Wedding Gallery

Ps. The giveaway below is still open – just see last post.

Spent last week in Paris – this time with the kids & hubby. Wonderful city, wonderful vacation, wonderful week – but now I’m pretty exhausted & need a vacation from the vacation.

For this trip I just brought the iPhone (and hipstamatic) and the X100 along.

If you’re travelling without kids, I’d suggest using the rental bikes. There’s bike/parking stations pretty much everywhere in the city, rental’s dirt cheap and you get to see a whole lot more of the city without getting sore feet too fast. Oh, and it’s fun to boot. I’d also recommend following someone with a directional clue if you do so (I don’t, so I’m glad I had someone to follow last year).

As we had the kids with us, we pretty much just used the metro all the time. This one got pretty good at reading the metro-maps and kept reporting on how many more stations that remained. We purchased a 5-day Paris Visite ticket for everybody.

One of the nicest aspects with booking an apartmenthotel is that you have the possibility of buying your own breakfast. Loved that there’s bakeries, butcheries, small restaurants and grocerystores like, everywhere in the city.

When travelling with kids, small games etc for the restaurants is a must! Thanks Banglamarie for this lifesaving trick. (Although – when you purchase new games – make sure the games actually contains *everything* needed – mine missed a special dice – and I heard from others that it’s not uncommon missing parts with this particular game (BOO, Egmont!)

Visiting the Eiffel Tower was a must. It was a big hit with the kids. Ps. Take the stairs. Only like 680 steps or something like that.

This was the view of the queue for the lifts from the 1st floor. It’s not the whole queue..and it was like, at least 4 if not 5x larger than the queue for the stairs, which took us 20 min top before entering the tower.

And naturally. When travelling with kids, the playgrounds are a sure winner. At least with kids like ours. Let’em run & spend some energy while you rest your feet. (This one was right outside Louvre, in the park behind it. Or in front. Whatever. There’s a nice one in the Jardin du Luxembourg one aswell)

Be sure to pay the 6 million Parisians a visit aswell – in the Catacombs of Paris. And yes, Amalie thought it was just dandy. After like 5minutes of holding her hands in front of the eyes she grew tired of it and thought all the skulls wasn’t that bad after all – and purchased a skull eraser afterwards which she played a lot with during the vacation.

Meet up with friends who’s in the same city as you (and try to get their kids to adopt yours) *wave Eli*

Pompidou is so well worth the visit. Well, without the kids. Sure, they did find a number of the installations interesting, but 70 percent of the time was spent trying to keep an eye on them and reassuring them we’d leave soon. Ps. Right now they have an exhibition of Edvard Munch (the Norwegian painter). Haven’t been to the Munch gallery since I was a kid, so it was pretty pleasant seeing the paintings and works and reading all the information about him at this exhibition. Plus, I love the timber-paintings of his (great trick of the eye).

Walk along the Seine and see Photoquai. We decided to reach Louvre from the Eiffel Tower on feet, and just found this. Fascinating exhibition, although again, the kids made it a bit difficult to give the exhibition the full attention I would have liked to give it. Sniff. After 20 minutes their patience ran thin, so we hurried along the way…

..and found these wooden installations & playthings. Stayed for another 30 minutes so that the balance was restored (happy kids = happy parents).

For Versailles we had learned the trick on how to make the youngest stay happy & patient. Just give her the camera & the responsibility of snapping photos. Sure, you get a lot (and I mean a LOT) of blurry and funny composed photos, but hey, that’s the price you pay for a pretty much undisturbed tour…

Don’t forget the happiest place on Earth…tip: Book your trip to this place on a weekday if you can. BIG  BIG difference between the queues at Friday and Saturday. Don’t dare imagine how it is in the summer…

Fun fact: Even the hotel we lived at smelled of candy and bubblegum (ok, only at the reception area, but still). True story. You could smell it once you got outta the bus. Must be fun to work there (or maybe not :p). Oh, not to forget the happyhappy Disneyish backgroundmusic in the breakfast-room. All.The.Time. Again. Must be fun to work there.

Got the coolest sweaters.

Saw all the princesses.

And had dinner at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (NB: sound on the site..hate that). Expensive, so-so food but had an entertainment show which the kids loved and will remember for a very long, long time. Probably. Hopefully. They better :p

Right. I’d recommend checking out Spotted by Locals, Paris, before you go. Ofcourse I didn’t, but managed to check out this restaurant the last day in the city (was like 10 min away by feet from our hotel) and wish I had read the guide more thorough before going.

My little girlie started 1st grade last week! So this is mainly for my mom..

Fulgte Amalie til skolen – det regnet litt, derfor full regntøy :)

På veien traff vi flere andre førsteklassinger som alle skulle begynne i samme klasse som Amalie…

Hun var veldig spent i begynnelsen..men ventingen gikk nok litt over i småengstelse..det var så mange ukjente voksne og barn der! Hun kjente bare én fra før av nemlig..

Så hun var litt på nippet til å gråte en liten skvett et par ganger der mens vi ventet på at navnet hennes skulle ropes opp..

Hun klarte å smile tappert, da..

Vel inne var det av med regntøyet. Plaggene hadde hun valgt ut selv..hun velger som regel ut klærne sine selv for tiden..

På vei inn i klasserommet var engstelsen glemt for en stakket stund..

Men da det var samlingsstund falt det noen stille tårer som hun fort tørket vekk – og hun snudde seg stadig for å se etter om jeg fortsatt stod der…:)

Nå etter en uke synes hun skolen er gøy, er blitt flink til å gå til og fra skolen og til og med begynt å bli kjent med noen av de andre elevene :)

It’s been quite long and weird-ish days at work since the tragedy struck our country past Friday. I’ve been working all weekend plus lots of overtime this week…I’ll be glad when I can take my mind off work this weekend – just have a few small things to wrap up at work tomorrow before taking some time off. All I can say is that I truly appreciate my colleagues and the viewpoint the local newspaper I’m working at have on how a local newspaper should handle such cases.

Leaving you with some iPhone-images from the memorial (? correct word? minnemarkering) from our little Island earlier tonight.

I’ll be back with renewed energy & scrappy stuff next week I hope!

I know by experience that whenever something tragic happens in a country/area I “know” people at, I’m anxious to know whether they’re fine or not because I don’t know the country nor them well enough to know whether it happened at their area or not, but I still think of them..

I’m fine, I live at the other side of the country.

Oslo is my hometown though, the city I grew up in… and it’s as far as I am aware my family is fine, and people I know seem to be accounted for..

Not sure what else to say, other than how surreal and unreal this is, happening in little Norway (yes, call me naive..but…nothing like this has ever (as far as I am aware) happened here before, nor did I really think it would..). Right now it feels weird knowing I’ll have to work this weekend!

My thoughts are with those directly affected by this…and I hope that the nation as a whole won’t give in to political, religious or racist hate..

BBC: Bomb blast at the Norwegian government quarter

“Auntie, how come you always take a lot of pictures of me when I’m here!?” she said, slightly not-all-too-willing. Well sweetie, I only get to see you twice or so a year – so I need to make the best outta the time we have together….

She understood that. That, plus the promises of chocolate when done might have had a say I guess.

Love her to bits I do..

Despite her unwillingness to properly cooperate.

But then I always have my own children. Like Amalie, who wonders why I’m not taking a picture of her because the lens wasn’t centered at her. “But you’re not pointing it at me mommy!”. Artistic choices, sweetie!

And my oldest, who have long learned that he just gotta shut up & play along – the sooner I’m happy the sooner he gets away…

Not sure if I’m happy with the editing here, but ahwell.

Right. Off to make sure the kids doesn’t drown themselves in the bathtub (jokeeee! :p)

Be back before you know it w/scrappy stuff! (darn slow manufs, I wanna share the gazillion stuff I’ve created but can’t until they’re done with their CHA-peeks!)

So, school’s out, and not surprisingly I was last-minute-everything on stuff this year. Like, when I wanted to bake oreo-cookies as teacher favor and ended up doing regular choc chip cookies because the oreo-cookies didn’t quite pan out the way it was supposed to. Nevertheless, made a little box for the cookies late in the evening the day before…this is the only picture I snapped of the contents of the box..look…Hambly Screenprints cupcake-paper! It’s made of a sort of thick vellumlike material, so I sort of imagine it’s great to place cookies upon too..like, thick baking paper…?

Here’s the boxed up box in bright daylight..

It’s pretty no-fuss&simple…blame it on my last-minute-everythingness! The woodgrainpaper & chipboard is from Crate Paper :)

ALso had to do some gift wrapping, and what’s better than kraft + 3ndypapir-papers + doily + vintage paper + Hambly?? Not to mention repurposing a tag I already had made (for the Crate Wedding Favors if you might recall).

Love getting to use this elephant-paper (Hambly once again :) )

What else’s new? Hmm..

I’ve gone slightly berserk at ebay..this is Deborah Lippmann’s “Bad Romance”. I got “Ruby Red Slippers” the next day, and am awaiting like five more polishes. *cough* (I deserved it! Worked the whole weekend so by the end I was like, I’m so gonna hit ebay now! Love quick shipping!)

The obligatory Midsummernightfire…blah blah….;p

In the craze trying to wrap up the Tove+Trym-pictures I’ve neglected to share the other snapshots made while in Oslo!! Here’s my lovely, adorable nephew!! Sigh, miss him so!

My sister and I are both in our thirties (YIKES!), and have never been out eating just the two of us. Never. So, thanks to the kindness that’s Groupon (haha) we had tapas the first evening…just the two of us and a bottle of wine…. it was such a great time and we both cannot understand why we haven’t done that before. I guess we had to grow up and become adults first…(and have Groupon come our way .p)

Then we went around Aker Brygge in search for some beer..(or in her case; Irish Coffee).

Only found boobs, though *wink*

And a gorgeous view..snapped lots of fun photos of us two…

When I was done shooting Tove+Trym on Saturday, my sister insisted on fetching me (at 11.30am) and driving me to her home (I originally stayed with mom, but sis insisted I needed to try her new outdoor Jacuzzi). Well, I was tired and sleepy and exhausted and she insisted to make me drinks and that I had to try the Jacuzzi before I left and it wouldn’t be time in the morning, so I was like, fine, fine, I’ll go just so you’ll stop bugging me…and well…I’m so glad I gave in, cause every photographer SO needs a Jacuzzi after a hard days work!!! We sat there for almost an hour before calling it a night…lovely ending to a great day :)

The next day…me and my adorable nephew once again…and LOOK! WE’RE MATCHING!!! ;)

Right. Been a few relaxing days off work where I did pretty much nothing, ahhh (I worked last weekend again = I have days off work the following Thurs&Fri), X fingers I’ll get my CHA-boxes today so I can get started before work starts again on Monday!!

Today’s the National Day here in Norway…the Norwegian Constitution Day…

Just a few pics for mom++

Shortly after the parade started, the rain came pouring down. Actually, this (above) was pretty much the last photo of the day. Did we know it was gonna rain? Uhm yeah, we might have had a suspicion. Did we remember umbrellas and stuff? Nope. Nevertheless, that was the end of any more photos from me that day…apart from some taken w/the iPhone, like the one below.

I wore my bunad ofcourse. Østfold ftw!

Be back soon w/scrappy stuff! :)