Happy New Year! One thing for sure, 2020 is a year we will remember into eternity.

Here in Norway, we started to hear about a virus in China at the end of 2019 , but I don´t think anyone of us could imagine what it would mean to the whole world just a couple of months later. Lockdowns, deaths, unemployment etc. Suddenly our world came to an almost standstill in the beginning of March 2020. And now, almost everyone on planet earth are figthing for the world to go back to "normal". In our household, we feel blessed to have our own house with a garden and things to do, and this is helping us during this pandemic.

My husband suddenly got home office and used every evening and weekends to work on our house when the lockdown started. I will post more from that separately, but below are a few pictures of what we did.

Almost done painting our house on the outside, roof over our entrance and a new door. Fixed the entrance to our basement and a new shed for our recycling bins. More to come.

In June we got a small heatwave and I could also finally visit my parents a couple of days. I then took a small trip to my favourite place in the world, Vangroftdalen. We have a summer farm there and growing up I spent every summer there.

Below is a picture of a waterfall. We owe half of this waterfall. I also came across a birds nest.

In July, we have a family get together at the summer farm. We eat, drink , play some games, but mostly just enjoy beeing together. This year it was very special due to the corona virus.

My sister and I also took a trip to Røros ( https://www.roros.no ) the same weekend. It´s only a 15 minutes drive from the farm where our parents and our eldest brother and his family live.

Below is a winter Christmas picture of the family farm. This is where my eldest brother and his family and my parents lives. There are two log houses on the farm, you can see a tiny bit of the other one behind the trees. My parents had a dairy farm, my brother started with sheep when he took over, but now he has black Angus cows.

As I said earlier, last year our new entrance was done and I could decorate for Christmas. I decided to go for the "less is more" look and I was happy with how it looked. As you can see from the picture below, we had no snow at all when I decorated. I think I will drop the outdoor Christmas tree next time I´ll decorate for Christmas, but I love the rusty candle houses. I think they will stay permanent all year round.

But we "finally" got some snow. It looks pretty and charming, but I´m not to fond of the snow and cold anymore. But I love to feed the birds during winter.

My husband bought himself an older John Deere in 2020 and I have to say, it is really cool to have a tractor. Shoveling snow is so much easier and quicker. And my family farm had an older tractor powered snow blower they gave him.

Christmas 2020 was very kind of strange. We had restrictions on how many people could celebrate Christmas together, so it was just me and my husband. But we have been just the two of us many times, so that was no problem.

I baked a very good bread with walnuts and tried to decorate the bread with a stencil of a moose. It came out quite ok I think and the bread was delicious.

We try the best we can to stay safe from the virus, we don´t think we will be sick, but we can´t risk to infect others who are more vulnerable. But we as you, are tired now and hoping the vaccine will help us to live more "normal" in a few months time. I say to you all, please stay safe and hang in there.