Our house

Just thought it was about time I posted the photos of our beautiful new home! We move in on the 15th of July, and there is plenty of room for guests. We are all so excited about it, and absolutely cannot wait to finally get our hands on those keys. We (well, I - but James is pretty dreamy as well!) are constantly day-dreaming about how we are going to furnish the house, and I have visited the IKEA home page more than once over the last couple of weeks. Also, in these financial times a lot of stores and producers are going bankrupt, and so James and I are constantly checking out the closing-down sales for one or two bargains for our house; not a bad way to grab all the little bits and pieces we still need. Another very exciting prospect is that once we move in we can actually unpack all the wedding presents - we have barely looked at most of them so far and it will be really nice to actually be able to use everything.

Dictionary:
1. etasje - Ground floor
2. etasje - 2nd floor
Sov (shortening for soverom) - Bedroom
Bad/wc - Bathroom with toilet
wc/vask - Small toilet and laundry behind a dividing wall
vf (vindfang) - wet-room / entry way
entre - hallway
allrom - well, a bit self explanatory, but it is an extra living area with an exit to the wooden deck in the backyard
sovealkove - a smaller bedroom
kjøkken - kitchen
stue - living area
balkong - balkony
garasje - garage
bod - shed

Spring in Paris

Here are some photos from our wonderful trip to Paris! Beyond spending lots of time with Pa Gaz, we were also lucky enough to catch up with Kate Napier, who decided to start off her big travelling adventure with a little French rendez-vous. We had such a great time - I'll let the photos speak for themselves!

Pa Gaz in Norway

It has been a while since our last update, but the last three or four weeks have been crazy busy and there has been little time left over for filling the pages of this blog. So many things have happened, and it all started with Pa Gaz' arrival in Norway. James, Isabelle and myself were about 20 minutes late to pick him up at the airport, we thought it should take us just over 2 hours when it ended up being 2.5-2.75 - which wouldn't have been that bad if it weren't for the fact that his plane was about 30 minutes early... Poor Garry seemed pretty tired when we finally arrived to collect him, but Isabelle of course could not help put a smile on his face.

We had a quick snack and put Isabelle into her pyjamas, before returning to Larvik. We spent a couple of days at home with my parents, giving Garry time to get acclimatised. I returned to Oslo on Thursday as I had a presentation/Tapas night with my future employers at PwC, which was lots of fun, and the three other Quinns followed suit on Friday. We had dinner with the Skilbrei's, and enjoyed a long walk around the Oslo CBD. Saturday morning we walked across the road from where we were staying to check out the newly built opera-house which opened last year - it is quite beautiful and you can actually walk on the roof in summer-time.

If you turn 90 degrees to the left from where the above photo is taken, you look straight at the PwC-building. PwC is one of the main sponsors of the opera, which means we will be getting free tickets every once in a while! There is a lot of development going on in the area, as you can see, and they are even moving the freeway underground, which will make the place even nicer.

The rest of that Saturday we spent looking at properties in an area just North of Oslo, called Skedsmo. Most of the houses we looked at was not really what we were after, but we really loved one of the properties. However, Easter was coming up, and we decided to leave the decision-making until after the owners had completed their planned 'open for inspection' a couple of weeks later.

Other activities while Garry was visiting included shovelling snow (spreading it out so it would melt faster in the sun)...

...and car-yard hiking...

...the reason for this particular hiking-tour was that after a return trip to Oslo in our 10-year old Kia (which by the way carried the name Leelah), Pa Gaz decided his grand-daughter needed a much safer car to drive around in, and so now we are the extremely lucky (and proud) owners of a brand new VW Golf!! Will put photos up later...

Waiting for Pa Gaz

Not too much happening at the moment, although Pa Gaz is flying in to Oslo airport this evening!

Isabelle has been very excited to see her Australian Grandfather again, and part of that may be due to the fact we suggested to Pa Gaz that a dinosaur book might be nice as a little gift when he gets here!

Aside from school work, we've been looking at a few houses/apartments on the net with a view to purchase in the next few months. There's actually a viewing for one we really like this weekend so we'll drag Gazza along to that to check out the financial hole we'll probably have to drag him into.

And because we all know why you guys check out this blog, here's a few photos of the little one. With supervision and a few small reminders, Isabelle can actually dress herself properly, but here's two photos from when she did it completely on her own (that's two t-shirts you're seeing).

(photos are a little fuzzy as she was jumping around like a mad thing)

Another relaxing weekend?

My cousin Nora turns 4 this week, and Isabelle got to go to her carnival birthday party on Saturday afternoon! Our beautiful little girl dressed up as a Spanish senõrita with a costume Mimmi and Bett picked up on their holiday.

Isabelle was very proud when mum put a bit of 'make-up' on her face...

The party was held in Nora's barnehage, where my auntie Anne Marit (Nora's mum) works as well...


After eating pølse (hot dogs) for lunch, the girls got their faces painted. Most girls asked for butterflies and princess faces, but our little darling has had a bit of an obsession with dinosaurs ever since coming across Jurrasic Park on one of the movie channels, so naturally - she wanted to be an angry little dino... Oh well - I tried my very best! (It was pretty hard to sit still for the little one - but luckily my auntie and her friends were painting the rest of the girls while I worked hard on my masterpiece)




The birthday girl:


Roooaawwwrrrrrrr!


They even had a piñata set up for the kid's take-home lolly bags!