this isn't more common in America. No one has carpet here, but I don't notice it so much when my feet are toasty on my wood floors. And coming out of the shower to heated tile is amazing. It is now a requirement on our ever-growing list of what must be apart of house we will build... eventually. If we ever settle down somewhere long enough to build ;) A little more about life in Norway.