A Good Day To Be Indoors

I don’t think I took one breath of fresh air today, as it was so dark, dreary and wet outside, I had no desire to be out there. I had to run to the store for a few things and I used the underground passage to get there so I stayed nice and dry. Our condo has its advantages.

Kaleb played with his friend Daniel all day so at least we didn’t have to deal with him telling us how bored he was because I’m sure he wasn’t bored at Daniel’s house. When Kory went to get him at five o’clock, Kaleb called me crying his eyes out because he didn’t want to leave. I could tell he must not have slept much on his sleepover.



We invited our ex-neighbor Tone, and her daughter Sabina for dinner, along with Kory’s cousin, Ketil, and his wife, Lise. I knew Sabina wanted to spend time with Kaleb, so I had to be rather firm with Kaleb that he needed to come home before everyone arrived at our house. Kory took nearly thirty minutes trying to get him in the car because he was so overly tired, he was impossible to deal with. Kory is way more patient than I. Once Kaleb got in the car, he fell right to sleep. Kory let him sleep for thirty minutes then went and got him down in the garage. Kaleb came up the stairs, went in the bathroom and fell asleep in there with the door locked. I had to bang on the door to get him to open it and he then stumbled to the chair in his room and slept all curled up with his head resting on the arm. I’m thinking he didn’t sleep one little bit last night as it was impossible to wake him for dinner. I felt bad for Sabina, who sat in our living room patiently listening to all the things grow-ups talk about when they are at a dinner party, with no one to talk to herself. Poor thing.



Kory worked all day on rewiring different lights and lamps that weren’t working. He’s handy that way - he can fix anything. He even tore open the alarm clock to see why the second hand wasn’t working. He’s got some kind of gift. Me, I just made dinner and tried to find the piece of a missing puzzle on this family tree I’m working on. I’m totally perplexed as to why I can’t find the information I’m looking for. I need to think more outside the box. But this is the very challenge I crave when I go searching for the names of dead people. They don’t give me any grief, but they sure cause me to lose sleep at night.



My biggest challenge in this ancestral search is that a hundred years ago, parents named their kids the exact same thing. We think it’s weird that George Foreman named all his kids George Foreman, but he wasn’t the first one to come up with that idea. The Norwegians have been doing that for generations. It was most common to name the next child after the family member that had most recently died, so if a child died in infancy, the next baby would have the same name as the baby that died. That is not too tough to deal with because at least the first baby doesn’t have other records on file – like confirmation, marriage and census records. But when parents name three of their living daughters Sogni, and they are all known as Sogni Olsdotter from the same farm, and they are born within a few years of each other, it’s nearly impossible to tell which child is which. Such is the problem I’m facing now as I think the discrepancies I’m finding in birth years and husband’s names is that two sisters have the exact same name. Ugh. I sure hope they had nicknames when they were growing up so it was easy to tell them apart.



Last year Kaleb met a man on a hike we were taking up the mountain. He had two golden retrievers and he named them both Seiko. My grandma named all her dogs from 1954 to 1983, Pete, but at least she just had one at a time. But why someone would name their only two dogs the same name is beyond me. It’s the same with these parents naming their kids the same thing. What are they thinking?



People here often ask me, “What kind of name is Mickey?” like it’s a disease or something. They understand the concept of nick-names, but no one uses them. Once I tell them my real name is Mary, they all want to use that instead, because Mary is a traditional Norwegian name. No one seems to like the name Mickey. They like traditional names and hyphenated names like Tor-Arhild, Gunn-Bente, Per-Helge, and they use both names when talking about and to the person. No one would ever consider just using the first part of someone’s name as a nickname. That just wouldn’t be proper, and Norwegians are very proper people.



There was a time in Norway when all baby names had to be approved by the government before a birth certificate was registered. They didn’t want anyone feeling weird because they had a strange name – maybe that’s why they used the same name over and over again – because it was safe and had the government’s seal of approval. But that law changed about fifteen years ago when all the immigrants started infiltrating this land. I think some of them were named Mohammed.