I took this one in my garden yesterday. It wasn’t until I uploaded it on the computer that I realised that the sun looks like an egg.

Note that it was around 1 or 2pm when I took it, pretty much the lightest time of day. The days are very, very short in Iceland at this time of year. We get maybe a couple of hours that could pass for daylight, otherwise it’s dark. The good news is that we’ve passed winter solstice, so it’s only going to get better from here!

And another ice bird…

My beautiful girls:

Raven is so happy to finally have some snow. The weather’s been really mild so far this year.

Our downstairs neighbours have an indoor cat. Whenever we go outside she’s there, glued to the window, wanting attention. She kept sticking her paw out and giving Luna kitty high-fives (she was gentle! ;)). Luna thought it was hilarious.

Happy New Year all! I’m sure I’ll be back soon with more pictures, and possibly even some words. ;)

Luna + me at Gullfoss.

We got home from the summer cabin this afternoon. We didn’t make all the stops on the way home that we’d wanted to as we were tired and Luna was getting fed up with being in the car. Oh well. We did however stop by Gullfoss (the “golden waterfalls”) and Geysir yesterday. They’re not my favourite places simply because they’re as touristy as places get in this country. Spectacular & well worth visiting, yes, but hidden treasures they are not.

I of course took eleventy bajillion pictures:

Gullfoss

Strokkur (in the Geysir area).

Geothermal pool – too hot for swimming!

On a completely different subject, I forgot to update that Raven does not need glasses. Yay! She was a little disappointed so she got a pair of purple sparkly sunglasses as a consolation prize.

In other Raven news, she’s officially on school holiday for the next month. I have no idea how we’re going to keep her occupied! She’s already bouncing off the walls and talking about wanting to go back to preschool to see her friends. I guess we’ll need to line up some play-dates. She’s such an intense, energetic kid that keeping her busy is no small task. There’s usually a lot going on downtown during the summer (festivals, free concerts, etc.), so we should find something.

Traffic jam.

We’ve been at a cabin in the countryside this week. I say cabin, but this place is huge! Way bigger than our little apartment. Just wonderful. We’re by a lake called Apavatn. It’s quite close to Reykjavík, about an hour and half’s drive.

We’ve been super lazy here, relaxing as much as is possible with two small kids (i.e. not very much). I feel slightly guilty about how little we’ve done, but at the same time it’s been nice to have a break without feeling like we have to cram everything into our schedule.

Yesterday we took a little drive to some caves in the area.

The view from the bottom.

On the way up.

Caves!

What’s interesting about the caves is that 100 years ago, people lived in them:

Painting of the cave house as it was 100 years ago.

From 1910-11 they were inhabited by a young couple, Guðrún Kolbeinsdóttir and Indriði Guðmundsson, then just 17 and 22 years old. They sold food to travelers passing by. Within a year they had earned enough to move to Reykjavík, and left the caves.

A few years later, from 1918-21, another young couple moved in. During their time there Jón Þorvarðarson and Vigdís Helgadóttir had three children, two of which were born in the cave. Can you imagine? One of the children, Magnus Jónsson, is still alive today. He calls himself The Caveman. Of course.

Looks cozy, no?

Raven was insistent that she was going to find some baby trolls in the cave.

Nowadays the house is gone. The caves are covered in moss, and graffiti carved into the soft sandstone.

I found Luna!

The view from inside the cave:

Remember the horses that were on the road?

The view standing on top of the caves.

I think today we’re going to visit the Golden Circle: Geysir (the original geyser), Þingvellir (Thingvellir National Park) and the Gullfoss waterfalls, so I’m sure I’ll be posting more pictures soon.

Seeing as this is *supposed* to be my art blog and I haven’t had time to draw anything new recently, I figure I might as well share some of my own UFOs.

(Please forgive the not-so-great image quality; I don’t have a scanner. The grey splodges you see on some of the pictures are shadows cast by a dirty window, not parts of the drawings.)

This first one was something I started a couple of years ago to hang up in Raven’s room. My plan was to do a mixed-media drawing/collage. I was going to draw tree branches with cut-paper leaves, and some paper flowers down the bottom.

Girl on a swing

I quite like it, but it came out a bit stiff-looking. The rough preliminary sketch I did had more life & movement to it:

Still, I think it’s nice and want to finish it.

This second sketch is based on a photo of Keith Richards’ hands. I did it in…2003? after years of not drawing. I did it to see whether I could still draw. It wasn’t intended to be used for anything, just a practice sketch.

In a similar vein, this next one is drawn from a photo of Iggy Pop (I love Iggy Pop!). Again, I wasn’t planning on using it for anything, just an exercise. I had to stop because the level of detail was making my eyes freak out. I’ll need new glasses before I attempt something like this again!

Back to drawings for children, recognise this? It’s from Madeline, Raven’s favourite book. Not much to say about this one. Again, it was supposed to go on Raven’s bedroom wall.

“To the tiger in the zoo, Madeline just said, “Pooh-pooh.”

And one last one for (and of) Raven. I did it when she was around 18 months old and at the peak of her cat obsession. It looks better in person – the light was terrible. I need to make the colour a bit more intense, but otherwise it’s more or less finished.

Raven with the dapper Mr. Cat

So those are my unfinished pieces. Now I want to know, what do you have in your unfinished projects pile? (It doesn’t have to be art, it can be anything!) And what’s keeping you from finishing it?

I got my first glasses when I was six years old. As a child of the 80s, I of course chose enormous, thick, fuchsia-pink plastic frames. Hideous. I recall them looking something like this but about 37x more pink. Actually, they probably looked pretty adorable on my six-year-old self, but it didn’t feel that way at the time.

I have a distinct memory of my first time wearing them to school. Everything was fine until we got to the gate, at which point I flipped-the-holy-crap-out because I didn’t want to be seen in them. Even at 6, I knew that enormous pink glasses were decidedly not cool. Thankfully the embarrassment wore off almost immediately, I got over it and life went on. (A year or so later my best friend got glasses too. She chose frames identical to mine and OMG that meant we were TWINS!!1!!11 Yeah, we were pretty rad.)

All of which brings me to the point of this post. Raven’s going to the optometrist (optician? opthamologist?) tomorrow to see whether she needs glasses. She’s been complaining that her vision sometimes gets  blurry and she has to blink and rub her eyes to bring things back into focus. So off to the doctor we’ll go.

I don’t think we’re going to have any problems with her not wanting glasses. Quite the opposite – I think she’s going to be upset if she doesn’t end up needing them. She’s been talking about wanting glasses for ages. She sees them as a glamourous accessory, something that usually only grown-ups (such as her very glamorous bespectacled parents) get to wear.

So we’ll see. I’m hoping the doctor will tell us her eyes are perfect, but I’m glad she feels positively towards glasses in case she does end up getting them. I’ll update tomorrow with the verdict!

Personal blogs:

http://musefusion.blogspot.com
http://yeehawranchmamasheri.wordpress.com/
http://theicelandexperience.wordpress.com/
http://epa82.wordpress.com
http://maturestudenthanginginthere.wordpress.com

Style, craft, home, design, etc:
http://longform.org/
http://blog.houseoffifty.com/
http://smittenkitchen.com/
http://craftgawker.com/
http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/
http://joannagoddard.blogspot.de/

Thanks for the great suggestions! :)

We found wild thyme at Raven’s preschool and took it home and made some tea. The pictures tell the story. Enjoy!

Wild thyme growing at Raven’s preschool

Collecting thyme.

You use the flowers for tea and the leaves for cooking.

The fragrance is unbelievable. Best smell ever.

We didn’t have a bag.

Flowers rinsed and ready for some hot water.

Steam! We didn’t have any tea filters so we just threw the flowers right in.

Sugar added.

And stir.

Scoop the flowers out and drink!

We need something to read!

Once upon a time in the days before Facebook, I had a little blog. My friends had blogs too. I read theirs and they read mine and we all commented on each others’. It was fun. Then everyone got busy and joined Facebook and don’t blog anymore. Now I have nothing to read. Okay, I have millions of blogs to read, but I have choice anxiety. I need suggestions.

What kind of blogs do I like? Well, off the top of my head, I like parenting blogs (like the uber-popular Dooce and Girl’s Gone Child, etc.) and design blogs (Design Sponge is amazing). Anything with pretty pictures of things people have made. Knitting blogs are awesome, even though I almost never knit anything myself. Some smaller blogs I’ve found and love include Saipua (so many beautiful flowers!), Vaka Design (sadly she hasn’t blogged in ages. Come back, Vaka!), Sýstraseiður (this one’s in Icelandic, but it has lots of pretty pictures), and Litla Skvís (a friend of a friend who makes beautiful things. It’s from Iceland but in English.) I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting!

Having said all that, I’m totally open-minded and will read blogs on just about any topic. Personal, feminist, expat, style, entertainment, photography, travel…it’s all good!

TL;DR: So dear readers, can anyone recommend some super awesome blogs? What are your favourites? And if you have a blog yourself, tell me about it!

29/06/12 Update: what people recommended!

I hadn’t meant for this to be such a “mommy blog”, but well, this pretty much sums up my life right now:

And because I haven’t had time for anything other than parenting, “mommy blogging” is what happens.

We had a little birthday party for Luna on Sunday afternoon. I’ve been so sleep-deprived recently and between that and her sudden clinginess I was very tempted to not do a party at all. Guilt got the better of me though. Poor Luna, the forgotten second child. Her mother hardly took any belly pictures when she was pregnant and it’s all been downhill from there. I sent out the invites.

I tend to stress myself out with parties, feeling like everyone will be silently judging me for not having 14 brauðtertur and 37 marengstertur. And I mean, why? No one cares. You come, you get free cake, the kids run around screaming, then you go home. No big deal. So, I kept it simple: chips, dips, some fruit and a few carrot & cucumber sticks, some nice cheeses and a couple of cakes from the bakery. Put it on some plates. Done.

Oh and how could I forget? My sister-in-law very kindly donated some very pink cupcakes that were just perfect (I can’t believe I didn’t take a picture of them!). So yeah, if you have a lazy party then be sure to have a sister-in-law who is both generous and also an accomplished baker.

See? Easy.

As always when I’m feeling antisocial but make myself do something anyway, the party was fun. Loud, but fun. I’m glad we did it. Luna hadn’t napped and could have been overtired and stressed out with all the people around, but she wasn’t at all. She loved it and stubbornly kept herself awake until the last guest left.

For the first time in my life ever, I failed miserably at taking pictures. Or rather, I took a bunch of pictures of everyone else’s kids. Here are the couple I got of mine:

Blowing bubbles outside.

Wearing the beautiful hand-knitted collars from their aunt. The picture doesn’t even come close to doing them justice.

The positive side to the clinginess is that it gives me an excuse to tinker with this blog while she naps on me. I’m trying to nice-ify it, so please bear with me as I change things around a bit!

I’m less than a week into blogging and I’m really enjoying it so far. For me, one of the hardest things about having a baby toddler is the feeling that I can’t get anything done beyond the bare basics. Rationally, I know I’m being too hard on myself – just keeping a little one alive & happy is a 24/7 job. Still, I need a creative outlet, and this humble blog goes a fair way towards scratching that itch. I’m also looking forward to getting back to school in the next couple of months. Studying while my baby naps makes me feel like I’m winning at life. The queen of multitasking. Okay, I’m no Þóra “Bad-Ass” Arnórsdóttir, running for president whilst briefly stopping to give birth, but it’s something.

On a completely unrelated note, I just have to share a few more pics of Luna in her birthday tutu (made by yours truly). As you can see, she’s obsessed with socks at the moment. She’s turned into a little sock bandit, thieving them from laundry baskets and even mugging them right off my feet. Fifty-bajillion toys and all she wants is nasty old socks. Toddler’s are weird.

Anyway, behold the incredible cuteness that is Luna in a tutu (and Raven too, of course!):

“Want a sock?”