I’m off!  For 8 months…or so.  Off to sail the seas, to work hard, and to hopefully make a few friends and have some great new memories.

In the meantime, enjoy a video of Isak playing my absolute favorite song ever that he’s played…Red Rose Rendevouz, a jazz waltz that is just incredible.  I’m very proud especially since he’s on summer break from lessons and has done this completely on his own.  He has worked very hard to get it put together before I leave and it has left me in tears several times because he plays with such beautiful feeling.

Seriously, could this kid BE any cuter?

This has been a long time coming.  She doesn’t wash it after swimming, or doesn’t wash it well, and she doesn’t condition it.  And on top of that, she does not brush her hair.  I brush it when I’m home but it needed to be brushed a lot more than once a day or every other day or every three days when I have duty.  It got to a point where it was so damaged that she couldn’t really brush it at all and it started matting in the back.  Not a pretty sight.

So I decided to cut it, and I let her pick out the style, and she found one in a magazine that the stylist kind of followed except that she decided to take it upon herself to assume that she shouldn’t put any hair products into her hair so she kept cutting shorter and shorter.  While I’m not entirely happy that she didn’t cut it how we asked it to be cut, it does look super cute on her and it is so. much. healthier!

Isak also got a haircut so the Shaggy look he was rocking has been scaled back to a more respectable little boy length.

This picture was just too cute not to share.  This is a look I’ve seen from Anja a lot lately, the scrunched-nose giggle face.  I love it.

One thing that the kids have been asking since we got orders to Spain way back in March or so was “Are we going to see snow??” They were so little when we moved away from Iceland - Isak was 3 and Anja was not even 2.  When we lived in Washington from 2002 to 2005, it snowed maybe twice the entire time, and both times it was a forgettable dusting.  And then, of course, 3 years in Spain and there was not a flake to be seen.

So we moved to the Pacific Northwest where it’s mild and rainy year round.  Not cold, not snowy, but mild and rainy.  One would think that in a mild and rainy climate, if the temperature drops to below freezing it would be cold and snowy, yes?  Apparently, if the temperature drops below freezing the clouds have nothing better to do except move to Wisconsin to dump snow there instead.  My kids have been understandably disappointed by the clear blue skies over the last week as the temperature dipped all the way down, according to our thermostat, to 11°.

But this morning I was sleeping in, until I heard a loud yell of, “Kids!  Look out the window!” with an instant response of “It’s ssssssnnnnnoooooooowwwwwwwwiiiiiiiinnnnnnngggggg!!!!!!”

It started out slow at first, just some flurries, but it turned into a winter wonderland of fat, fluffy snowflakes that ended with about an inch and a half of snow.  The kids, however, didn’t know how long it would last so they wasted no time in getting out and enjoying it.

See all those little patches, and the long spoke-y lines?  That’s how much snow it took to make a snowball at this point.  But they did a good job of amassing a small arsenal of them, ready to launch at unsuspecting parents.  Little did they know that I was watching from the upstairs loft.  I love the view from here, especially when it involves sneaky little ones plotting for our demise.

Can you name three unusual things about this picture?

1. Isak is wearing pants.
2. Isak is wearing shoes.
3. Isak voluntarily got himself wet, although he probably didn’t know it when the snow was still frozen.

The kid hates pants, and he hates shoes, but he was dressed so fast in layers of clothes, socks and shoes, and out the door before I even knew what was happening.

Anja, on the other hand, is NEVER one to pass up on an adventure.  The snow brought out the best in her beautiful, energetic personality.  She’s happiest when she’s outside, and today was not only no exception, but her happiness was at a whole new level.  She couldn’t get enough of it.

Who needs a hill to roll down when you have our driveway?  I wish I could figure out how to calculate the slope, but unofficial calculations show it’s The Perfect Slope For Turning Oneself Into a Human Snowball:

She really just couldn’t get enough of it.  No matter that there was barely enough snow to cover the ground, she was GOING to make the most of it.  I love this picture; I can just feel her love for being outside and the excitement of finally being able to make a snow angel.

And then my cover was blown, and the even bigger personality came out…

Unfortunately, I didn’t get any “after” pictures to show how much snow we ended up with, but it was quite a bit!  Probably close to two inches…enough for mini snowmen complete with mini carrot noses (sorry no pictures!)  If it snows overnight and is enough to close down the schools (from what I hear, 4″ is more than enough to shut them down around here…wusses!), they are going to have so much fun tomorrow they won’t ever be able to have this much fun again.

Isak is having a sleepover at Niki’s while Anja is at her second swim meet - her first pentathlon - while I’m at home, catching up on some sleep and rest.  While I feel bad for not being at her meet, after her last meet coupled with the last few weeks of work, I’m beat.  And I have a birthday party to go to today that involves driving an hour each way and as tired as I was, that would probably have been a dangerous prospect if I hadn’t gotten more sleep.

So yeah, work.  I’ve settled into work and am enjoying it very much.  I work with a great group of people, I’m getting involved with the ship, and I finally feel like this is why I reenlisted.  That said, everything is not roses:  my day is extremely long - I’m up at 3:45, out of the house by 4:30 for a 20 minute drive to the base and a 2 hour ferry ride to the ship.  We work our butts off until 3:30, when I do the ferry and drive back home, finishing my day around 6:00pm.  And those hours in between are crazy busy, and while I do like the pace, sometimes it’s frustrating because there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything that needs to be done.  My job is one thing; I can handle the stuff in the office just fine.  It’s that we’re in the shipyard getting lots of repairs, upgrades, etc. and we’re trying to get ready to get OUT of the shipyards and go back out to sea.  That involves lots of training, meetings, drills, exams, and what is probably the most frustrating is the attitude of many of the people on the ship.

I’ve been disappointed with my peers.  There are a handful of very strong ones who have good attitudes and are willing to help other people out, but for every one of them there are 10 people who are lazy, negative, and some bordering on incompetent.  Them’s fightin’ words, I know, but really…more than once, I have been astounded by some of the things I’ve seen and/or heard.

Anyway…I’m finally getting into my own groove and as long as I’m surrounded by positive influences, I do enjoy myself.  I’m finally meeting people, making some friends, settling in and making the ship my second home.  It’s not quite as nice as our beautiful house that we finally moved into, but…it’ll do.

And since we’re at the present, here are yesterday’s Halloween costumes.  Anja wanted to be Coraline, but no one seemed to sell a yellow rain slicker or yellow galoshes in her size, so we made do with what we had and what we could find.  Isak was a Croc-footed Ninja, having left his black shoes at his friend’s house the night before.  How he got home, I can’t figure out, except that he is a Ninja, you know.

I knew right away when they said it was B on the phone at work that something was wrong.  “I don’t think so,” said my coworker, “He sounded perfectly calm.”  As I suspected, something indeed was wrong:  Anja’s school called to pick her up because she fell off the balance beam and cut open her chin.

Lucky for me!  I work 2½ hours away from my house!  And we only have one car, which was sitting happy as could be on the pier on the base all by its lonesome.  Fortunately, we have a friend from Spain who happens to live about a mile away who could pick up B to get her, but she had out-of-state visitors that already had plans and couldn’t take them to the hospital.  I finally got home 4 hours after it happened and we went straight to the emergency room.  The PA that saw her determined that she’d need stitches, and she was a bit nervous about the stitches but we assured her that she wouldn’t feel a thing…after she got the shots to numb it.

In case you’re not familiar with -caine medications - like I was - they have to inject it pretty much straight into flesh where the wound is…and this, my friends, is not a procedure for the faint of heart.  I realized during this whole ordeal how NOT okay I am with blood, especially blood coming out of my precious child’s face.  When he stuck the needle in it, I made the grievous mistake of watching, and even now the thought makes me a little bit woozy.  Anja, on the other hand, was a trooper.  She squeezed my hand so very, very tightly (and needed to be reminded to breathe when it was over) but she let him do his work without wiggling or screaming or even shedding a single tear.

As I mentioned, she was nervous about getting the stitches but once the numbness kicked in, she was totally fine.  So fine, in fact, that the PA had to tell her to please stop talking so he could get the stitches in properly.  Because she’s a picker, he thought it was best to put in individual stitches instead of looping them so if she did pick at them, they wouldn’t all unravel.  Smart guy, that one.  When all was said and done, she had 8 little stitches stitched of a lovely blue thread.  She was anxious to see them, and when he let her look in the mirror, she gasped in excitement and said, “Mamma, from now on, my new name is Bluebeard!”

Bluebeard (click if you're not faint of heart)

We have now been living displaced for 26 days, in this same small hotel room for 20 of those 26 days.  It’s an Extended Stay “Deluxe”, which offers a kitchenette with a microwave, stove, oven and fridge.  These things have made living here just a tad bit easier to deal with since we can make eggs and pizza and other somewhat home-y things to eat instead of fast food. 

However, the room remains a small, cooped up space which offers us no privacy from each other and as such, tension can get a bit high.  We have a game, and some paper for drawing and writing, and of course there’s TV.  The other day I bought a few books, a book for each kid, and today as tension in the kids was mounting, I decided off with the TV and on, instead, with the books. 

Due to the lack of space, the kiddos share a bed to sit on to read, and though Isak refuses to sleep on it with her - she’s a pain in the butt to him when it’s time to go to sleep - it’s the only comfortable place for him to read.  So there they were together, on the bed, and Anja is very obviously getting frustrated with him.  I couldn’t understand why as Isak was just laying there on his half of the bed, reading.  Her whininess increased until Isak finally demanded, “What?!” to which she replied, “You’re thinking something of me, you’re thinking in your mind, ‘She’s doing something wrooooooooong, she’s not doing it right!’”

Ah, this is so much fun.