First day of school

First day of school

The brothers are ready! The day has finally arrived! The first day of school. Our little schoolboy will turn six on Sunday and he has been waiting for school to start for real for so long. He started to read when he was 4,5 years old and is a fluent reader. A couple of his friends from kindergarten will be in his class so we are hoping today will be the best day ever, he claimed so when he was walking with us to school this morning. There is a short walk to school, only a few hundred meters, and the path is quite safe – no streets to cross so after this week, he and his brother can go by themselves.

I really hope he’ll find school both entertaining and a good place to be at. If the feeling is good then all doors are open.

Berry season

Berry season

IMG_0973.JPGNow it’s the season to go picking berries! We have a variety of wild berries here on the north coast, mainly three types of blueberries, my favorite type are called bilberries and we try to pick as much as possible before the nighttime frost ruin them. Harvesting berries in late july & august is a very common tradition in Iceland and in fact one of the few sources of vitamin c (along with root-vegetable) that my ancestors in Iceland used to survive, there are no fruit trees here because the summer is too short and cold for them to flourish.

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Welcome baby girl

Welcome baby girl

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Our little girl was born shortly after noon on sunday June 22. It was such a beautiful day and she was so alert and awake. We were home the morning after and now, almost two weeks after she was born, it feels like she’s been around forever.

It’s very common in Iceland that babies get their name announced at their christening which can be a couple of months after they are born but we decided to announce her name when she was a couple of days old, her name is Rakel.

Rakel is adjusting well to her new surroundings, drinks like a champ and delivers in her diaper like a pro. That’s how we roll these days. (more…)

A handknitted woolen sweater for each newborn?

A handknitted woolen sweater for each newborn?

How cute is this ?  The municipal leader in a small community in the West fjords, a woman named Andrea, was worried last year that no child would be born in the community so she promised, as kind of a joke to her friends, that she would knit each child born from now on a woolen sweater. The town of 270 inhabitants are now experiencing a baby boom!  She stuck by it and has in one year knitted 11 sweaters 🙂

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Only in Iceland… 🙂

Taking care of children in Iceland

Taking care of children in Iceland

I came across this article in the Guardian the other day, about child death rates in the western world for children under five. My country, Iceland, happens to have the best outcome of all countries with the rates 2.4 per 1000 while the UK has a ratio of 4.9 and the US a staggering 6.6 per 1000.

While the articles focuses mostly on public health care and financial status of parents in the UK, I’m wondering if there is something in our culture that we do differently and could be beneficial to look at. I only have Denmark to compare with personally, since we lived there for two years while our oldest was 2-4 years old.

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