Baby's first hiccup

This afternoon I was sitting at my desk at work, when an uneven throbbing began in my abdomen. At first I thought it was my heartbeat (because sometimes my heart beats really strong in my stomach for some reason). But it was too slow for that. Curious, I put my hand to my stomach, but immediately thereafter the throbbing stopped.

After consulting with a friend who is farther along in her pregnancy than me, I concluded that the baby had been hiccuping but was startled by the pressure from my hand. I haven't felt very strong movements from the baby yet so this was a first! I loved it.

Spring Fever

First let me just say that I love Easter, I love General Conference, I love my husband/future baby, and I love Spring!

Spring fever? Who, me?

So now, the real reason for my post: In Denmark, Easter weekend comes along with 3 bank holidays, so on Friday we decided to do an all day date and enjoy the weather. It has been a while since we were able to do that, mostly because until recently I was spending every spare minute laying on the couch with a large bucket nearby. I have been feeling a bit better lately, YAY! So Friday was really fun. We wandered around the city for a while - and Copenhagen was beautiful as usual:

After a little while we encountered Rosenborg Castle which neither of us have ever been inside, and decided to be a bit spontaneous and do the whole tour of the castle right then and there.

It's the castle that was used as a residence by the Danish monarchy from around the 1600's to the 1800's, until they decided they would like a castle with more than one bathroom in it and moved to Amalienborg instead. First we checked out the crown jewels, which literally are...crowns and jewels and various combinations thereof. Then we walked around in the living quarters inside the castle, which was lots of fun. Some pictures outside the castle:

By the way I know I'm huge and yes I'm sure it's not twins.

After that we hit the Hard Rock Cafe - best American food in town!

I am a sucker for funny signs and I love the sign they have on the door of each bathroom stall:

...and after that we hit the movie theater (Alice in Wonderland 3D), and went home tired but happy! All in all, a great day.

The big news

Got something I want to let you all know...

I am very happy to say that on or close to September 15, Morten and I will become parents to this adorable (though somewhat blurry) little person!

In this picture, he/she was doing a little dance on my uterus. We won't find out the gender until April 21st, since now (13 weeks) is too early to tell.

Here is some thumb sucking action. Well it's hard to see where the thumb is exactly, but it's cute nonetheless.

Ahhhhhh...babies.

Icebergs

Where I sit at work, I can see the harbor out of the window. For the past several weeks (or is it months?) it has been either completely iced over or chock full of large ice chunks. This is the harbor, in other words OCEAN, that we are talking about.

You might be thinking, well it's Denmark, look how far north it is, the bays and harbors must always freeze over there. Actually, we usually have a pretty temperate climate, and this (apparently) is the coldest winter in 14 years. On one hand it's annoying that's it cold but on the other, I never thought I would ever actually see such a thing, much less every day of my life, so it's also kind of cool.

I have straight hair!

See?
Oh the wonders of modern technology (chemical straightening + flat iron).

Muse Concert

I promised my brothers I would put up pictures from the Muse concert we went to last Monday. It was awesome! I have some videos too but decided not to post them since there are much better versions on Youtube now anyway.

We stood in line outside the stadium for a few hours before getting in. That wasn't one of my brightest ideas, since it was raining the whole time, as you can see. As you can also see from the "grumpy old man face," Morten wasn't too thrilled about the rain either.

We got more excited once we were inside where it was warmer.

We were pretty close to the stage. This is before the supporting band ("The Horrors") came on. They were pretty horrible, hardy har har...

Big crowd. Though the stadium, which is Denmark's national stadium, was actually much smaller than I thought it would be.

There were some pretty awesome video pillar thingies, where the three members of the band would each stand on a pillar that goes up and down. That is them in the middle of the pillars in this picture.

Also some very cool green lasers on some of the songs. The picture doesn't look very impressive, but it was more impressive in real life.

More video pillar thingies.

Matt Bellamy on the piano.

Piano again (tried to get a close up but the lights were too intense for my poor lil camera phone).

I don't remember which song this was.

What I liked most about the concert was how they built up the momentum with long intros and effects. When the concert first started, the band didn't even appear on the stage until slowly building music and effects had been going for about 3 minutes. They really know how to get you ready for a good show.

Here is a video showing another long intro, and the green laser effect:


More piano. Though it's sad that this video stops right before they really got going on this song.


Knights of Cydonia, one of my favorites, was the one they ended with.

faldera and fiddle-dee-dee

I was going to start out by saying that the main reason I don't write in here so much is because I don't have cute kids to write about and post pictures of. But then, most of you also don't have babies but you still manage to write pretty interesting stuff.

I have mostly only been interested in updating Camille's mission blog lately. She is doing great and I am so proud of all that she is accomplishing!

Otherwise, life has been good. No I mean really really good, even if I haven't been blogging about it. We love our new apartment and enjoy spending whole weekends cleaning and fixing it up. Now we have everything we need except a couch. Yes I guess that is a pretty basic thing not to have, but we are just picky.

Work is getting a lot more interesting lately. I am finally past the point of learning the basics - a process that has never taken me so excruciatingly long with any other job before. I really was given a rare opportunity by being hired for this job while so underqualified, and even though it took a longer time/greater effort to get up to speed, I have gotten to learn a lot in the process. Sometime in the past month or so I have crossed into the threshold of programming more complicated processes, and I find it thrilling. There is soooo much more to learn still, which is also thrilling. Yes I know I am a nerd.

Denmark is cold. I somehow forgot that over the summer. Today I wore my big winter coat with another light jacket underneath and I was still freezing. But at least the sun is still shining (sort of) for another month or so. And then it's on to the dark, wet, cold, semi-hibernating stupor for a few months. Gotta love the Danish weather.

Well that's it for now.