Didn’t take many days before we were out into the woods again, but now for the first time with our newborn baby. It was time to practice baby-wearing! I’ve always known I wanted to carry my baby, and not use a pram. And that’s definitely what my baby wanted as well. Before he was born I bought a vowen wrap (Yaro Elvish), an elastic wrap as well as a ring sling second-hand. I also ordered some woven wraps (Middle Earth from Oscha), to use when he got bigger.
Those first weeks were incredibly intense. Nobody had prepared me for the fact that some babies just want to be constantly stuck to your boob, but I’m flexible and I ended up handling it quite well, providing him all the comfort that he wanted. If he wasn’t on my boob, he wanted constant motion and action. So we put him in the sling and carried him. I quickly discovered that babies are programmed to sleep whenever the parents are in motion. It makes total sense, as it would be impractical to feed when the mother is busy, and no point in crying either. If you think in the form of a more tribal and natural setting. Our baby was amazing, as he was so in tune with his instincts, he guided us and let us know how he wanted everything to be done. And he was very clear if we did it wrong!
The truth is, you can’t spoil a baby. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. People told me he was using me as a boob. The truth is that babies use pacifiers as subsistute boobs, not the other way around. They crave the closeness and comfort of your body, and nothing can compare to that. So I was breastfeeding 24/7. Which meant he was stuck to my boob constantly all night long as well. Not all babies are like that, but that’s their basic instincts and needs, and I wish someone had told me beforehand. Babies are meant to be close to the mother, constantly! Therefore, babywearing is essential. There are tons of other advantages as well, and there are so much to love about it!
These 2 are my favorite thing in the world. Can’t possibly imagine a better father for my kids! Feeling so so blessed!
I did his hair viking style, and I think it looks so good. Personally I didn’t do anything interesting with my hair for months… oops! 😉
Someone told me these pictures looked like a painting! It is in a fjord some minutes from home. Notice how the baby is searching for a boob on Ruben? So funny!
6000 years old petroglyphs, showing moose and deer. There are a lot of these rock carvings in the area!
Just me, feeding a hungry baby. As you might have noticed, not many pictures of actually wearing him in the wrap/sling. But there will be lots more in later blog entries 😉
He is here! 😃 Our baby boy was born the 7th of June at 1:45 in the night, after a 20 hour intense labour. He is perfect and healthy, born during his due date, weighs 3680g and is 53cm long. We are resting and snuggling and we are all well! 🍃💜🌳
We took him for a walk in the garden when he was 3 days old. We are going to become experts in baby wearing! (I know he is not positioned correctly in the ring sling, but it was just for the pictures.) I’ve got such a wonderful collection of baby wearing wraps and slings already.
He was wearing his little bunny hat, and clothing knitted by his great grandmother. Our cat Ori joined us and posed like a baby godfather… hehe! It was so cute!
Some weeks ago I spontaneously decided to do a maternity photoshoot. So I grabbed some items from my wardrobe and my wonderful fairy wings from FancyFairy, and went into our woodland garden. My love Ruben took all the pictures. Our cat Ori apparenly wanted to take part in it as well, he happened to have a natural talent for modelling! I’m quite pleased with how it all turned out. Perhaps you can notice that I’ve started upgrading my camera gear?
I’ve been super busy for months making everything ready for the baby. I’ve tried making the most out of every day, and didn’t spend much time relaxing or having fun… but the day we took these pictures were quite relaxed, and nature started getting really green and beautiful, almost the height of spring!
In these 3 last pictures I’m reading Faerie Magazine/Enchanted Living, which I’m occasionally writing for! This time the spring 2019 issue, which features a long article I wrote about Eco Fairytale houses in Wales, I think it is printed on 12 pages, and I think it is definitely worth reading! The rest of the magazine is amazing as well, just purely beautiful 🙂 You can buy the magazine here, either a printed version, or a digital one.
Happy Midsummer everyone! I hope you are having happy and bright days. Here spring has turned into summer, I use to think of the summer solstice as the gateway to summer, it is still often quite chill here in Norway in late June, but everything is green and beautiful and flowers are blooming everywhere. This year everything bloomed a lot sooner than ususal. It is growing so fast and I have not been able to keep up with it, being super pregnant and all! I did manage to plant an assortment of vegetables and flowers though, just crossing my fingers that most of it will survive while I’m occuppied elsewhere.
Wanted to post some mostly fresh pictures taken of my garden in previous years, I love my garden more for every year as we shape it more to our liking. Here is some pictures featuring a small part of our massive garden! This time the pictures are from the part right in front of our house, if you want to see other parts, click on the Gardening and Permaculture cathegory 😉
We’ve got a trampoline which we put mattresses and sheets and pillows
and blankets on, to have a space to relax in the garden, and for those
rare moments when I decide to bathe in the sun while reading a book.
Someone called this “the burning bush”, hehe! It is adorned by copper colored fairy lights, and in the beginning they were super bright! They have faded quite a lot now though.
We typically celebrate Midsummer by the campfire in our garden 🙂 I absolutely love being in our garden in the evening and the night, it is so beautiful with all the myriads of fairy lights, and the smell of roses and many other flowers.
My fern paradise! Path to the campfire place.
So I might have forgotten to mentioned that we’ve got a flock of ducks now! This is the 3rd year they live here, and I love them. I guess I’ll make a post dedicated to them some day. Before we got them we made this pond, the water comes from a natural spring in our garden, and then it runs under the bridge. Ducks love water and ponds!
Foraging Meadowsweet in the garden, then drying it. My kitchen is filled to the brim with various herbs and flowers I’ve gathered!
And in the end, some white currants! They taste sweeter than the red ones. It’s a bit hard to see when they’re ripe, but you just have to practice.
Summer is finally upon us, and it is time to enjoy the garden and all its wonders! Don’t you all just want curved garden bridges? In my garden I have a big stream and a small stream. I just really wanted some bridges, and when my dad came visiting we decided to just go through with it. We did it all as easy as possible! So then I thought, why not tell you all about how we did it? They almost didn’t cost me anything! Also you don’t have to have streams or rivers to make a bridge, it could just as well be a ditch, or curves in the landscape.
When we bought this property, there were some pressure treated pallets laying around, so we simply removed the nails and cut the planks to the desired lenght. I do recommend pressure treated materials, as they won’t rot, even when laying close to the ground and on wet places.
So how to make the curve? I’m sure you could buy already curved planks, but I guess they will become a little costy!
We bought the widest pressure treated plank we found at the local carpentry store, and then we cut it with a jigsaw. I have an electric one. I just drew the curve free hand, then placed the parts opposite. It looked like this:
Try to make the curve as arched as possible!
Fused together with those pieces of steel
Then we nailed the planks, two nails on each side of the plank.
We did dig a bit in the ground so the bridges lay nicely, and put some flat rocks to step on, on each side.
My cats kind of like them! Here is a pond we made, now with a LED fountain.
I’ve had these bridges for a couple of years already. We made two curved, and one smaller flat bridge. I kind of want to make a railing on them, but we’ll see! It would look cool if it was rustic, or just ropes. Or what do you think? These bridges could look really enchanting with railing and lanterns, or fairy lights! Or garden statues 🙂
For safety, I’ve nailed a few planks at 2 cm width on each side of the bridge, so people won’t slip on them.
It is with great joy we are sharing the news with you, that me and my beloved are eagerly awaiting the arrival of our firstborn child! We feel truly blessed and are so excited about this new adventure in life. It is something we have been wanting for so many years, as we care so much about children and natural parenting. At last we felt that the time was right, we consciously created our baby boy underneath the stars in the forest and it was the most joyful night of my life! Just so magical and incredible! It was our first and only try and it worked extremely well.
It is a great honor to carry the child of my beloved partner, I can’t ever imagine a better father for my children, so amazing. We can’t wait to meet this new little elfling soon! Just wanted to share the happy news with you all 😍 I already shared it with my closest friends and family a while ago, but did not wish to make it public until now. 1+1=3!
I aim to continue running my blog as normal, but you might experience a slight change of content after some time. However, I will do my best to keep it interesting and share amazing things with you! I believe this will all be for the best 🙂
I’m looking forward to motherhood, it is such a journey, I am learning so many new and interesting things I would love to share with you! I have no words for how excited I am 😀 And a bit scared of course!
Kittens… again! I would call it a cute and happy accident. We certainly did not plan it this time, but what to do? We enjoyed some time with what is hopefully our last kittens for a long while or many years. And they were totally adorable and the sweetest little souls. With all very distinct personalities. One little girl made her way straight into my heart, being extremely affectionate, clever and interested in everything we did. The kind of cat which would stay on your shoulder most of the day if you let her. Luckily she got a forever home with our dear friend @gaiadottir 😀
Here is some adorable pictures I took of them! But honsetly, life with kittens is not all glamour, cuddles and fun. They make a mess and basically destroy your entire home. You might visit me and at first everything looks nice and cozy, but with a closer inspection you might start to notice white cat hair everywhere, and how my pillows and fabrics are damaged by claws, or how many of my things are mended with super glue 😉 My adult cats Zelda and Ori are very well behaved though! Life with adult cats are quite wonderful and effortless. And now all the kittens have found new homes, and we are all enjoying some peace and calm. Of course we miss the wee ones, but we are pleased to have done our part in finding them the best homes and feel quite assured they will have a good life.
The gang!
Fellini, adopted by Gaiadottir
The dark truth about life with kittens!
I hope you all appreciated this dose of kitten cuteness overload 😉 Do you have cats? I would love to hear just a little something about them!
Do you remember when I made a post about our old-style kitchen? I told you we were renovating it and renewing it all. And I promised to show you how it all turned out. For some reason I didn’t get around to it until now, but here you go! We basically removed every single thing in the kitchen, including the floor. That floor was such a pain to remove as it was a vinyl attached with hundreds of nails and almost an impossible job. Renovating a kitchen took far longer than we expected, and we had to cook our food outside or in the livingroom for quite a while! But in the end it all came together. We designed it so as to get as much extra space and storage as possible (like creating many small extra shelves wherever we could), as it is a fairly small kitchen. Our house is old and crooked, so we had to make everything custom fit and in specific weird sizes and angles, but in the end we managed it.
We re-used the old objects which we liked, and combined it with some more modern elements. We have a sink, fridge, electrical stove and dishwasher. As far as possible we buy used/pre-loved things. Only thing we bought new was some of the cupboards. Except for that, every single little thing is second hand, also the lamps and curtains. It looks more modern than my personal preferences, but since we renovated it for possibly selling the house again in the future, it was all a compromise, and I can live with this.
In general we have been renovating our entire house, inlcuding isolating all of it, changing the door and all the windows, renovated the basement and built a new addition to the house, which consists of 2 rooms, and made a new porch. It is an almost 100 years old log house.
In the end of this entry you can see how the kitchen looked when we bought the house.
So I don’t normally allow the cats to be on the table, but Ori was still a kitten when I took these photos. The kitchen window used to be behind the fridge, but we moved it to the middle of the room and removed the door.
Tons of herbs and dried mushrooms! And a ton of jars can be found in my house. All from thrift shops.
A Russian gave me these artworks.
I collect wooden spoons, here are some of them. The one with lilies are carved by the incredible Giles Newman!
I dry tons of herbs, but in my 13 layers herb drier, these are just for decoration. I’m not a fan of dusty teas 😉
The kitchen has been evolving quite a bit since I took these pictures and gotten even more personal, but this is the basic of how it looks.
Here you can see a picture from the renovation, and then pictures of how it looked when we bought the house (not my things, it all belonged to the previous owners):
I just have to say: Skogtroll (Forest Troll) festival was definitely the most magical and amazing days of my life so far. I know I say this after every edition, but how is it even possible to be so mindblowingly fantastical? Every minute was just better than the next and I wish I could savour all those prescious seconds in my heart forever. I’m in awe. What a blast! It was all like taken out of my dearest dreams and visions and made reality. When I was there I thought this must be the wildest and most enchanting and deep and wonderful party this planet has ever witnessed. So healing and refreshing. And I’m not a party person – at all! The dancefloor was a stunning work of art and only we who were there will have felt the true beauty of it!
Skogtroll is definitely my favorite place ever, it feels like home on so many levels, and my favorite people as well, a true fairy troll tribe. What we created was pure magic, something really strong and epic which will echo in time and help bring about the re-enchantment of this planet. A future in which we live in harmony with nature and technology, in symbiosis with the plants and the magic, the missing link in our existence. I know I was far from the only one who never wanted to leave the forest again. Alas we all did in the end. I don’t know if it is possible to ever top this spectacular festival experience, but let’s hope we will meet again and weave our magic together <3 Lots of love to all of you who co-created this unique experience, you are the best of playmates! And thank you mystical forest for welcoming us and dancing with us under the stars.
The location is deep in the Norwegian wilderness
It is wet, dark and cold. But lovely!
We just met a cow at this spot deep in the woods!
PsyElf playing
Stine spinning fire
Our little elven camp
If you’re wondering about the music being played: You probably wouldn’t like it! 😉 It is mostly psytrance and since I’ve listened a lot to it since 2005, I’m used to it. The music at Skogtroll is dark and hardcore. You just have to learn to not take it too seriously. Also it is possible to learn to dance to it! A lot of the music is actually really nice.
The dancefloor. Bascially in the bog. Dancing here can be a real workout!
UV on the dancefloor
Me and my beloved lightwhips
Weaving my magic
Floating rune table
Static Movement playing. I’m a fan!
I was barefoot in the woods for 5 days!
I used to think everyone loved partying and dancing except me, but I’m not so sure anymore. I hope this can be helpful to some of you. Please know it is never too late!
I started this year with a single new years resolution: “Learn to party, or die trying”. This probably sounds lame or really out of character, but I was at such a sad and desperate point in my life. The truth is, I have always despised parties, dancing and being in most social settings. I’ve avoided parties all my life and still have never been to a normal party. Allthough I’m actually quite a festive person, I’m playful and creative and think I’m a fun person to be around once you get to really know me. But I also have suffered from severe social anxiety since I was a kid. I much prefer the company of trees and animals. I’m not a complete noob though, I’ve been to a couple of festivals out in nature as well as a couple of forest parties, but allthough I quite liked them, I did feel awkward and kind of uncomfortable a lot of the time.
The months of 2018 went by and I still had not set foot in a party, so this didn’t exactly turn out as planned. The summer went by with all work and no play. Except me and my boyfriend started to have our own lovely date parties in our livingroom, dancing all night to our favorite music! And we started flowing seriously with poi and lightwhips in the garden multiple evenings a week.
Then came autumn and I got the chance to attend this festival. I was super nervous as usual, but so determined to go for it. What happened next were incredible. For the first time of my life I felt comfortable, at home, at peace, joyful! I just honestly always feel so alone and alien. Like a forest creature stuck in the modern society. But there in the forest I got to be myself for 5 days. And I danced every day and every night, even when no others were dancing, even when sober, even when I did not like the music, and I loved every second of it. It was the most beautiful and magical experience of my life! There deep in the forest with my trolltail and my antlers and my circlets and my many layers of skirts and my elf ears and with painted UV moons and swirls, and I danced with my lightwhips and my poi and I ruled the dancefloor and the forest! I danced with the trees and the northern lights and the trolls and the ents, with nymphs and with elves.
I don’t know if I ever will get to experience something like this again, or feel this content and happy in life, but at least I got to experience it, and that is worth everything!
Wonderful Maren
I ate a bunch of blueberries
Someone let me make my own beeswax candle. I freaking love beeswax candles!
Hans, our friends dog
This festival is basically like a playground for grown-ups. I can assure you, it is WAY better than my combined years in kindergarden. Thanks God I grew up!
It’s also a true wilderness experience!
The last night, soon time to go home!
Do you like festivals? Would you like to attend a forest festival deep in the Norwegian wilderness?
If you want to read more about earlier years or other festivals I’ve attended, check out the blog cathegory Festival Life!
Remember when Zelda had her very first kitten quite some years ago? He was all white, and last year she birthed another white son, an only child. So does a kitten like this become lonely? I don’t think so. We gave him plenty of attention and play, as did his mother, and his half brother, also known as Uncle Ori. So in the end he turned into a skilled hunter and a social and happy little fellow. He got a wonderful new home with some friends of us, living by a beautiful lake close to nature. They decided to name him Sirius, and I just love that name.
Look at this adorable little fellow, it was some months ago, but I just had to share them anyways:
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