Søstrene

“Søstrene” is Danish for “the sisters,” so it’s a word Molli Malou and Maddie’s American relatives should know.

I saw Maddie tonight for the first time in 13 days. It had been very, very hard not to see her for so long, but I had rationalized it day by day reminding myself that it was best for her (that I not get too near her until my own stomach virus was long gone) and best for the family (that I dedicate myself to Molli Malou while Trine dedicated herself to Maddie). It didn’t help much, but it got me through.

I was amazed by what I found when I got to the hospital tonight. Maddie was enormous. She’s gained over a pound since I last saw her — the proportional equivalent of, say, my gaining more than SIXTY POUNDS in two weeks. Her hair was fairer. Her limbs were neither the flailing matchsticks of her early days nor the jiggly surplus of her later days but long, muscular, proportionate. Her movements were more baby-ish than spastic. (She was never technically “spastic,” it’s just hard to find a single adjective to better describe the random, jerky flailings of her first few weeks.) And best of all, she was awake!

She’s been out of isolation for a couple of days now, so she has a new roommate, a little Uruguayan boy who was sleeping soundly and whose parents were absent, so I jumped right into a big rambling monologue with Maddie, reminding her who I was, what role I would be playing in her life, and how thrilled I was to finally be able to have some more time with her. I changed her diaper (she’d only just stained it with a yellow smear of nastiness, but it made me feel more daddy-ish just to do something for her) and then took her up and held her while she took a meal through the nose tube.

How nasty is that? Let’s all share a moment of prayer in hoping that girls who get their first month or two of meals primarily from tubes jammed up their noses don’t develop eating disorders!

I talked a lot, to the extent that she finally fell asleep. Then I just stroked her and murmured to her and marveled at her until it was clear she was just going to sleep the night away. I can appreciate the marvel of a baby sleeping in my lap for about 30-40 minutes, at which point, shamed as I am to admit it, I no longer see the point in sitting there with a baby in my lap. So I tucked her in, doted on her, and found thirty minutes of excuses not to leave just yet before I finally came home.

The roommate’s Uruguayan parents had come in, meanwhile, and been having a smashing time with their son, and I introduced myself and realized their Danish was worse than mine and they had no English and I had no Spanish. (Or Portuguese. Dammit, what IS the line of that Treaty of Torsedillas?) So we smiled and nodded a lot and they rolled vowels at me and I stammered English monosyllables in reply.

Anyway, let’s get to the pictures.

First we have a couple from Mormor’s phone: one of Molli Malou giving birth or something and one of her with the Danish children’s television celebrity Sigurd. Then we have a series from New Year’s Day of Molli Malou streaking Mille’s hair, then Mille returning the favor. And lastly we have the only pictures of Maddie from the past two weeks, all of them taken by Trine during a single visit, or maybe across two visits, just a few days ago.

Now that I’ve set them all up, there’s not much point in providing further commentary, so here they are.

And that was… the weeks that were.