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.

Today was the day when my kid threw up on a 40 minute bus ride…when we were only halfway through the ride.

Here’s the thing I’ve discovered in the past two days of trying to take care of Maddie and Ada on my own in a foreign land. You always feel like you are on, alone, with decisions coming at you from every direction, requiring brainpower, focus, cultural capital you don’t even begin to possess and all you’ve got is a Google translate and the ability to play the part of a dumb American.

But then I tell myself it’s Norway—right? If I let Maddie and Ada run feral in the middle of the Oslo Bussterminal, they’d probably be picked up by a friendly police officer, given some chocolate, free health care, and then be wonderfully cared for at some dream like police station that likely includes an awesome playground for emergencies just like these.

Here’s how the day started. After going to bed at some ungodly late hour last night, Ada woke up and wasn’t all that pleased with her breakfast.

Still, she managed to eat just about the whole thing over the course of half an hour. Meanwhile, I was packing our bag for the one goal we had for the morning—get to our noon appointment at the Olso Police Station for our residency cards. Passports? check. Water bottles? Check? Snacks? Check. What more could we need? Loaded up we headed out for the short walk to the bus stop near our Airbnb and got on the bus that would take us all the way to the Police Station.

When we got on the bus, Maddie suggested we sit in the back, her favorite spot. About 10 minutes in, Ada said, “my tummy hurts.” Then 10 minutes later, she threw up all over herself, and the dress she wore for our flight and first day Oslo in a row that she insisted was clean and she should be able to wear. She also threw up on to the bus seat. “I ate too much bagel” she said. I know what you’re thinking—throwing up on a city bus, isn’t that like a daily occurrence for most cities? Well, Oslo buses are a bit different.

Oslo transit buses are amazing—they are better than the best coach buses you’ve been in. They are spotless clean. Every seat has an overhead light, your own personal USB power port, and a stop button. There are multiple screens in the bus that tell you the next three stops, and when you will arrive each one. Really, I felt like we had defiled the presidential coach at this point.

Now, I was wondering what in the world I would do—A 3 year old just ruined her favorite dress and the seat of an Oslo bus. Maddie quickly decided it was best to abandon us and moved two seats ahead. I started searching the backpack. I found a couple of tissues which weren’t even remotely up to the task, and thankfully, a change of clothes for Ada that Diana had put in there for just such an emergency. But we still had to weather the next 20 minutes of the trip. Ada was a surprisingly good sport once I was able to clean her up a bit and assured her that we would be able to save the dress.

It’s not my proudest moment, but I must confess when the bus pulled into the terminal, we just hopped out the back door and began searching for the bathroom in the bus terminal. Though it costs $1.40 to enter a bathroom in the bus terminal, and Maddie refused to go into the bathroom with “stinky Ada”, it felt like the best $1.40 we’ve spent when Ada came out in clean clothes and a rinsed off dress stuffed back into the backpack.

Amazingly, we made our appointment and completed our residency applications. We also found out we need to come back in the next couple of days with our rental contract (which we didn’t have at the time) so we can national ID numbers, tax number and start the steps for getting a Norwegian bank account (which is sure to be another blog post).

After a nice lunch at a sushi cafe next door to the police station (Ada swore she felt much better and wanted sushi), I decided it was time to head back—it was near Ada’s nap time. But for some reason, my transit card had expired, and the ticket kiosk kept declining my credit card. Here’s one of those moments where I felt decisions coming at my fast and furiously. I called my credit card company to see why they would decline the charge, and the told me that they hadn’t. So I went to find another ticket machine. Should be an easy task in a bus terminal, but the only one I could find was also broken. No worries—next door is the central train station. There’s got be a ticket machine there, right? At this point, Ada is in such a state exhaustion that she must be carried on my shoulders, and Maddie drags 10 feet behind me telling me I should carry her too. A couple of wrong turns in the central train station has me walking down the path leading to all 29 tracks, not a ticket machine in sight. We wander out the some side exit to a parking lot and only after Maddie is at her most dejected, back in the front entrance and to the main ticket counter of the central train station. Hooray! I think to myself, and remember that I can probably buy one of the fancy 7 day tickets here that might save this ordeal from happening again.

At this point, I decide to speak to an agent, who couldn’t have been more helpful and tells me that 7 day tickets are even cheaper if you buy them at the convenience store across the corridor. And this is when I realized another major lesson of the day—at any point in this ordeal I could have saved us simply by asking one of the dozens of helpful employees for directions, or where to find the nearest ticket dispenser, or how to apologize to the poor bus driver whose bus my daughter defaced with vomit.

Purchasing train tickets at a convenience store also meant Maddie and Ada insisted they needed chocolate, and since my willpower reserves were depleted, I gave in and added a $2 Kvik Lunsk to my order (they’re exactly like Kit Kats).

You’d think we were done, but no. Since we had already walked at least a kilometer through the train station, I proposed that we just take the subway back. Ada said yes, but Maddie for some reason is totally fearful of the subway at the moment, so I decided to save that growth moment for some other day, and since the bus drops us off closer to our Airbnb, we’d be less likely to collapse from fatigue in the afternoon sun.

There’s more to this story—but I think you now see that this was a Shakelton-esqe adventure, and you don’t need to hear about all the craziness that ensued when we had to walk through a shopping mall to get back to the bussterminal and Maddie and Ada saw a toy store on the way.

Needless to say, on the way back, Ada was so exhausted that she fell asleep sitting up, and even passing the Royal Palace was of no interest to her.

You would also think that getting back home and eating dinner would be a good end to the day, but alas, I still needed to meet with our landlord, sign our lease and transfer our 6 suitcases and 2 duffle bags to the new apartment. And here’s the final lesson—you are truly never alone—people are always willing to help, even strangers, even when the asks are way larger than you would imagine. I had no ideas what I would do with 2 little girls while I was doing all of this moving, so I just asked our Airbnb host if Maddie and Ada could play with their daughters, and they happily agreed. My landlord is amazing, and thankfully drives a small SUV and not a tiny electric car like many other Norwegians. It only took us two trips to get all of our luggage to the apartment. I was also exactly right in a previous post about the location of our apartment. We are right next to the train station, above the grocery store and adjacent to a toy store. The apartment is fully furnished and I think it’s going to be perfect. After figuring out some details of international wire transfers (yeah Transferwise), I got this pretty cool looking set of keys and we will move in tomorrow afternoon.

Oh, and there was a camera in the back of the bus, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the super efficient Norwegian transit service tracks us down and makes us pay to reupholster a bus seat. Should any of them be reading this, I’m really sorry, and will stock my bag with baby wipes once I can locate them at the grocery store.

Diana left early this morning for Atlanta. We had a fun time figuring out which of the zillion awesome public transportation options to the airport would be best for her flight, and she settled on the bus that goes straight from our town to the airport in 1 hour and 20 minutes with free wifi and usb charging ports on the bus. As I type this, Diana is somewhere over the Atlantic, and her mom is doing much better–she’s breathing on her own after the doctors managed to remove quite a bit of fluid on her lungs. Please keep your thoughts and prayers coming for her.

By the time Ada and Maddie were up and ready for the day, Diana was halfway to the airport, so they got to chat with mom over FaceTime, while we ate the last bit of food in the house. This meant today would be full of new challenges-we’d need to get groceries for two days, I’d need to figure out how to convince a 3 year old she could really walk down to the town, and much more. I must admit, this morning, I was a bit apprehensive; I’ve taken care of Maddie and Ada for long stretches of time before, but never in a completely new place, without a car, without much in the way of food, and without any understanding of the language. Would we survive the wilds of Norway while Diana is away?

We started off with a visit to Maddie and Ada’s school playground, which put them in a great mood to start the day.

Maddie wanted to make sure I pointed out that she saw her friend’s name here in Norway:

And here’s a video of them on the cutest swing on the preschool playground. HAGS, in addition to being the acronym everyone seems to write in 1st grade yearbooks, is also the name of a Swedish manufacturer of playground equipment.

Just across the street from the kids school is the Bekkestua Public Library, so we decided to stop in and check it out. It’s amazing. Even the simplest of children’s books is beyond my ability to understand at the moment, sadly. But there is a big collection of English language YA fiction, and a modest collection of English language kids books, along with a bunch of wooden trains and other toys that will likely be fun to play with, especially on cold winter afternoons.

After picking up another pint of strawberries from the farmstand in the center of town, we took on my greatest fear, the grocery store. Yesterday, we discovered that all grocery stores in our town (and all of Norway, I think) are closed on Sundays, so we were totally out of food at home. I needed to simultaneously plan out a menu for the next three days, and keep Maddie and Ada from grabbing everything in sight and loading it into the basket. I’m happy to report that we were successful, though a promise of an ice cream cone might have been necessary. $70 in groceries should keep us well fed until we move into our apartment on Wednesday.

After heading home for lunch, Maddie and Ada rediscovered their Norwegian friends, Nora and Julie, the daughters of our AirBnB hosts. Nora and Julie are almost the same ages as Maddie and Ada, and they had a wonderful afternoon jumping on the trampoline, swimming in their kiddie pool, and trying to communicate with each other when they don’t speak the same language. Somehow, they manage to play wonderfully together, playing games on the iPad, building things with Legos, and running all around the backyard.

Here’s a photo of their swim party. The house in the background is our AirBnB rental.

Maddie has developed a real fondness for our Norwegian friends, and I’ve had a few good conversations with our host. The most amazing thing is that when we move, we’ll be less than 2km from them. Nora and Julie’s schools are right next to Oslo International, so hopefully we will find a way to grow a friendship here.

And that’s pretty much the day. Dinner was salads, some French fries and some bacon and onion hot dogs Ada picked out of the freezer case— Bacon in Norwegian is exactly the same as in English, and Maddie and Ada are addicts—we also have bacon cream cheese for our bagels. Tomorrow, we head back to Oslo to get our residency cards, and then in the evening will hopefully sign the lease on our apartment and figure out how to transport all of our stuff from the AirBnB to our apartment. Our landlord has promised to help, but I don’t think she understands just how much stuff we have.