This is just a quick placeholder to note that today we returned back from our first winter break skip trip north to Akureyri. We had a great time, and look forward to more skiing in the future! 🙂Read more
[Written 19 February 2014]
FFF #6 almost didn’t happen because it was such a busy weekend with the double birthday celebration etc. etc.
But, I’d been meaning to check out the gallery showing of The Visitors (YouTube, NYTimes) by Ragnar Kjartansson (and friends), having heard good things about it, and the kids were whining, so I decided to make a break for it.
I’m very glad that I did because this was so fun, lovely, technically impressive, and charming. Oh, Ragnar, why must you be so darn charming?! 🙂
Now, because this is Icleand, and Iceland has a tiny population, it should surprise nobody that Ragnar (anno 1976) and I attended the same high school/junior college. Now, I didn’t know him per se, but I certainly knew of him, and knew people that knew him.
It’s funny how some people are just incredibly noticeable right from an early age.
I haven’t really followed his work closely, but from what I’ve glimpsed over the years, one recurring theme in his works (which straddle the range from music to painting to installations to performance art) is repetition. (See painting the same guy in the same room in the same outfit once per day for six months, getting opera singers to repeat a famous operatic moment again and again for 12 hours – YouTube link).
This work had a lot of inbuilt repetition too, but not so that it felt gimmicky.
Basically, you walk into a large very dark room, where there are 9 large illuminated screens, set up such that some obscure others from view. On each screen is a musician/singer with headphones and they’re all performing/singing the same song, but each of them is in a separate room, so they’re united, but apart. (28 images total, 1 video)
A large dark room, with a surprising amount of people! (No, they’re not dancing, it’s just an animated gif!)
Due to the smallness of our abode (in particular the dining/living room combo), we decided to split Emma’s already small birthday celebration into two parts.
On Saturday afternoon we had Finnur’s family over, and mine came over for lunch on Sunday. (30 images total)
Finnur’s Family – Saturday 15 February 2014
Emma with her new walker, and a present ripe for opening.
Just took Emma to her well-child visit and, uh, she’s growing like a weed height-wise, but has hardly gained any weight since two months ago…
This is what she looks like on the WHO anthro program: (4 images total)
She’s 81 cm tall (just shy of 32 inches), which is equivalent to an average 18 month old child.
Well, whadda-you-know… Emma Ósk is 1 years old today!!
There was no actual celebrating today though, but she did get a present from us. Proper celebrating will happen next weekend with our respective near-families (we’re trying to keep the celebrations ‘small’, just like the person in question!).
The day pretty much went like any other Wednesday, but I did take a few pics (14 images total)
Ms. Emma getting her present from us this afternoon.
This weekend’s Fake-Football-Fanclub outing (#5!) got postponed from the originally scheduled time on Saturday because we decided on a whim to have Finnur take the big kids to a technology-show in downtown Harpa instead.
Come Sunday, I was suffering from acute cabin fever, so when the opportunity presented itself, I just headed out to do my thaaang, even though it was late in the day.
On the schedule was checking out the second part of the show “From a Different Angle…” (Betur sjá augu…), see FFF #3 for the first part. The second part of the show was much smaller than the first part, and somewhat less interesting. That may just be because I have a preference for photos of people though. 🙂 (48 images total)
Driving to downtown Reykjavík at 4 pm.
My brother Pétur and family gave us three tickets/giftcards to see Mary Poppins at the theater for Christmas!
Super-luckily for us, Signý (Pétur’s fiancee), works in the ticket office of the theater, so when I asked her to find us ticket at a particular showtime (which was filling up fast), she emailed back a couple of hours later informing me that a new show had just been added (the third last of a year-long run), and that we had been the first to get seats to it!
Sometimes having “connections” is particularly sweet! 🙂
Lo and behold, soon the day of the show was upon us, so to the theater we went! (4 images total)
Bjarki with the stage backdrop behind him from our excellent seats!
Finnur’s electric bike developed some connectivity problems (probably because it’s been shaken to death by all the ice on the roads), and he ended up borrowing his parents’ car to go to work.
We had to pick him up again at the end of the day, but we arrived before he did so I got a few photos of the three grandkids that were there. (3 images total)
Kids flanked by their grandparents.
Pics from the living room this afternoon. (11 images total)
The last image I took, but the only (decent) one with all three kids. Bjarki was kinda busy playing on the Wii though! (This was post-6 pm.)
I’ve been dragging my feet in posting about this (I didn’t want to jinx things!!) – but Emma moved into her own bedroom on 30 December 2013, and has slept there, quite well, ever since.
The long story is that she was slowly but surely killing me by repeatedly waking up at night, and yes, her crib was in our bedroom.
By the end of November, things were getting a bit better, but the midnight feeding kept moving all over the place, sometimes all the way until 2 am. That’s when the chorus of women around me started chanting ‘drop the midnight feeding’, and I figured… why not?
On 01 December, Finnur flew off to the USA, and I decided to stop sleeping in my own bed. Instead, I moved full time to the single bed in the door-less ‘office’, i.e. the fourth (bed)room on the second floor.
And lo and behold, Emma stopped waking up at night!! (I also kept going to bed very late so I didn’t wake up to every whimper and complaint, so that ‘helped’).
When Finnur returned some two weeks later, I kept on sleeping in the office, except for a few nights where I tried sleeping in my own bed. The conclusion was always the same: Emma slept worse with me in the room (of course, she could care less about Finnur!).
What needed to happen was clear: Emma had to move into the ‘office’, except it had no door.
After some prompting and prodding from Guðrún, I called around to see what a door might cost. Of course the door-opening is non-standard (almost two doors wide, but not quite), so we were looking at either a) a very expensive custom-made double door, or b) a cheaper single door with a wooden panel on the side, either as a DYI project, or employing a carpenter.
Being female, I decided to go for option c) (that’s a joke for Augusto 🙂 ) and hang thick curtains to cover the opening and call it a day! (10 images total)
It struck me one day that we still had a set of thick-ish Ikea curtains on a semi-permanent loan from Holla. We’d originally used them to cover our bedroom window in our rental apartment during our first year back in Iceland. Amazingly, I managed to finish hemming them the day after we put them up. I guess I’ve learnt my lesson after too many hemming projects that I let linger half-finished for years…