Everything you never wanted to know about Aksel’s birth

So, the thing you need to know about Aksel’s birth is that I had spent a lot of time agonizing over whether to pursue a home birth or go with a birth centre, with the assumption that medicine would play only a small role in our birth experience. In the end, choice had nothing to do with it. Instead, we rode the roller coaster of real life right through a series of misadventures and into the delivery suite at the hospital. Not that anything went particularly wrong--the kid had an APGAR score of 10 just one minute after birth! But, well, let’s just say that it was all a little bit unexpected.

You see, Aksel was due to be born on July 11th, and my mom and her sisters were scheduled to arrive in London that afternoon. Still pregnant, I somehow managed to get a bad summer cold on July 10th. That must be why, when I started having contractions on the 13th, my body shied away from active labor. The pains would come every few minutes, but just when I thought they’d settled into a rhythm, there would be a huge fluctuation. After a day of this, my dear aunts suggested I try going on all fours to see if that would help. Brilliant idea. I tried it later that night. Question: Have you ever been kicked in the lower abdomen? And maybe peed yourself a little? You know, just a little?

No? (If you said yes, I’m sorry). Well, nevertheless I’m sure you can imagine the outcome of my experiment. A warm bath accompanied by a dramatic reading from The Princess Bride helped soothe the spasm, until maybe an hour later, when the doorbell pierced our calm, quiet environs with its heinous voice. It rang again and again. Upon answering it, we found out that our downstairs neighbor had water pouring through her ceiling. We discovered water under our tub, and that was the end of the bath. I rested while Soren helped our neighbor manage the mess, and then we packed up and went to the hospital. There, in triage, the midwives said my waters were definitely leaking and that I was dehydrated. I could stay and have fluids injected into my bloodstream, or go home until the following evening if I promised to drink a lot. Home we went.

We arrived back at the hospital at 8pm the following evening. Next time we’ll remember to call ahead. Shift changes and a busy night meant that I spent the next hour in a small waiting room, contracting, with a sharp, nauseating ache building in my back. At 9pm, a midwife walked us to a room with four curtained-off sections and a bathroom outside. Just before we entered, she casually mentioned that, of course, as it was a shared room, only one birth partner could stay the night. We should have anticipated this setback, but as I said, intervention wasn’t part of my plan, so of course I’d forgotten to research the standard induction procedures. When she saw the looks of terror on our faces, she quickly added that Mom could stick around for a few minutes as we talked about what was going to happen.

Once we’d settled into the 8-foot by 8-foot square occupied by a hospital bed, tray table, monitoring equipment, armchair and birthing ball, she told us that they were going to start by monitoring me for 30 minutes, but as there were so many laboring women coming in, I'd have to wait to be induced for at least six hours. Which would not have been so terrible if I wasn’t battling heartburn and a cold, if I wasn’t already exhausted from two days of relentless pain management, if the constant, needling pain in my back wasn’t teaming up with sufficiently painful contractions to shred my soul to pieces. It took less than two hours for me to give up on my plan of avoiding painkillers, but the wise midwives would only give me Tylenol and Codeine. This lovely combination took away the ache in my lumbar region, but it couldn’t cover over the latest unexpected development of the evening: back labor. Yes, that’s right. Back labor. Aksel was in the optimal position. Didn’t matter. That whole night, I laid on my side and Soren had the charming job of shoving my hip into the bed during each contraction so that I didn’t die.

Let’s not forget that I was still dehydrated. I’d tried to make good on my promise to fill up on fluids, but I simply couldn’t keep anything down. So after the loooooong night on the ward, I thought I’d managed to keep my breakfast down, but I was immediately met by my nemesis: heartburn. I sought relief in the form of a licorice-tasting substance that had the consistency of glue (they tried to tell me it was antacid, but I couldn’t hear them over the retching), however that didn’t last long, and the pressure of the regurgitation caused another type of explosion. My shorts were soaked. The floor was covered in water. I had fluid on the top of my pregnant belly. I straightened, wide-eyed, cardboard bowl of my rejected breakfast in my hands, my legs dripping in amniotic fluid. And that, my friends, was when we laughed on Aksel’s birthday.

Around noon, I guess they decided they were tired of bringing me stacks of incontinence pads*, because the midwife came in to give me a small dose of Prostin gel. She said she’d monitor me for six hours, and then I’d be given Pitocin if it didn’t work. She also mentioned something about this being a bit of a risk because I’d already started contracting and, well, once the gel is in there, they can’t exactly take it out. Indeed.

It took a grand total of 15 minutes for the breaks between contractions to diminish. In the blink of a proverbial eye, my life had become one loooong contraction, going from bearable to unbearable and back again. I managed to survive by breathing through the first 30 minutes, and then through one hour, then two hours. But then I thought it had been three hours and it had only been two-and-a-half hours, and that’s when I broke. The pain was mounting. Time was slowing. And I wasn’t even halfway through my six hours. Soren told the midwife I was done. She came in and I told her that I, the girl who had practically begged to be approved for a home birth, who had sworn that I would avoid unnecessary interventions at every turn, could not do it anymore. I told her, in not so many words, that it was time for--duhn duhn duhn--The Epidural.

Now, during this 2.5 hour stretch, I'd been given a tank of entonox (a.k.a. gas and air/laughing gas/nitrous oxide and oxygen), and I'd tried to take a breath of it here and there, but all it really did was distract me from my controlled breathing, so I’d abandoned the whole thing. Hence, after the midwife gave up trying to convince me that I could follow my birth plan and use natural pain management methods, she said, “In the meantime, put [the entonox mouthpiece] on and leave it on!"

Two minutes later, I became a true believer in entonox. Silly me, I’d been doing it all wrong! I still had to breathe through contractions, but after all I'd been through in the previous days, that was nothing! The midwife resisted the urge to roll her eyes as she told us to call her back if I felt the urge to push. Five minutes later, she was back, declaring me to be 4.5 cm dilated and ready to be transferred. Two young, cheerful midwives arrived with a wheelchair to take me to the delivery room. Like any laboring woman would, I begged them to run so that the high wouldn’t wear off before I could renew my supply. They didn’t. It didn’t.

This was around 3pm, and after that, my experience gets a bit more hazy. What little awareness the entonox spared was dedicated to pain management, but I do know that they succeeded in placing an IV for fluids on the fifth try, and it took Mom about an hour to get to the hospital. Soren says the midwives really enjoyed the playlist I’d made, but I didn't even realize the music was playing. I ended up having the urge to push before I was fully dilated, and that was Mom’s time to shine. When I was born, I beat the doctor to the hospital, but not until after my mom learned how to avoid pushing. Eventually, my dad told the nurses (certified nurse-midwives, actually) they weren’t going to wait for a doctor anymore, and that’s how I entered this world. So Mom was able to coach me through waiting until I was dilated. (Hint: Blow out! You can’t push a baby out if you’re pushing air out!)

It was actually pretty fortunate that things were hazy for me, because in these later stages, they noticed Aksel’s heart rate dropping during contractions. They called in OBs and the head midwife and discussed with Soren how low they'd be comfortable with it going, and carried on without intervening for awhile. They decided that things were not serious enough to transfer me to the "theatre" (operating room). When I (finally) reached 10cm, they had me get up and push through a couple of contractions, but his heart rate dipped so low that they wanted to get him out, stat! So they had me get in stirrups as they took away the end of the bed, and the OB who had cleared us for a home birth weeks earlier was there with some sort of cord. I was like, "Oh look, Ines is here!" in my mind. I was totally out of it. As it turns out, Ines was operating a vacuum (ventouse here), and after three pushes, Aksel came out with his hand in front of his face (“Oh, a little Superman!”). They took him to the baby station on the wall to be checked by a pediatrician, and he had that perfect APGAR score. They put him in a scruffy little hat and wrapped him in a blanket.

And then they brought him to me.

There it was--the end of life as I knew it. The end of sleep, of independence, of reckless abandon. The end of waiting, of empty arms, of deepest longing. All wrapped up in this precious, pudgy, wide-eyed little lump.

Speechless.

I was so tired, so unprepared, so unsure as to what came next. I knew what was ending, but I had no idea what was beginning. I was content with the care we’d received--the midwives had done everything they could to honor my birth plan. It was all a bit unexpected, but I’d been given the grace of time to accept the changes as they came. I held this little person who didn’t know he was a person yet, looking around for the first time, and I simply couldn’t comprehend. I didn’t feel a gush of love--that would come soon--but I felt such a glorious weight settle on my heart. My son. My son. Aksel. 

Psalm 139:13-16 (ESV)
For you formed my inward parts;

you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;

my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,

intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,

the days that were formed for me,

when as yet there was none of them.

 

*This is a joke. They finally had room in the delivery suite.

208 Miles

Last night, after an eight-hour kerfuffle to get Little A’s official picture taken as part of his visa application, we found ourselves tired, but relieved, and located in Covent Garden, a cultural centre of London, full of lovely restaurants, theatres, and shops. We sauntered across cobblestone streets, manoeuvering through the crowds, buying dinner at a booth on our way into one of the city’s largest train stations at rush hour.

A few short hours later, I was just falling asleep as 129 people were killed, shot to death in Paris, in a theatre, in restaurants, in the crowds. 208 miles away.

As an American, I’m used to my buffer. I’m used to that big Pond keeping me safe. 9/11 was horrific because it was a modern-day Pearl Harbor–it reminded us that our oceans can’t protect us from everything. But I wasn’t afraid to die then. Now, children and adolescents and young adults are killed in schools and on campuses in my home country almost daily, but I live in London, where I’m safer and my son is safer because people don’t have guns. Right? 208 miles stand between me and Paris’s 11th district--that’s less than the distance between Chicago and Detroit. Less than the distance between Los Angeles and Monterey, almost identical to the distance between New York and Washington, D.C.

208 miles is not very far.

So tonight, I sit here in the long dark of winter, my little man asleep in his bed, and I try to fight the shivers that threaten to course through my body with every exploding firework, because last week’s festivities around Guy Fawkes Night have given way to Diwali, a celebration of light, and the pyrotechnic displays continue. I wonder what kind of world my son is going to grow up in. I hear phrases like, “act of war” and “terrorists’ new strategy” and I am reminded that I am small and weak and broken and the future is uncertain. So many things are uncertain.

So I must place my faith wisely, and here is where it lies:

“God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” -1 John 4:16-18

The Expectant Traveler: Oslo via Ryanair, Part II

Now that we’ve enlightened you with some of our hard-earned wisdom, here are some highlights of our trip! (Note: Since there was so much to share, Janel wrote about our first couple of days in Oslo, and Soren wrote about our time with his sister!): 

Part II: Impressions and Adventures 

1. Being in Norway.
   
   

   

   We didn't want to leave!

   
   We are each, in a large part, Scandinavian-American, so we’ve dreamed of taking a trip to Norway at least as long as we’ve dreamed of living in London. My first impression was somewhere along the lines of, “The weather here is a lot like Chicago’s, and the forests remind me of Wisconsin...No wonder my people ended up in the Midwest!” I enjoyed seeing rosemaling around, not as a fun cultural accent, but as a normal part of decor. Soren was thrilled when people would speak to him in Norwegian, as if he belonged. He was also grateful that they could switch to English when he told them he didn’t speak Norwegian. 
   
   

2. Being in Oslo.
   
   

   

   Admiring the architecture.

   
   I loved Oslo’s landscape–it drew my mind back to Cape Town, where you dwell in the warm embrace of the mountains and the sea, but the hills were further improved by endless swaths of evergreens. Soren fell in love with the city right away, delighted by the neoclassical buildings and their cheerful pastels that reminded him so much of St. Petersburg.
   
3. Discovering the Moka Pot.
   
   

   

   The best.

   
   Shortly before we left Chicago, Soren’s brother and his fiance invited us to help them settle the question, once and for all: What is the best way to make coffee? How do the espresso machine, the drip coffee maker, the French press, and the pourover stack up next to each other? The only real consensus was that the drip coffee maker loses big-time, but that was before we were introduced to this new contender. I’m sure we would have discovered it here in London eventually anyway, but the Moka Pot was our airbnb host’s coffee maker of choice, so that’s where we found it, and that’s where we fell in love with it. It seems that we’ll have to do a retest. Mmm, Moka Pot coffee.
   
   
4. Visiting the Norsk Folkemuseum.
   
   

   

   A storehouse and guest space, all in one!

   
   Our Norwegian and Danish ancestors came to the US fairly recently, since the turn of the 20th century. Therefore, I loved the opportunity to admire Norwegian farmhouses, storehouses, and barns (every village was some combination of these three) that were originally built in the 1700’s or the 1800’s. My great-great grandparents may well have lived in buildings that looked very much like them, topped with grass and heated by the fire in the center of the room, or later by the fireplace in the corner. When I see a stavkirke originally built in the 1300’s, I know that for centuries, some of my ancestors would have worshiped in such a place, where the eye is drawn ever upward. History is what I share with the people of Norway, whether I can truly lay claim to being “Norwegian” or not.
   
   

   

   Note the dragon carving.

   But then, I can walk through an apartment building built in the 1890’s, and see how different people might have lived between its walls in the decades since, and know that I have cousins who may have lived there, too. I see how Norway has grown and changed since my dear ones left, and appreciate the beautiful, widening gap between my own experience and that of those who stayed. On that day, I was Norwegian, and I was American. There are other parts too, other heritage sites to explore, other stories to come alive, but this was a wonderful way to start. 
   
   

5. Spending a day in Vigeland Park and Frognerseteren.
   
   

   

   Frognerseteren.

   
   Every moment I spent in the city’s center, my eyes were drawn to the surrounding mountains and their verdant forests, and all I could think was, “Why aren’t we up there?” I was not made for the urban existence, believe it or not, and I have an insatiable craving for trees, or rather, to be surrounded by them. So, when holiday closures and expensive internet drove us to unearth a guidebook, my heart leapt when I found a cafe that looked to be surrounded by the forest and boasted an unparalleled view of the city, and then went on to discover that it was right at the end of a Metro line that also went by Vigeland Park, a famous destination that we’d been planning to go to anyway. With that discovery, our plan was set: We would take a walk through Vigeland, and then continue on to Frognerseteren.
   
   

   

   Motherly love :)

   Given that Vigeland is an outdoor gallery full of statues depicting domestic life “au naturel”, we didn’t have spectacularly high expectations. Thus, we were pleasantly surprised when we found ourselves taken in by the complex and beautiful web of familial relationships displayed in the sculpture series, with nurturing mothers, playful fathers, wrestling brothers, moments of discipline and tantrums, moments of affection hoped for or found… We enjoyed a hundred snapshots of the story of life and the relationships that make it full, and came away grateful for the fullness with which we’ve been blessed in our families.
   
   

   

   Be careful!

   From there, we took the Metro train up, up, up the hill, past Holmenkollbakken, the historic ski jumping hill, past many neighborhoods and a house with what was once a grass roof, but has since become a tree-sapling roof. At our stop, we disembarked and walked through the trees to emerge next to a traditional-looking Norwegian building. Inside, we decided to play it safe, given that we knew nothing about Norwegian food, and I had a superb quiche, while Soren had some delicious meatballs. We managed to grab an upstairs table next to a window overlooking the city, and marveled at the view, laughing, as we ate. When we were finished, we found a trailhead and hiked in the snow until Soren’s sister could join us. The aroma of the evergreens was completed by the scent of a recently burned campfire, and I was giddy to take even a short walk through the woods. [Soren interjects: Janel was practically running down these icy paths. I didn’t know I could be that worried…] Since we had enjoyed our lunches so much, we decided to stick around for dinner, and at Soren’s sister’s recommendation, I had rømmegrøt (a traditional Norwegian sour cream porridge) and Soren had a dish featuring Norwegian reindeer. All I can say about that meal after such a wonderful day is that if it had been possible, we may well have stayed at Frognerseteren forever.
   
   

6. Our wonderful Norwegian hosts.
   
   

   

   Brunost: Brown Cheese.

   It’s great to see the tourist sites, but there’s always that nagging desire to get a taste of how the locals live. We had the amazing fortune to spend half of our time in Norway with a young family (the parents are similar in age to us, and have three little kids). Anticipating our first kiddo, we were eager to meet them and to get a picture of Norwegian family life. We were not disappointed. They were wonderfully welcoming and we picked up several useful tidbits about how to raise a Norwegian baby, like using bibs with sleeves and a lovely wooden high chair that adjusts as the baby grows! They also lovingly provided us with ample Brown cheese and reindeer sausages. ;)
   
   

7. Paske!
   
   

   

   Welcoming Spring

   
   
   While Easter (or Paske, as Norwegians call it) did make our touristing a bit difficult, we enjoyed the window our hosts provided into Paske traditions. In anticipation of the new leaves of Spring, one of these traditions is to hang painted eggshells on trees. We experienced this as a public children’s craft, drawing on paper eggs, but our hostess showed us how it’s really done with this dramatic display of gorgeously colored eggs. The other highlight of Paske was the Paske egg. This delectable chocolate egg is filled with marshmallow fluff that leaves you asking “Cadbury who?” We need to find an importer.
   
   

8. Family.
   

   
   

   Of course, our driving motivation and best times were chilling with my (Soren’s) sister. I hadn’t gotten the chance to spend much time with her since I left for university seven years ago, so it was fun to see how much she’s matured and come into her own. She gave us the “inside scoop” on all things Oslo and brought us to some of the more famous sites in the city (like the Royal Palace, the Akershus Fortress, and the Opera House) as well as some of her more local haunts in the Drammen area. Plus, she liked hanging with us so much, she came out to London just a few weeks later! What a gift!
   
   

   

   Overlooking Drammen.

   
   

The Expectant Traveler: Oslo via Ryanair, Part I

It has been exactly one month since we returned to London from our trip to Oslo, so we are commemorating the occasion by telling you about it!

Part I: Our Hard-Earned Wisdom

Are you as excited to hear about our trip as I was to get on this plane?

As we’ve mentioned before, one of our major motivators for moving to London was our love for travel. After all, we are anthropologists at heart–hungry to see the world, understand it, and offend as few people as possible in the process! Obviously, our mental picture of “travel” is still heavily shaded by our youthful idealism, but now it’s time for real talk, friends.

We decided to take the jump over to Oslo so soon after relocating (nine days after landing, to be precise) primarily because Soren’s sister was only there for one more month, and we really wanted to see her and what her life has been like for the past year. Well, that, and it was Easter, and Easter is much better spent with family than alone in a city that is not yet home.

We decided very early on in our inaugural intra-Europe trip that it should be categorized as “a learning experience”. You see, if you call it “a learning experience”, you don’t cry when you realize that you’ve made an expensive/time-consuming/idiotic decision (or two, or five) because of your inexperience. Instead, you write it down and share it with all of your closest friends and the rest of the world. So, these are the things we learned on our trip to Oslo:

1. Getting to the airport is part of the cost of the flight.
   
   This may seem obvious, but we’ve lived our adult lives in Chicago, where the round trip cost from the Loop to O’Hare via public transit is only $10, and a round trip to Midway is $4.50. Neither price is anywhere near what you’d pay for airfare, and the price difference between the two airports is likewise insignificant. London and Oslo each have a handful of airports, most of which require special express trains or coach buses to reach if you don’t have a car. The total cost of going to and from airports for the both of us was roughly $115. We could have saved $10 or so if we’d taken a different coach bus to Stansted in London, but if we’d chosen an airport other than Rygge in Oslo, we could have saved $30 or more to get into the city, which is definitely enough to consider other flight options.
   
   
2. Ryanair is simple enough to deal with, if you’re prepared.
   
   We had done our research on Ryanair, so we had an idea of what to expect. The key differences that you need to know about are: Ryanair’s luggage limitations (their carry-on size is tiny, and companies make adorable little suitcases that fit those dimensions), the exorbitant fee for printing your boarding pass at the airport (do it beforehand), and the fact that you have to do a “visa check” at the check-in counter before going through security (but you can “check-in” up to a week beforehand online). None of these things are a huge deal, unless you’re at Stansted and there are 20 Ryanair flights leaving within two hours and there are hundreds of travelers with multiple bags. Then you might wait in line to get your visa checked for nearly two hours and end up “voluntarily” paying a small additional fee to go through their express security line so that you don’t miss your flight.
    

   

   This is a picture of the line you had to stand in to get in line. #holidaytravel

3. The local “internet cafe” may actually be the back office of a convenience store.
   
   At least it still had a printer. The point is, don’t forget to print the boarding passes at work or at the library if you don’t have a printer at home, because your options at 10pm might be a bit comical, if not shady.
   
   
4. Stansted requires you to power walk for 20 minutes to get from security to the gate.
   
   My pregnant, tired self was not amused by the fact that I had to wind my way through a labyrinth of duty-free shops to get to the other end of a massive room that is reminiscent of a sunlit warehouse, at which point I could go up an escalator and then along another winding hallway to reach the entrance to the terminal, which was only another 5-minute walk from my gate, all while running late after standing in line for two hours and paying that express security fee.
   
   
5. Do your research on the local holidays.
   
   Of course we knew it was Easter–that was part of our motivation in going that weekend! However, what we didn’t know was that Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Monday are all public holidays in Norway, and that half of Oslo shuts down for a week–including many museums, grocery stores, and coffee shops–while the locals travel to the Mediterranean. We discovered this when Soren walked over to a coffee shop on Thursday morning in order to conduct an important business call using their free WiFi, only to find out that it was closed. After frantically adding more vodafone credit and vowing never to leave ourselves without cheap internet in a foreign country again, we found that one of the museums we’d wanted to visit was still open, and we had a lovely time there.
   
   

6. 

   The Oslo Transit Map. What a beautiful thing!

   Guidebooks and transit maps are your friends, but if you don’t have them, you need to have internet access.
   
   I don’t know what we were thinking (well, I was probably thinking about moving to a different country at 6 months pregnant...), but we didn’t acquire a guidebook prior to arriving in Norway. We decided long ago that guidebooks are the way to travel, and yet we seemed to have completely forgotten this for our Oslo trip, relying instead on top-10 lists that we found online. And, of course, we then booked an Airbnb that didn’t have WiFi, so when our plans hit that unforeseen holiday snag, we were dependent upon vodafone and its international rates to find out the information we needed. Luckily, we eventually found an old guidebook, along with a transit map, on our host’s bookshelf, and it led us to one of the coolest restaurants in Oslo, but that only served to confirm that guidebooks are the best and we should never leave home without one.
   
   
7. If you’re pregnant, let go of your idealistic dreams of walking everywhere and buy the transit pass.
   
   
   After our early-morning flight and our expensive coach bus ride into Oslo, I was in a bad state of sticker shock, so I refused to let Soren talk me into buying a bus pass straight away. The bus station was only a 30 minute walk from our airbnb, so we could do it! And it’s true, we could make that vaguely-uphill walk. Once. Afterward, I couldn’t move for the rest of the day, because I hadn’t been accustomed to walking distances, and the baby had entered a stage of rapid growth and my body was a bit behind. Of course, this prevented us from doing any touring on the only non-holiday day we were there, and we ended up buying a pass the next day because everything that might’ve been within walking distance was closed for the holiday. The cool thing about Oslo transit, though, is that all forms of transit within the city proper are included in the 24-hour pass–including the ferry–and while transit is fairly expensive per ride, a 24-hour pass is only about $10, and a 7-day pass is around $30, which is competitive with other cities that I’ve seen. And, they’re pretty easy to purchase, because every Deli de Luca and 7-11 sells them, and Deli de Luca is everywhere (and it’s open on holidays!).
   
   
8. Don’t stay overnight in an airport while pregnant. You will regret it.
   
   
   Rygge is a nice little airport, but if you take a flight at odd hours, it’s a nightmare. As I mentioned, the transit to get there is expensive, and there are no hotels a free shuttle ride away. For us, that meant that, in order to make our 6:30am flight, we either had to wake up at 3am and cross the whole of the Oslo metropolitan area during the wee hours of the morning, or spend the night in the airport. We elected to spend the night in the airport. What a bad idea.
   
   The thing is, I actually got a couple hours of sleep, because the seats are arranged in a bench-like formation and I could lay down, but they are also made of wood, so we had to pull out every sweatshirt and scarf we had in order to provide the necessary padding. No, Soren was the one who suffered the most, because I had to use his lap as a pillow. That meant that he was sitting up on a wooden seat all night. Poor guy. The pain of the situation was further deepened by the cost of airport food–we spent about $45 on a light dinner and pastries for breakfast. Soren still cringes every time it comes up.
   

   

   For reference, this is how pregnant I was when we were in Oslo.

   Part II, comprised of the highlights of our trip, is on its way! Stay tuned!