An appreciation of amazing mother in law and all the people who love and care for her

Way back on June 26, when we were visiting Atlanta before heading for Norway, my mother in law went into the hospital with some pain in her abdomen thinking she might be having signs of a heart attack. We all thought she would be out in a day or so, and so when we visited her two days later just before we left to head off on sabbatical, we were sure she’d be out of the hospital within the week. Now, 47 days later, Mary Ellen has been on an odyssey battling pancreatitis and it’s many related complications, extended stays in the ICU, batteries of tests, treatments, and procedures and so much more.

You might think that an experience like that would drain a person’s spirit and leave them with little reason to smile. But not Mary Ellen—her unsinkable spirits and her determination to overcome every obstacle are amazing, and even on days when she couldn’t speak at all, her smile filled the room.

On the 41st day of her hospitalization, Mary Ellen got to go outside for the first time because of her wonderful occupational therapist, Danielle. We arranged for her to get a visit from two of her granddaughters when she exited the hospital doors. You can see the smile I’m talking about—there isn’t much medicine in the world better than a sunny day and two granddaughters.

Presently, Mary Ellen is out of the ICU, making great progress in breathing on her own, and getting ready to move to Long Term Acute Care facility that will continue to work with her on breathing and other rehab to get back to normal.

Secondly, I am deeply impressed by the incredible care Mary Ellen has received throughout all of this. Certainly, Northside Hospital and all of their doctors and nurses are incredible, but the most impressive thing has been to see the way in which all of the family has cared for Mary Ellen throughout this journey. Diana’s Dad has spent literally every day with Mary Ellen since she entered the hospital. Diana’s sister, a Nurse Practitioner, has also spent every day at the hospital and has been a de facto member of her medical team, updating a daily group chat to many family members keeping all of us informed of her progress. Diana’s Uncle, a professor of Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina, spent a week in July at her bedside, while Diana’s two aunts spend every afternoon with Mary Ellen. The get well cards Mary Ellen has received could easily be measured in pounds, and when she started receiving visitors last week, her signup was quickly filled. I can’t imagine a person who has more people thinking, praying and caring for her than Mary Ellen, and when you spend any amount of time with her, even in the most challenging times, the dreariest days, or the gloomiest hospital room, Mary Ellen buoys everyone around her with her smile and positive spirit that cannot be diminished.

And today is Mary Ellen’s 48th anniversary. I’m sure this is the last place she and Jeff really want to spend such an occasion, but I hope Mary Ellen’s incredible progress over the past weeks is enough to make it a memorable one. Happy Anniversary Mary Ellen and Jeff, and we look forward to seeing you in Norway!

Back to Norway and good riddance to driving

After 3 weeks in Atlanta, Diana’s mom is doing much better thanks to lots of rest, the incredible care of her medical team, family and a couple of granddaughters that snuck in for a few visits to hospital. She’s got a long road ahead of her, but her progress has been amazing, and I’m hopeful we’ll see her in Norway this spring.

Yesterday, we started our long trek back to Oslo, which is an alternating series of trips on plans and buses, and got back this afternoon. This was the first time in 4 visits to the Oslo airport that we were able to leave with all our luggage—no lost suitcases or forgotten strollers. And we were able to bring a few more “necessities” back with us this time, like measuring cups and spoons, a vegetable peeler, and an Apple TV.

It again was such a treat to have the Flybussen bus roll up to the last bus stop and know we are just a few flights of stairs away from our apartment—this will never get old, and I’ve just got to find a way to make sure the next place I live (or retire) is right next to a public transportation nexus.

Now that it’s mid-August, our town feels way more alive than it did back in mid July when I would sometimes find myself alone in the grocery store on an afternoon around 4pm. I guess it must be true that Norwegians that the month of July off on vacation.

While I was in Atlanta, I managed to put close to 1000 miles on my sister in-law’s mini-van shuttling kids to a great lego and coding camp I found, and really found myself completely sucked back the horrors of living in a car-opolis. Whether it was having to check three different apps to figure out the fastest way to camp, being both thankful and sad that my kids could be so easily sucked into the backseat DVD player as we drove 30 minutes to camp, searching for parking every time I went somewhere, dealing with a rock that shattered the window and required a $500 repair, there’s just very little I find fun anymore about driving, even if my sister in law has the coolest minivan around (Thanks Julie!). I just find myself being stressed and noticing how the entire city and and beyond must designed around a vehicle first way of life in order to support a car-centric lifestyle.

My travel time in Norway is so different—it’s clear that our town and just about everywhere we go is designed around people. There’s a giant tunnel that routes traffic under our town, making the main street through our town quieter than some of the residential streets in my in-laws neighborhood back in Atlanta. I’ve never seen a traffic jam in Norway, and the automatically collected tolls nearly every highway around Oslo and pay parking must have a lot to do with that—let people who use cars pay for the externalities they cause, and make fast, efficient and affordable public transportation available. It’s hard to overstate how much of an effect this has on the feeling of a place.

The next week is a busy one for us, and really the last of the summer. Maddie and Ada have school orientation on Monday, and we have some great friends (yea Gilheanys!) visiting Oslo for a few days this week, and this weekend, we’ll do the Norway in a Nutshell tour that seems to be a must do on every visitor’s itinerary.

A tale of two museums

During our week in Paris, we had the chance to check out two science-related museums, the Musée Curie, and the Cité des Sciences et de Industrie.

I decided to write up this visit in the form of a letter to the curators of the Cité des Sciences et de Industrie that I will be mailing soon. Read on, and you will understand why.

Dear Curators,

Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting your museum with my wife and two daughters. My eldest Daughter, Maddie (age 7), has developed a passion for all things science, and physics in particular, so our first stop was the exhibit on the Great Story of Our Universe. As a high school physics teacher, I was eager to explore this exhibit with my daughter.

At first, I was struck by just how beautiful the exhibit was—your designers did a marvelous job of creating a inviting space that wonderfully used lighting and texture to evoke a flow through the origin of our universe, with great hands-on experiments that allowed you to touch and view meteorite samples, or see a live infrared photo of oneself to understand how we are able to classify stars based on the light they emit.

Maddie looking at some meteorite samples.

I was particularly impressed by so many of the simple but engaging experiments—a parallax experiment that explained how we measure the distance to stars, by demoing how to make a measurement of a “star” on the wall across the room. My favorite demo of all was the side by side model solar system and galaxy, and the text that invited the patient to see how these two models behave very differently. Maddie and I watched it for at least 5 minutes, and she made so many observations about the differences she saw. What a wonderful introduction to Dark Matter.

After getting through the first floor of the exhibit, I was pleasantly surprised to see it went to a second floor that explains the strange physical laws that “enable us to describe and understand the evolution of the Universe.” Here again, I was impressed with all the interactive exhibits and even more impressed with your efforts to explain not just some of the oldest physical laws like gravity and electromagnetism, but also to fully cover discoveries in quantum mechanics (we loved Schrodinger’s Cat in a Box), and even some very recent discoveries in cosmology.

As I walked around this exhibit, I began to notice something strange—every column in the exhibit featured the name and biography of a famous physicist or mathematician, and every single one of them was a male. I’m also pretty sure that they were all white European men—Newton, Galileo, Descartes, Schrödinger, Lorentz, and on and on—more than 20 names in total. I looked hard, and I didn’t see a single woman or person of color in the entire collection.

In another part of the exhibit on the second floor, there was an exhibit presenting nine quotes about the nature of the universe from scientists and philosophers throughout history, and every one of them came from a white man, as best as I can recall.

It’s easy to come away from this exhibit thinking that our entire understanding of the universe, and the field of physics, is the result of the work of a bunch of dead white dudes with gray hair and more often than not, a mustache, leaving out so many important stories of women who have contributed to this understanding and what the field of physics looks like today.

There are so many incredible women scientists who have made deep and profound contributions to this story, that I find it hard to understand how they could all be left out of this exhibit. Adding a description of Vera Rubin and her groundbreaking work on galactic rotation curves would have have been an informative and powerful addition to the first-floor exhibit about the rotation speeds of galaxies and our solar system. Marie Lavoisier, Marie Curie, Joycelin Bell, Henrietta Leavitt—each of these women made major contributions to experiments and discoveries that were already mentioned or alluded to in your second-floor exhibit, and they have inspiring and important stories that are worth sharing with visitors to the exhibit.

With the exhibit’s vast amount of space and focus on highlighting recent discoveries in physics, I can imagine a wonderful addition that highlights very recent discoveries in physics—like the discovery of gravitational waves, showing photos of the hundred-person plus team that made this discovery. A wall featuring photos and descriptions of scientists today could very well inspire many of your youngest visitors to see themselves as scientists and imagine how they might contribute to understanding the universe when they grow up.

This exhibit also raises the opportunity to talk about why the field of physics has been historically dominated by men—specifically pointing out the ways in which women have been excluded from educational opportunities and research organizations since practically the beginning of science. At the same time, you could point out the hidden and unrecognized ways in which women have made vast contributions to the field of physics—from serving as the “human computers” to painstakingly type the dissertations of their husbands. Perhaps this conversation looking at the nature of who does physics could be a web resource, similar the great ones I saw on the ground floor in Cite des Enfants, where the signage encourages parents to visit a website for more ideas about how to engage children in the experiences they had in the museum.

I know that museums are incredibly powerful places—they are some of the most important places for inspiring young people and opening their minds to possible careers and ideas they would not have otherwise considered. This was made most clear to me in the case of my own daughter, who developed a love for Marie Curie after reading a short story describing her life in “Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls.” After reading that story, Maddie decided she wanted to be a scientist just like Marie Curie and wanted to know all she could about the Nobel Prize. When Maddie read in the story that Marie Curie lived in Paris, she asked us if we could visit her house, and through that, we discovered the wonderful Museé Curie, a tiny three-room museum dedicated to the life of Marie and Pierre Curie. Maddie pushed this museum to the top of our Paris agenda, and watching my daughter in this space was magical. Maddie was thrilled to see Marie Curie’s office just as it existed, but she spent the most amount of time scrolling through images of Dr. Curie and her family on a large video screen, occasionally fixating on a picture of Marie Curie on her wedding day. Maddie has been super fascinated with weddings recently too, and when we talked about it leaving the museum, she told me how awesome it was that her hero, Marie Curie, was also able to get married. To me, this visit scored the trifecta of science museums—it helped my daughter to not only understand an important discovery in science, it helped her to relate to the story of the human that made that discovery—emphasizing her humanity and helping my daughter to see that she too can be a scientist.

Maddie in Marie Curie’s office.

I wish we had more time to explore your museum. I’m sure I missed many exhibits that did celebrate the work done by women in science, and help students of all backgrounds seem themselves as scientists. I appreciate your consideration of these suggestions and look forward to visiting the museum again in the not too distant future.

Sincerely,

John Burk

Physics Teacher and Dad of wonderfully curious 7-year-old girl who wants to be a physicist

Back in the states for a while

After getting back to Norway on Wednesday, we were back on the Flybussen to the Oslo airport less than 24 hours later to catch a flight back to Atlanta, and we arrived late last night.

We’re back because Diana’s mom’s health took a turn for the worse a few days ago, though she has improved somewhat since then. We are all still hopeful for a full recovery, but it’s going to be a long process. For the next couple of weeks at least, Diana will be visiting her mom in the hospital while I take care of Maddie and Ada and get used to driving again.

A couple of things I’ve observed since being back in Atlanta for a Day:

The Mobile Passport App is the greatest app you’ve probably never heard of. When we got back to Atlanta at 8:30 at night we were exhausted, and the normal passport line queued outside the passport control area and back into the hallway. On Diana’s last trip back to Atlanta, she had to wait an hour in this line and then learned about the Mobile Passport app. We installed the app in the Oslo airport, scanned our passports, took our photos, and when we got to Passport control, we bypassed that horrible line and were able to walk right up to as Passport Control officer—amazing!
Giving up driving and moving to a country where food is twice as expensive in the states has been great for my health. I’ve lost almost 10 pounds, and I found my usual run in the park near my inlaws’ house much easier than I did a month before thanks to walking everywhere.
After eating bread from French and Norwegian bakeries for the past month, all other bread is a disappointment. Le sigh.

Please do keep Mary Ellen in your thoughts and prayers.

We’ll always have Paris

It’s been a wonderful 7 days in Paris. Thanks to Diana’s college friend, Mary Lewis, we’ve gotten to experience the city through the eyes of a local.

Here are some of the things we loved about Paris, small and large:

- Croissants.

- Visiting the Musée Curie. Maddie has been obsessed with Marie Curie for the past couple of years—she loves reading her story from Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls and asks me about how she won the Nobel Prize all the time. The museum is a wonderful little gem—they’ve left Dr. Curie’s lab and office just as they were when she worked there.

Marie Curie’s office

Maddie writing her name in the guest book at the museum.

- Incredible playgrounds and parks everywhere you turn, each of them with wonderful water spigots for refilling water bottles on warm days.

This is the beautiful Beuttes-Chamount Park, which had this wonderful water feature that ran all the way down a steep hillside to a large pond.

- Having every piece of playground equipment marked with a maximum and minimum age. Maddie and Ada seemed to pay no attention, but I’m glad Paris pays this much attention to detail.

There’s even a playground in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.

- Of course we went to the Louvre, and of course, it was gigantic and overwhelming. It was super hot, and Maddie and Ada weren’t all that excited to explore on this day. You can see our official portrait, with Ada refusing to be photographed in the back.

Numbering the floors of a building starting with 0 (and if you’re the science museum, labeling the basement with negative 1).
The subway—it’s hot and much dirtier than the pristine public transportation system (honestly, most operating rooms are probably dirtier than the Oslo T-Bane), but it goes everywhere, and the trains run on tires, which is just amazing.
Simple lunches—sure, it takes separate trips to the Boulangerie, Fromagerie and the fruit stand, but the result is incredible—a picnic with the best bread, cheese and fruit you’ve ever tasted.
Getting to know a neighborhood: we spent most of our time around Square Saint-Medard near the Latin Quarter in the 5th Arrondissement. This is advice I took from Tyler Cowan, and it was right on the money.
In this square, we found all sorts of fun, including:
- - Dancing in the square on Sunday, when a few local musicians turn out after church to play French classics.
- Eating lunch in the playground in the shade of Saint Medard Church, that dates its origins back to the 7th century.
- Enjoying delicious ice cream and macaroons from a beautiful patisserie across the street from the playground.
- Exploring the wonderful shops along Rue Mouffetard, and finding a favorite Boulangerie and Fromagerie, that we went back to again and again.
Exploding all those stereotypes I’d heard about French people being rude. Every person we met was kind, welcoming and doted heavily on our two Maddie and Ada. It made really wish I’d kept up with my high school French so I could do a better job communicating with people we met.

In the end, Paris felt like a wonderfully livable, enormous city steeped in a deep history composed of layers upon layers. We’ll have to come back sometime.

The horrors of 10 days with no wifi

I’m sorry I haven’t posted anything on the blog in the past few days. Since we moved into the new apartment, we don’t have wifi, and so it’s been a struggle to post stuff to the blog using just my phone. Heck, it’s been a struggle just getting by, when my kids have become addicted to the Wow in the World Podcast and Goodnight Rebel Girls Podcast, and “need” them in order to be able to go to sleep. I’ve listened to the one episode of each that happened to episode on how migratory birds cross the ocean so many times now that I think I’m ready to migrate.

But today, my landlord brought the cable modem by, and after a quick trip to purchase an outlet splitter at the hardware store across the street, we have wifi. We have podcasts. We have Netflix. Google translate works reliably. All seems right in the world again.

I’m also very happy to report the great news that Diana’s mom is doing much better, and will likely move out of the ICU in the next few days. As I write this, Diana is also on a flight back to Oslo—hooray! We’ve then got a couple of days to pack bags and then we are off for a week in Paris, where Maddie is desperate to see Marie Curie’s house.

In the meantime, here are some photos of our adventures over the past week.

The playground at the center of our town is a tremendous hit.

A couple of days ago, we got library cards.

An incredible playground at Frognerparken

Sometimes all this travel is exhausting

Our first week in Norway

On Saturday, we celebrated our first week in Norway. In some ways, it feels like it has been an eternity—I’m certainly exhausting my list of easy things to do that I know will entertain Maddie and Ada. But it mostly feels like we are are still just beginning and there is so much to do.

It looks like Diana is going to be home in Atlanta for at least another week. Her mom has made some great progress, so please keep her in your thoughts and prayers.

For now, here are a couple of cute pictures of Maddie and Ada.

Maddie and Ada on the bus to the beach.

This is how they like to shop in the grocery store next to us.

A day at the beach

On Saturday, we took the bus to the beach in Sandvika. I later learned that this beach was just opened, and it is gorgeous. The water was cold, and I forgot a towel, but that didn’t stop Maddie and Ada who changed into their swimsuits on the beach and jumped right in.

I think I’m starting to see why this is such a family friendly place.

Here are some cool trash cans we found on the walk to the beach.

The beach! Ada starts by just putting her toes in the water.

But it isn’t long until we are swimming.

And splashing!

In the distance below, you can see a diving structure at the beach where kids would just walk jump and jump into the water—the taller platform seemed like it was about 10m. The other thing that was just awesome was a perimeter of freshly laid sod around the beach. It’s awesome to put your stuff down on the grass, and then walk onto the beach, play around, and walk back to the grass to get all the sand off your feet when you are ready to go.

There was also this awesome play structure we had to check out.

There are mermaids in Norway…of course when she saw this, Maddie asked if we could get her a mermaid tail.

Everything is expensive in Norway…even teeth

Ever since we got on the airplane to Norway a week ago, Maddie has had a wiggly tooth that she has been talking about a lot. For the past few days, it’s been hanging on in her mouth. I’ve tried to convince her to let me pull it out for the last few days with no success. She just keeps wanting to play with and talk about her wiggly tooth.

Today, we went to hang out with Maddie and Ada’s Norwegian friends (the daughters of our AirBnB hosts) and apparently as they were playing the oldest daughter, Nora, told her to pull it out. I’m not exactly sure how she did this, since Nora doesn’t speak much English, but Maddie came running into the room where Eric and I were watching the World Cup to show off her new tooth and the corresponding gap in her smile.

I asked Eric how much the tooth fairy pays for teeth in Norway, and he told me the going rate is 50kr (about $6.19), and has been going up, since the girls talk at school. It was 10 kr when he was a child.

I will add that Norway is as close to a cashless economy as I’ve seen. When I visited in March, I didn’t pay cash once. We visited the ATM earlier this week to get some money to pay for strawberries at the stand, but I later discovered that even they took credit cards.

All this is to say I think the tooth fairy is struggling to find any coinage to pay for teeth around here. So far, all I’ve seen is a small 5 kr coin. Maybe the tooth fairy should leave a note saying that when Maddie gets her Personal Number, she will send her some more money using Vipps (Norwegian Venmo). (The personal number is something like a social security number—it takes a few weeks to get one in the mail after tuning in a ton of paperwork, and is necessary for opening bank accounts, cell phone contracts, internet service and seemingly just about everything we need these days).

My kid is a Norwegian now

One thing I’ve noticed young kids do in Norway is they run around a lot in their underwear or without any clothing at all. It was true of the kids of our AirBnB host, and I’ve also seen kids playing in the fountain the center of town in just their underwear. The weather is beautiful and bordering on hot—who can blame them.

Ada has now decided to join the movement. She stood out on our balcony (in the center of twin) after dinner for 20 minutes talking to herself, and it was only the promise of Norwegian cartoons on the TV that could get her to come back in.