Preparing for the party...

My mother turned 60 this past April! I still have a hard time believing that, not to mention what that says about my age?! Let's not go there, but yes, in the end it is all about me...

Back to the matter at hand - the reason we needed to be in Norway no later than this week is that the Big Party celebrating my mother is this Saturday. Our family has a tradition of gathering friends and family from near and far to celebrate milestones, so we expect to be innundated with relatives starting tomorrow. At least we have had a total of 2 days to recover from our trip...and should be ready to receive by tomorrow afternoon.

As such, today was spent on important tasks such as writing silly songs that we will sing for my mother on party day. Yes, you read that correctly. In Scandinavia, we make up songs that we print out in as many copies as there are guests. Each guest will get a copy of the song, and will all be expected to sing along to celebrate (or make fun of, as the case may be) the guest of honour. In our case, two songs were made. One from her five grandsons, and another from her children and children-in-law. You may be able to guess the theme of the song from her grandsons - if you thought along the lines of how wonderful a grandmother she is, you came very close. However, we were quite naughty when creating the song from her children and children-in-law. Based around the Beatles song "Yesterday", we waxed poetically about how old she's become...it is going to be hysterically funny. Or not at all. Depending on your feelings around the issue of age. I will let you know how it goes...

Mike did not have a lot of time to spend creating lyrics, as he had a golf tournament to go to in the afternoon, and thus spent the morning brushing up on his Norwegian golf terminology. Fortunately, most of the necessary words are the same as in English, such as "green", "bogey", "driver", etc. Not sure he knows how to say "d#$% it" in Norwegian, but that may be just as well...he did make sure he knew that "fore" is "fore" in Norwegian, too!

The boys are doing so well. They love being with their cousins, and we had a little photo session with them this afternoon. Christopher was thrilled to hold his baby cousin Emil, and I think he even got a smile out of him!

They are getting a lot of use out of the trampoline we purchased and assembled with great gusto yesterday. I went on it for a while today - and it was a riot! What a great way to exercise. I am trying to figure out how BodyAttack might be done on a trampoline. Honestly, it would just make it so much more pleasant!!

Tomorrow will undoubtedly be another busy day for us, but I will keep you posted on our happenings. Hope to hear from you too. Please use the comments feature and let me know what you think of this way of communicating.

XOX Heidi from Norwayland...