Húsafell: Horses at Giljar
[Written 8 August 2013]
On our last full day at Húsafell, we took the kids ‘over the hill’ to a horse rental at Giljar.
Anna and Arnar went first.
Húsafell: Chocolate Cake Day
[Written 8 August 2013] After a busy day, we had a quiet day. Halli made a chocolate cake for tea-time, yum! 🙂 Read more
Húsafell: Hraunfossar and Barnafoss.
[Written 8 August 2013. This is getting comically late.]
On our way back from the goat-farm, we stopped by the waterfalls Hraunfossar and Barnafoss.
I’d seen pictures of Hraunfossar (The Lava Falls) before, but they somehow never quite capture just how odd/pretty/special they are. Essentially, it’s a series of waterfalls that leak out from under a lava-field into a big river:
Quick video capture of Hraunfossar. Click on image to go to the video on G+.
Anna and Bjarki by Hraunfossar.
Húsafell: Goats!
After a couple of quiet days, we again headed out for a short drive, this time to visit the goat farm at Háafell. On the way back we stopped by some weird/pretty/beautiful waterfalls: Hraunfossar and Barnafoss, but that’ll be another post.
Again, here are way too many pictures, but hey, goats and waterfalls! 🙂
A goat. There are remarkably few goats in Iceland, less than 1000.
Húsafell: Chillin’ Days
[Written 1 August 2013. Why does time move so fast?]
After a pretty active Saturday, we took it easy for the next couple of days, not venturing much outside the Húsafell area. We took the kids swimming, hung out and played games, they got sent out to play, we napped, ate, etc, and, oh, all the adults but me went on a food gathering trip to nearby-ish Borgarnes on the Monday while I minded the kids. Not a lot of pictures were taken.
Sunday 14 July 2013
Sitting on the deck, talking about life, the universe, and everything.
Mind. Blown!
I did not take this photograph, Google+ created it: The photo above was made by AUTOMATICALLY combining these two photos here, after I uploaded them to the site: The comment Google+ gave me on the new image was “This photo was created using the best smiles in a set of similar photos.” Which means thatRead more
Húsafell Summer House, Reykholt and Bonfire
[Written 31 July 2013, wayyyy behind again?!?! Why?!?! Hoooow?!?!]
[Warning: This post is loooooooong!]
Lots of unions/retirement funds/other organizational entities in Iceland own their own summer houses which they rent out to paying members for a smallish fee on a weekly basis ($150-ish for the week).
Adda and Halli, our awesome friends, are organized enough to actually apply for these summer houses and have been lucky enough to get them now two summers in a row. And super luckily for us, they’ve invited us along both times. Last year we went north to Eyjafjörður, but this year we stayed on the western side of the country, and stayed at Húsafell.
Image of the western part of Iceland. We drove from the big red blob at the bottom (Kópavogur) to the red square on right side (Husa).
Emma Numbers at Five Months
The day before Emma turned five months old, we took her to the health clinic to get her measured and immunized. She keeps growing like a weed and is now up to 8.77 kg (19.3 lbs) and about 69 cm (2 ft 3 in). And, yes, she’s 100% breastfed.
On the growth charts in the clinic (they’re from Sweden, not the WHO ones) she measures like an average 9 month old baby.
I put the new numbers into the WHO Anthro program and here follow her plots of Weight for Age, Length for Age and Weight for Length. For comparisons sake I also dug out the numbers for Anna and Bjarki, so I’m posting their plots too.
So yes, this post is dreadfully boring (Hah! Most of my posts are dreadfully unexciting, but this one is about nuuuumbeeeers so it has a dose of extra boring for most people because apparently numbers are boring. Which is not true. But the media and society will have you believe that.) It is mostly just for me to keep things in one place.
Let the charting begin! Keep in mind that the lines represent percentages with the top line being “97th percentile” (as in “97 percent of ALL children are less heavy than the child on that line for that age”), then come the lines for 85%, 50%, 15% and 3%.
Emma, Weight in kg vs. Age in months. Measures like an average 11 month baby.
Anna at Horse Riding School
Last summer, we signed Anna up for two consecutive weeks of horse riding school run by Viking Horses, which happen to be located very close to us. When the two weeks were up, Anna spent a whole day crying over the ‘loss’ of her horse, was sad for days afterwards, and waxed poetically about ‘her horse’ (Sproti) for an entire year.
It was pretty obvious that two weeks were nowhere near enough time for her to get her horse-fix, so this year I kept a close eye on when registration started this spring, and booked her for a whopping five consecutive weeks: from when school ended up until we would leave for a week-long stay at a summer house in Húsafell. (Deal sweetener: A 10% discount for repeat bookings.)
This worked out really beautifully because a) Anna could bike to and from the horse riding school (about 15 minutes each way) on a bike path with so many underpasses that she only had to cross one street, meaning b) she was out of the house between 12:30 to 5 pm every weekday, which meant that I could take uninterrupted daytime naps with Emma (Bjarki was at daycare).
For me the extra icing on the cake was also the fact that Anna really wanted to go, so there was no whining about when or if to get going. Which is priceless. Really.
On the last couple of days of her five week stint, I showed up with the camera to take pictures of Anna with ‘her’ horses, as well as with some of the kittens which she’d spent a good chunk of time playing with both before and after each afternoon session.
Anna on Síben, her new favorite horse, because he would gallop (go very fast) if given the chance. (Photo by Viking Horses)
Bjarki Figures Out Reading
This post is just to commemorate that Bjarki ‘read’ for the first time today. And by ‘reading’ I mean that he sounded out words and figured out what the words were. Now he just needs to learn what all the letters say, and he’s good to go! (He currently knows quite a few upper caseRead more