Last night Katy and I played Settlers of Catan with C for the first time!

It wasn’t quite the full game: no development cards (and thus no Largest Army and no robber-takes-some-of-your-cards-if-you-have-too-many), and we only played to six points instead of ten. Oh, and no trash-talking (which is, of course, at least half of the game).

But guess who won?! And we didn’t go easy on him or give him any easy trades or anything. (We did advise him throughout the game a bit.) The best part was when Katy and I were racing to build a settlement in this one spot, and then he builds a road to an adjacent spot and puts a settlement there, meaning that the spot we were racing to was no longer allowed to be developed (and was in fact a dead-end, meaning Katy and I had both wasted a road… you kind of need to see the board to see what I mean, but I took no pictures).

The kid’s a natural: takes after his old man. :)

Chris(posted on Nov 1, 2008 at 8:07 am)

It was a day off of school, so I took the kids over to the Reptile Park which recently relocated to our neighborhood. They have to have a “reptile park” here, because owning reptiles is illegal (at least according to the people I’ve talked to.) It was a lot of fun, they really enjoyed it. I played around with the camera a bit, and I was suprised to see how difficult it was to keep track of all the little factors. It was kinda dark, and the kids move fast. It was hard to keep them in the frame all the time! I feel like a dork admitting this, but photography is a little harder than I thought.

Katy(posted on Dec 6, 2008 at 10:57 pm)

We took a trip down to the new Opera House, as I’d still never been. You’re supposed to be able to walk all over it, and I guess it’s a big deal or something. Except it was all closed off, and it started raining. So we walked around to the side and watched the fjord instead.

Chris(posted on Nov 24, 2008 at 6:39 pm)

Overheard: “C, have you ever seen me wipe the table? Have you ever seen me wipe the table like that??”

Good times. :) In other news, I think I’m having nasal hallucinations. I’m not hearing voices, or seeing things, but I am smelling things. It’s been happening, on and off, for maybe a year now. Today, it was onion rings. All day, everywhere I went: onion rings.

I don’t even like onion rings.

Chris(posted on Nov 11, 2008 at 4:53 pm)

Details of a building we passed on our way to Frogner park.

Chris(posted on Nov 19, 2008 at 10:32 am)

We took a lovely, if cold, trip to Frogner park.

Chris(posted on Nov 24, 2008 at 7:25 pm)

Joey’s second baby, Rachel Jolie has arrived! This is the pretty pink quilt her Grandma Susie made for her.

Katy(posted on Jul 15, 2009 at 11:23 am)

We had some errends to run, and Katy wanted to take some pictures of some of the things she’s knitted. So we moseyed around our neighborhood and took some pics.

Chris(posted on Nov 25, 2008 at 7:37 pm)

We applied for C to start his elementary school career at the Oslo Montessori Skole, and so we were invited to their annual Christmas fundraiser/party. It was a little too busy at first, but we found a corner of the gym/cafe and watched the Christmas concert and then had a sandwich and waffels while the kids played on the stage.

Katy(posted on Dec 15, 2008 at 8:05 am)

I don’t know how old this tree is, but the fence must be older.

When this guy was but a wee sapling, it must have chanced to grow its trunk in between one of the squares in the fence. Or maybe someone put it there? Who knows.

But it grew right through it. It’s a pretty big tree now. What surprises me the most is how intact the trunk is just a few inches above the intersection and obvious trunk-wound. I guess I always imagined that trees grew up, like if someone was pushing it up from beneath. But if that were true, the trunk would be mangled the whole way up, and probably the tree would not have survived.

Of course, now that I think about it, it’s stupid to think a tree would grow like that. But since I’ve never watched a tree grow, I still had the mental model of tree growth that I’ve had since I was 3.

Which begs the question: what other juvenile mental models do we still have, that we’d abandon as absurd if we ever thought about it, but that we just don’t ever think about?

Chris(posted on Nov 25, 2008 at 8:10 pm)