Norway

Pretty grainy pictures throughout the site right now with only one intent, to really get as much juice flowing as possible on an already hot issue. Serves as a great test article for their new commenting system though, that's for sure.

Considering her father, Malia was surprisingly good on skis her first time! We were in the mountains right behind Morgedal and had a little fire going on a bit of land nestled between two lakes. Temperature around -10 celcius and plenty of snow as you can see After skiing and something to drink, it was time to try out the little sledding track that we created. Perfect for the three kids that were along (ages 2-5).

And here's some videos too.

I'm going to start doing posts of interesting ideas/sites I come across every now and then on my personal blog. This is the first...

The guys from The Big Word Project have a massive hit on their hands! The moment I saw the site I shot off an email to Peter saying "next million dollar homepage right here". I found out about it yesterday courtesy of my favourite (non travel) blog, Daring Fireball.

Quoting "John Gruber @ DF"

New viral web site “dictionary” from Paddy Donnelly and Lee Munroe, two students in Northern Ireland. The gimmick is simple: pick any word you want, pay $1 per letter, and you get to “define” that word as a link to your web site. I bought two.

I was rather quick to the party as there were about 500 words 'defined' when I first visited the site. I picked up 10 or so really nice words, so was quite lucky. 24 hours later there's over 1600 words. That's a good 1000 words, let's say at 6 letters per word average. 6000 dollars to Paddy and Lee in 24 hours and they are only just getting started!! This site is going to get a lot of publicity and press, both on- and offline. I don't doubt that for a minute and then just watch the sale of words skyrocket. I'm not kidding when I say I think they're going to have at least 75 000 words defined by the end of March. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if it was 150 000!

There's still some really short words left, but you can bet all the good ones are going fast (although not as fast as they would be if all the big name SEO weren't partying it up at SMX, hehehe). Brilliant really because the more short ones are gone the more people will be spending. At the moment they won't let you change the link you enter when you buy a word, but imagine if they start allowing that. Words like 'travel' and 'hotels' (yes, that's one of ours, yay!) could get a really nice price on auction if this takes off in any way near what I imagine. Heck, if Paddy and Lee didn't feel they were making enough money they could even charge for changing URL's

It's extremely rare to see such a brilliantly simple idea executed so well. Keep an eye out for about a thousand clones in the next few months!

Mil and Suz came over for the weekend and brought a rather LARGE box of lego which kept Malia (and the rest of us) busy for hours

At DOGA they were exhibiting this revolutionary new mask for mine clearers. It's surprisingly light. I certainly don't envy that job, no matter how cool the mask looks!!

To the Munch museum on Friday. For anyone heading over to Oslo, it's FREE entry till the 1st of April. Of course they're still at work restoring the 'Scream' that was stolen a few years ago but one of the two pastel versions is hanging. The National Gallery has the other oil version of the Scream (there's two pastel and two oil versions) if you just have to see it.

Then there was some skiing at Tryvann on Saturday.

A stroll in the Botanical Gardens on Sunday.

It looks like our video provider might still have some issues with sound on the 3gp format, but other than that the uploading seems to be working a-ok My favourite subject on the swing, her current favourite outdoor activity:

Keeping everyone updated, here are some pics from last week. Malia was trying out a new hat with her grey jacket, but the hat ended up being returned. Some cute pics though

This next one is actually one of her school photos, but we didn't really like it much (had forgotten it was photo day so the outfit was not too smashing - an understatement!). Also, at 20USD, we felt it slightly overpriced

Some photos from a day at the different museums in Bygdøy, Oslo. Well worth the time if you make to Oslo!

I've uploaded a few more pics of the little one to my gallery. I'll stop hogging blog space with wildly uninteresting entries only with pictures, but I'll continue to upload the pictures to my gallery here. They'll all be tagged as Malia, so you can easily see all of them in one go if you click on the above link (or click the Malia tag next to one of the recent pictures).

Here's one of the more recent ones

To be honest, Margit and me did not research the meaning of the name Malia too intensively before today. But seeing as so many people have asked what it means and how to pronounce it, I've done some googling and these are my findings:

According to several websites (for example this one, this one and this one), Malia is Hawaiian. A few other websites (like this one) say it is American Indian, but I am taking that to mean native American, ie. for Hawaii the original inhabitants, the Polynesians. This could then mean this name might actually be Polynesian (I'll let our Polynesian specialist answer that one!).

Regarding the meaning. For those that clicked on the above links, you'll already have seen some different ones. "Bitter" is one that is mentioned on a few sites, so that might be the direct translation of Malia in Hawaiian. Not my favourite Quite a few sites agree that Malia is a variant of Mary; another name of which the meaning is unclear (see here), so it's not so strange that they can't agree on Malia. So, what are the possible meanings???

• "perhaps/probably" (source)
  
• "calm and peaceful (waters)" (source and source with 'waters')
  
• "bitter/bitterness" (several places as above and here)
  
• "rebeliousness" (as variant of Mary - see source)
  
• "wished for child" (as variant of Mary - see source)
  

As you can see, plenty of choice I think we'll go with the last one (hey, with that much uncertainty, one should be allowed to choose!), which is kind of neat seeing as Samuel has a similar meaning (see here). Plus, that website seems to give the most reason for actually claiming the meaning and seems to be the most professional. And yes, we prefer it over 'bitter' or 'rebeliousness'

Regarding pronounciation. We'll be pronouncing it so: ma-LEE-ah . This is actually one of the reasons we liked this name so much, it pronounces exactly the same in Norwegian, Dutch and English (this is extremely hard to find!). So no hassles there and she's already equipped with a name she can travel the world with easily and without too many translation/spelling problems.

How we came about the name? While on holiday (and discussing baby names) I was listening to a random song on the ipod and the artist's name on the display caught my attention. From the album "Saint Germain des Pres Cafe - Volume 5", the song was "Yellow Daffodils" by "Malia feat. Erik Truffaz" - the song is pretty nice too (there's a snippet available to listen to under the artists website, click Music and scroll down to song one of the second album). A total coincidence in other words, but in our opinion a beautiful name. It stayed our number one pick with no other name coming near it for a girl - whereas we had gone back and forth up until then with about 5 names

And for those of you that just can't get enough (read: myself), here's another picture of sweet Malia asleep...

Hey, who says I'm not allowed to be excited about this

Following is a boring description of the birth, primarily intended so that I don't have to tell the story a million times to family and friends reading this Those not interested in details, just scroll down for a couple of pics...

Margit and me woke up at about 2.30 am this morning to what looked to be the starting phases of contractions (both of us really had no idea, but hey, what else could it have been?? ).

Being my always mathematical self I straightaway started timing these things but in the beginning they were a bit hit and miss. Anyway, about an hour later they started becoming more regular and increasingly painful. At this stage I was already counting about 6 minutes between them, which I was promptly told was not possible. Naturally, one does not argue this at such a moment. Having called the hospital (about 30-40 mins drive away), and noticing that the periods between contractions were down to about 4-5 minutes we headed over to the hospital where we arrived at about 5 to find Margit was about 6 cm diluted (is that what this is called in English?). Half an hour later it was 8 and at about 6.15 the doctor decided to give it a few tries. This while Margit insisted that this was the perfect time to hit her with pain killers, but the doctor refused. Anyway, to make a 'long' and painful story short, an hour and a half later Malia Klingen Daams was born! I didn't realize baby's were quite that blue at birth, but I was happy to hear her give some snorts pretty quick.

Margit is doing really well and surprisingly fresh, but they say that's one of the benefits of giving birth quickly (one of the downsides being that the pain is aparently more acute). Malia is healthy as can be and was doing nothing but drinking breastmilk and sleeping when I left the hospital about an hour ago.

Here's a couple of pictures of the new family.