Last weekend I decided to take my kids out of all the election noise and into the woods for a few hours. We didn’t take any toys along with us, not bats, no balls; it seemed like the right time to just let their play be guided by nature and allow them the space to apply their imaginations to whatever they found in the forest. They climbed up trees and played in the branches for five hours. I don’t think their feet touched the ground the entire time we were there, and it was a challenge to get them to leave their arboreal adventures when it was home time. This was an unplanned day of outdoor fun, but one I...
Hiccups are a funny thing, and not just because of the cute little sound your kids make when they have them. We know babies and kids get them because they drank or ate too quickly, or because they gulped too much air in excitement, but one of my favorite piece of Scandinavian lore to share with people in the US is that when babies and kids are cold they get the hiccups. Very few people know about this secret, but this folk knowledge has been verified by scientific researchers at the Mayo Clinic and other medical institutions. We have nerves that run from our neck to our chests and when those nerves are irritated for whatever reason they make the...
If you were a child any time before the 1990s your memories of wearing wool might be similar to mine. Some of my earliest recollections of winters in Norway, involve me barreled up in course and scratchy wool base layers to keep me warm. Only years later did I discover how soft wool can be.
Hi!It’s been a busy few months while I’ve been building up our stock of winter product, but as today is Columbus day, it got me thinking about a cool experience I had recently that I’d love to share with you.In September I went with my family to watch the Draken Harald Harfague, a scaled replica of a Viking ship, make its passage into New York Harbor. The ship set sail from Norway 5 months earlier. The crew was closely reenacting an expedition undertaken by Leif Erikson who was the first explorer to sail to North America, around 400 years before Christopher Columbus did. The voyage of the Draken followed a route through rivers and seas in Iceland, Greenland, across...
Hi, I got some exciting news to share! The main reason for starting Ella’s Wool a few years ago was that I could no longer stand to see the empty playgrounds here in Brooklyn during winter time. I was trying to find out why the kids and I practically were the only ones out playing, so I started to ask around how the other parents dressed their little ones. As a Norwegian, I have experienced (and survived!) 32 winters living in Norway before moving to the US. As I’m getting cold super fast, I've tested out all the different base layers at the marked. The one thing I found out, NOTHING beats merino wool when it comes to base layers....
