Maddie has been taking piano lessons once a week after school, and she’s really starting to come into her own. Thanks to some sticker rewards from her teacher, and a used electric piano we found online, Maddie now practices every day, and really enjoys getting better at playing music. She’s got a wonderful repertoire that includes Jingle Bells, When the Saints Go Marching In, and Alouette, a song that she and Diana discovered is about plucking the feathers from a little bid.

Maddie has also taken up composition, and recently wrote her first song which she had Diana transcribe. She titled the composition “The Math Test”, because she explained that “it starts off easy and then it gets harder.”

All of this hard work recently culminated in her first concert, which you can see below. You’ll also see some of Maddie’s adoring fans—her sister, Ada and her friend trying to get front row seats.

This Sunday, we went to the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo, the National Art Museum. It was a rainy day, but we really enjoyed this trip to a reasonably sized art museum that you could comfortably visit in a couple of hours.

This museum is famous for having Edvard Munch’s The Scream, and we had to get one of us to do the tourist pose.

This was one of my favorite paintings— it also give a good sense of what things look like around the “twilight” hour of 3pm.

One of the coolest features of the museum was a drawing room, equipped with all the art supplies you needed to make a drawing of a scuplture of a mother and child in the middle of the room. Maddie had other designs on what do draw, choosing to draw Camille, the doll she recently got for her birthday.

And here’s the finished product:

One more portrait of a young artist, hard at work:

And of course, Ada had to join in on the fun.

And a couple more paintings that we liked from a special exhibition of Harald Sohlberg.