Tuesday December 27th 2005

Anna’s birthday party
Today we celebrated Anna Sólrún’s second birthday with a family gathering here in Mosó. This time she was absolutely thrilled when we sang Happy Birthday for her (last year she looked mostly confused about the whole thing) and clapped wildly for herself as she blew out the candles on the cake. When all the eating was over, I asked if she’d like to unwrap her presents, and she ran straight for them! She got tons of great presents (thank you all! 🙂 and I’m pretty sure we’re going to need an extra bag to get all this stuff back home to California! When it was finally time for her to go to bed (around midnight, three hours after the last guests left…) all she could talk about was candles-this and birthday-that. 🙂

In other news we’ve had a lovely time. We’ve mostly been visiting friends and family and overdosing on chocolate (well, me anyway). Anna now goes to bed around midnight and the grown ups go to bed between 3 and 4 am. Crazy what happens when it’s dark until 10am… Actually this schedule works pretty well since this way everybody gets to enjoy Anna’s company and we get to sleep in.

The only “problem” so to speak has been Anna’s toilet training. She’s been pretty good about it, wetting her pants only 1-2 times each day, but for the last couple of days she relapsed into not wanting to go to the toilet so we were getting a little frustrated with her. But today she was much better, telling us she needed to go and then going. We’ve also stopped using a diaper at nighttime (our stash ran out, and no, I’m not buying any more!!) and had a couple of accidents, but now we have a waterproof sheet under her, so any future accidents will be less of a hassle.

On other developmental fronts, she’s getting much more talkative, listening to her as she’s going to sleep is nothing short of hysterical. 🙂 She’s also taking to singing in bed, she doesn’t quite know the words, but she tries. All in all she’s been happy here in Iceland (although for the first couple of days she occasionally wanted to go home) especially when we’ve visited friends that also have young children. Oh, the toys! 🙂 She seems to have learnt most of the names of the extended family members but does get confused when I refer to her grandmother here in Mosó as Anna… 😉

Happy holidays all, I’m going to see if I can post any more pictures. I’m sooooo behind!!! 🙂