Norway: highs in the low 60s.

We wake up at 11am the children and I, or sometimes 10:30 or even noon, still groggy with jetlag and maybe simply wiped out from a year of New York City noise, buses, subways, rushing, dressing, smiling, worshiping, running, bill paying, forgetting, agonizing, snacking, homeworking, cat caring, doorman hello-ing and the rest. The oddest part of waking up after 12 hours of sleep here is that I feel no remorse. No frustration about how I should be up at 6am out picking berries or building troll huts in the woods. When you are with a five- and a seven-year-old all day every day, in a pure quiet uninterrupted setting, that sort of ambition seems to fall away. You simply become.

The only sound as I write is the birds outside and the scratch scratch scratch of the children's coloring markers.

We have three weeks before Papa and BestePapa join the women here (my sister-in-law and mother-in-law come and go). The forecast shows many days of little suns being cruelly shoved aside by dark, rainy clouds. The highs are in the low 60s. Wetsuits for the sprinkler and the lake are de rigueur.