Bliss's first graduation.

Bliss's pre-school held a graduation ceremony on Friday. She's very excited to be starting school the week after next!

Bliss is 4!

Bliss celebrated her 4th birthday recently with a party at "Pump It Up" (a kids party place with a bunch of large bouncy inflatables), a very exciting event for her. She's now eagerly awaiting her 5th birthday, which she says will be in two week's time.


Bliss & friends.











Blowing out the candles.













Bliss and Devlin in the birthday chair.

Devlin enjoying his first ride on a real swing. 

Checking in from Sweden

Yesterday morning I woke up in Oslo and said to Karen: "Want to go to Sweden today". And we did. OK, so it wasn't really as spur-of-the-moment as I liked to imagine. I walked from our Oslo apartment down to the Hertz office yesterday morning to pick up a Volvo V70. We have a lot of luggage with us on this trip (kind of hard to avoid when being away from home for a month with a toddler, a baby and a shopaholic wife!), but I was fairly sure I'd be able to get it all into the Volvo, a large station wagon.
I drove back to the apartment, found somewhere close by (and, I think, legal) to park (an achievement in itself) and then Karen had to dash off to a final meeting at the University College ("Hogskolen i Oslo" in Norwegian).
When Karen returned we finished up the packing and then came the task of getting all our luggage downstairs (from our 6th floor) apartment in the tiny elevator, and then into the car. I'm glad to say I was successful - with very little room left to spare! And I was still able to get the kids in. :-)
The people at Hertz told me that the car was supposed to have a navigation system - which was going to be very useful. Damned if I could get it to appear though. The Volvo doesn't have a screen built into the front of the dash like most, but a screen that pops up from the top of the dash - if you can figure out how. I couldn't see any buttons anywhere that looked like they had anything to do with navigation. The two(!) remote controls that I found in the centre console had no affect. Playing with the stereo controls I managed to get the screen to come up to show live television, but that wasn't much use to me. I looked in the manual, which unfortunately is all in Swedish and it seemed to indicate there should be some nav system buttons on the steering wheel, but I didn't see any. So before leaving town I dropped by the Hertz office to have someone come and show me how to get the nav system activated. Turns out that the buttons for it are hidden on the back of the steering wheel! And the nav system DVD hadn't actually been loaded. Unfortunately the DVD drive for it is in the back of the car, so that meant unloading some of the carefully packed luggage to be able to get the DVD in. Then the Hertz guy was able to bring up the nav system and kindly configured it to work in English for me. I told him I could figure it out from there.
We finally managed to depart Oslo after a final meal there at one of Karen's favourite restaurants - even if only for the name! - Chocolat, around 1:30 - a couple of hours later than anticipated. Before heading off I plugged in the address of our hotel in Boras to the nav system and proceeded to do as it told me. So far so good!
The drive to Boras took a while longer than expected. Devlin didn't seem to happy about being stuck in his car seat away from his boobies so we had to stop every now and then to get him happy again. Luckily one of those Devlin inspired stops turned out to be the place we were looking for where we could get our tax refund on the load of stuff we'd bought in Norway. We got around $US170 back, so that was definitely worth the hassle (and it was a bit of a hassle - they even insisted on seeing every bag identified by the tax receipts - luckily we'd put them all into the one suitcase).
We finally got to our Hotel in Boras around 9:30 last night - after a bit of a hiccup in Goteburg where we had trouble finding the turnoff to the road to Boras (E40).
The hotel is pretty basic - no fridge or coffee maker in the room - but the nice thing is that it has free wireless internet access. Especially nice after having to spend the last three weeks sharing a single ethernet cable between our two computers (and turning the cable modem on and off each time we switched the cable over, to ensure it would get allocated a new IP address - that took a bit of figuring out at first).
The weather on the drive here was pretty yucky for the most part, and it is still grey and wet here today.
Tomorrow should be fun - we're catching a ferry (the 12:45 express which takes two hours) from Goteburg to Frederikshavn, Denmark and from there will drive to Billund, home of Lego HQ and Legoland!

A month in Scandinavia

The Fisher family is spending the month of May in Scandinavia. We're spending the first three weeks in Norway and will then spend a fourth week in Sweden and Denmark before heading back to Seattle.
Right now we're just about at the end of our time in Oslo.
We're staying in an apartment fairly close to the King's palace. Bliss is wading in one of his duck ponds in the palace grounds in this picture.

Welcome baby Devlin!

Devlin Norman Fisher was born on February 23, 2006 at 7:35am at Evergreen Hostpital in Kirkland, Washington, USA. He weighed 7lb 12oz at birth and was 20 inches long and is working hard to put on more pounds (or kilos).

Kalaloch - May 2005

Bliss enjoying the sand and her new toys.

Vashon Island visit - April 2005

Karen & Bliss on Vashon Island