The weekend that was
After Finnur spending almost two solid weeks working while tending to a sick kid at home (first Anna, then Bjarki), there was a very dire need to stay far far away from our apartment this weekend, and we mostly succeeded! 🙂
On Saturday there was the usual morning sports-school for Bjarki (next-to-last-session) and English-school for Anna (last session) – oh, and participating in a pesky election. Straight afterwards we dropped Finnur off at a sports-pub where he oogled lovely Everton men and their thighs (isn’t that what men do when watching soccer? No?!…) while the kids and I brought and ate lunch at Holla’s place – which happens to be very close to the sports-pub and Anna’s piano-school which has started having hour long group sessions shortly after lunch on Saturdays. Yup, more school for Anna.
Aaaanyway, after I’d collected both a satisfied Finnur (was it the lovely thighs, or the win? Who knows?!) and Anna, and stuffed our faces with more bakery goods at Holla’s place, we headed to Guðrún and Snorri’s place. There I proceeded to finish assigning the last homework set this semester (I’m always behind. Always!) before crashing out on their sofa. Finnur meanwhile behaved like a proper guest (i.e. awake, and talkative), while the kids got their video fix upstairs. Dinner was lovely thai takeout, and we took off for home around 9pm.
On Sunday, I was the one to “rise and shine” with the kids, which is highly unusual, and probably never a good idea. For example: That morning I found the kids trying to fix the fallen slats in Anna’s queen-sized Ikea bed, and noticed to my surprise that the L-brackets supporting the middle (which supports the slats) were bent on both ends, resulting in very poor slat support. Yes, all that jumping on the bed had resulted in bent metal! Taking this as a sign that the (cheapo) bed-frame should go and Anna should finally get a ‘regular’-sized kid-bed (the queen-bed was our ‘guest’ bed in the US), I disassembled the bed-frame right then and there – and then went to wake Finnur up with the news that we would be having lunch at Ikea.
However, once Finnur became coherent, he vehemently objected to Anna getting a new bed because a) we might get visitors!, and b) we can’t fit the queen sized mattress into the basement storage , and c) he likes lying in bed when he’s reading to Anna at night, and d) it’s good to have a spare bed-space for when somebody is sick. All good reasons, and my enthusiasm for a new bed dimmed. Still I managed to persuade him to at least take a look at beds at Ikea – and that’s when we found out that European and USA Ikea beds ARE NOT THE SAME SIZE!
For example, you’ll find that the matching mattresses for a US RYKENE bed are 135 cm/152 cm wide, while in Iceland the matching mattresses for RYKENE beds are 140 cm/160 cm wide. Imagine my dismay!
Having been failed by Ikea (!!!) we proceeded to drop the kids off at my aunt Hulda’s place before heading out to look at yet another property. It was an ‘interesting’ house, but probably not one we’d like to live in. The weather seemed to concur and conspired with much wind to blow us away. A quick stop at the hardware store (Finnur braved the storm — which was crazy, with planes at the airport stuck at the runway due to flying debris) resulted in four potential L-bracket replacements, and then it was back to Hulda’s place. There we accepted an offer to have dinner, and I went to work on grading homeworks. I really need to figure out a way to not have to work on the weekends. It makes for an annoyed me.
Post-dinner we headed home, put an over-tired Bjarki to bed and went to work on re-assembling Anna’s bedframe. Thankfully one of the L-brackets pairs fit perfectly and the bed has thus been restored to its former ‘glory’. Then it was time for me to assemble the last EM lecture (which I proceeded to botch nicely the morning after) and finish grading the EM homeworks.
All in all it was a highly successful weekend, in that we successfully managed to avoid spending time in our own home. Excellent! 🙂
