Fjord perfect

Our days in Sørlandet are drifting by, and suddenly there are only a few days before Norway's peacefulness is replaced with Thailand's hullabaloo. Looking back on the past two weeks, I see how easy it is to slip into the happy indolence which I remember from childhood summers spent here at my family's hytte. There has been a lot of downtime, yet chock full of pleasant memories. Here's a bit of what we've been up to. 

Tamar has made astonishing progress in the traditional Norwegian card game  Værsågodbligærn, winning three of the last four against my mother Kristin and me, and leading us to empty the akvavit bottle and start in on another. She's also run to Grimstad a couple of times, to gawks of admiration from my relatives who don't see how she manages to raise four girls and travel incessantly, then randomly toss in dozen-km runs as though it's no big deal. 

We've roamed the fjords like Vikings on holiday, pillaging the Hennig-Olsen ice cream stands everywhere we go. We wobbled and splashed on Tvedestrand's giant inflatable water park; we saw Hakkebakke skogen and cajoled all three girls onto Tømmerenna at Dyreparken; we rowed out to an island picnic with some lovely friends who visited from Cumbria; and swam on Bjorøya in the chilly water of the open sea. 

The girls are thriving here. They race up and down to the trampoline countless times each day (Aurora has resurrected her game Boom-Yeah which you may remember from Slovakia). Tova spontaneously heads out to pick handfuls of raspberries and currants, which she doles out to her sisters (Zadie usually gets the most.) They avidly fish crabs now that we killed most of the boathouse snakes with a rake. The house is chock-full of books from my childhood and Kristin's, and there's been reading aplenty - Tova is getting very confident at reading simple words, and Sophia can just magically read Norwegian as well as English. Aurora devours books as always. We read Trollmannen's Hatt, a Moomintroll book translated to Norwegian, and the girls were riveted and now want pets named Tufsla and Vifsla. 

Zadie is plumper and cuter than ever. She placidly eats grass and watches her sisters play, she sings loud wordless tunes to herself, she goes berserk with some complex emotion when Wilma the tiny dog licks her face ecstatically, and she gets carried around and played with by all three of her sisters regularly. She and Tova fell asleep in each other's arms last night and it was the cutest thing on the planet at that moment. 

Kristin and I cleaned out the Augean boathouse, which involved sifting through vast amounts of interesting stuff: fishing tackle, my grandfather's ancient medicine bottles, seaworn furniture, toy boats from my boyhood, a dozen oarlocks, big conical crab traps...all the paraphernalia of a much-loved Scandinavian boathouse. 

Now it looks tidy and spacious yet musty and shadowy, which I think is perfect. 

In the evenings, when Tamar is not whooping us at cards, we've had nice chats with Kristin and my aunt Ingvild and uncle Bjorn-Olav on any number of topics - how Norway should address the refugee crisis, local history (the largest boat in the world in the 1400s was built 200 feet down the fjord from us!), recovering from lower back pain, what the world is coming to, protecting the fjord from conniving developers, and on and on. We will definitely miss this place! 

Tova's curls should be immortalised somehow

Sophia's resting face

Aurora's poker face during Dad Joke Hour