wired

Morocco and the Geek Elite

Tomorrow, Matti and Emma and I, along with the my colleagues at CCP will leave for Marrakech in Morrocco for four days of festivities. Of course Emma's first trip abroad is to Africa at the age of four months. She's so cosmopolitan.

I've written up a looooong list of things to bring and piled most of them onto the dining table. Traveling with a baby will be interesting...

While Matti watches It's always sunny in Philadelphia, I'm reading Fast Company, specifically an article about the Geek Elite, high powered producers and creators of shows such as Heroes, Lost and Battlestar Galactica. The gist of the article is how these shows are transmedial, since they use a variety of mediums such as graphic novels, novels, computer games and the internet to create sideplots and fill the holes left in the TV shows.

Most of these men tip their hats to George Lucas and the consensus is that Star Wars and Star Trek are the pioneers of transmedial sci fi experiences. Read the article if this seems interesting to you - for me it elaborates on an idea which is central to my job.

Yes - life's so tough...

Yoga and the giant baby

Emma and yours truly started yoga class this week. The classes are intended for new mothers to "reconnect" with their bodies and the offspring are brought along. As a fresh batch of mothers joined the class this particular Monday, everyone introduced themselves and their little one. The baby's age was also announced. I knew Emma was big for her age before I got there, but I hadn't realized that she's as big as babies twice her age.

A part of the yoga class is doing certain exercises with the baby, such as rolling on your back holding the baby in the air. When that time came, Emma was sound asleep so her mother had to do the yoga-with-the-baby part without the baby. A bit embarrassing really. Two days later at the same point in the class I decided to skip the embarrassment and woke Emma to join the other moms with babies dancing in a circle. Then we did a few exercises holding the baby, hoisting it up in the air and lowering it to the floor. My back still hurts and she'll only get bigger...

Non baby stuff
These past few days have been strange, a mix of sadness and joy. Matti and I are thinking hard about relocating to a great looking apartment smack in the center of Reykjavík, but the current state of the housing market has us hesitating. We also confirmed our reservation for a three week holiday in Thailand in July. My brother is awaiting his firstborn son in the summer, bringing joy to the whole family.

I haven't really been blogging about what's happening outside the four walls of the nest but my friend Bryndís is more than doing her job of telling it like it is. Go Bryndís!

Hef lagt heilann á hilluna...

... or  in English: I've laid the brain on the shelf. I know, it doesn't have the same ring to it. This will be long. And rambling. Read at your own risk.

For the past two months I've been a stay at home mom. Instead of a gazillion e-mails, telephone calls, rushing between locations for meetings and extracurricular activities, I spend my days gazing into the eyes of my firstborn, changing diapers, watching crappy shows on dvd while breastfeeding, doing endless loads of laundry, strolling down Laugavegur with the pram. I'm loving every minute of it, knowing all too well that this time doesn't return.

As the proud mother of the smartest, funniest and most beautiful baby on the planet, I'm obligated to point my readers towards my flickr page where you can oooh and aaaah at your hearts content. I haven't yet dared to venture towards barnaland.is and I don't think I will. I reserve the right to change my mind at any point in the future though.

Matti and I have been blessed with a baby who hasn't yet caused us any worry or trouble or lack of sleep. She sleeps while we sleep, is happy to drink from either boob or bottle (but only her mother's milk), smiles and laughs and coos and is in every respect perfect. She hasn't started talking yet but I predict it'll be soon. Much like her father, she likes her milk and is growing at an unusually rapid rate, weighing over 6,5 kgs at 9 weeks.

Motherhood has definitely changed me and somehow not at all. I thought I'd become a different person overnight but instead I'm still me, albeit a little more humble and with a reshuffled set of values. When leaving the house for a course I took two weeks back, I was asked if I didn't feel strange leaving the baby. No, I didn't. I was happy to be out and about, seeing different people and confident about leaving Emma with a couple of bottles of milk with Matti, who incidentally is probably the greatest dad on the planet. This, I've been told, does not make me a horrible mother.

I've developed a slight allergy to the time sucking on the internet but vow to do more blogging in the future and perhaps the posts will not be all about Emma...

Emma

...
is here. Born on the 18th of December, weighing 3695 grams and measuring 53 centimeters in length, she's absolutely perfect.

Oh, and happy new year!