Elise's First Blog Entry

Tony Yates — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 22:06:19 GMT

Since I don’t keep a diary and the pictures on our web site don’t tell everything I see that it’s time to fill some words into our blog. Our everyday life is not too exciting or extravagant, but never-the-less, we would like to share Philip and Claire’s development with you, and especially with our family in Canada and USA that we don’t see very often.

Claire and Philip stated day-care about 6 week ago, and everything is going very good. Tony drops them off every morning about 8:00 am and I pick them up around 4:00 pm Monday to Friday. Day-care is located just 7 minutes walk from our apartment so the logistics are going good too ;) Philip and Claire both belong to the same 18-children-group, and they are the youngest in their group. It was maybe a bit challenging for them the first weeks but we choose to look at the positive sides; such as more advanced language and physical stimulation. We have a very good impression of all the teachers at day-care in general so we are grateful parents.

We are about to get well after our first sick period this fall. First Philip, then Claire, than Tony and then me. Fever, running nose and much coughing, but we all survived very well. We kept both the children home most of the days last week, but tomorrow we will be back to work all four.

Claire and Philip are developing into two active and strong willed toddlers. Most of the time they are friends and playmates, but suddenly they are not. We can hear them shout “Mine!” a word they have learned from their new friends at day-care… Other than that their language is coming along, mostly in Norwegian but also their English. They still mostly use 1-2 words sentences so they don’t talk too well to be 2 years and 8 months, but we can hear new words coming every day so we are not worried. They are very much into counting now. They count to ten both in English and Norwegian and count every time they see numbers.

Claire likes to dress and undress herself, and she is doing pretty good. Even the tights she can handle. Most of the time, if not she’ll get angry, and even angrier if we try to help her. So getting dressed might take some time…

Pushing buttons, like on the elevator, on a lamp, traffic light or wherever there is a button is the biggest in their life at the moment. And since they always are two and the button is mostly one it is always a race to get to it first. Our front door has a handicap-door-opener that they race to every morning, who ever that looses waits for the door to close again. Important this…

The past few moths have been very busy for the family father. Every October he is arranging a big conference called Expander World, and Tony has been busy busy many weeks and weekends ahead of that. So we haven’t gotten to spend so much time as we wanted at the cabin this fall. And going there on my own with the children is too much hassle, at least when week ends are the only chance to get some rest for me now-a-days. But last weekend we spent
at there. We finally got to bring up a new couch! A big and soft one from Ikea. The cabin is about 10 min walk from the parking spot so it was actually a bit work. But we got help from Øyvind, my cousin, so it all went very well. The old couch, that you hardly can call a couch is now fire wood ;)

Next weekend Tony goes to Barcelona for a week for a Microsoft conference and I’ll take the children to see my family on the West coast for the whole week. I just pray for no snow storm, since I’ll be driving the 9 hours by car. I’ll tell you about that next time.

I hope you all are doing good, and to those of you who has the right to GO AND VOTE !

Have a good week,

elise

PrivateLife

Elise's First Blog Entry