PREPARING FOR HURRICANE MOLLI MALOU
In the few idle moments I have at work, I’ve prepared the following Official Preparation Guide for Hurricane Molli Malou, who will be passing through North America from June 28th through July 27th of this summer.
It’s primarily directed toward Nana & Pop-Pop, Aunt Deb & Uncle Gene, and Moster Mette, as the relatives who will be sharing their homes with Molli Malou. I’m posting it on the blog just because I think it’s a nice snapshot of where she is these days.
Read it for amusement, read it as a practical planning guide, or don’t read it at all: the hurricane is headed your way, and I offer the following in whatever spirit you wish to receive it.
THE BASICS
Molli Malou is 102 cm as of last week. She seems taller than a lot of her peers, but that may just be because she’s skinny as a rail and therefore just looks like a beanpole. She doesn’t weigh much over 30 pounds. She is extremely energetic. She wakes most mornings between 630 and 730am, and goes to bed most evenings between 730 and 9pm. She almost never stops moving in between.
You’ve surely seen the most recent videos, so you know what she looks and sounds like.
She is perfectly capable of communicating all her basic needs and desires in English and Danish. She understands much more than she ought to. She will often claim not to hear or understand things she doesn’t WANT to hear or understand, and is even capable of the unmitigated lie, so don’t be afraid of challenging her if she tells you something suspicious, like “Daddy said I could have ice cream for breakfast,” or “Mor said I didn’t have to wear a shirt today.”
Her name is Molli Malou and she likes to be called Molli Malou but does not object to Molli. We’ve actually asked her what she prefers and her answer is: she doesn’t care. Trine almost always calls her Molli Malou, I am about 70-30.
FOOD
She’s basically omnivorous but has some kinks.
She loves peanut butter and loves jelly, but will not accept them simultaneously. She likes spicy food, garlic, and pepper, but obviously in moderation. She has become obsessed with bubble gum, but often only chews it for about thirty-seconds before spitting it out. She thinks chewed up gum is disgusting, so she will usually spit it straight out of her mouth and then holler for someone to come throw it out. When told to throw it out herself, she will recoil in horror, but can be persuaded eventually to pick it up and toss it out if you’ve got the iron will to force her.
For breakfast she most often eats yogurt – pear-banana is her favorite – with cornflakes, Special K, or “ymerdrys” (I call them “sprinkles” because we have no actual word for them in English: they’re pumpernickel bread crumbs with sugar). Sometimes she prefers oatmeal – sometimes hot with butter and salt, sometimes cold with milk and sugar. She is also amenable to toast or bagels with jelly or cheese, or both, but never buttered. Her appreciation of cream cheese comes and goes. She likes eggs, but will not eat the yolk. She loves bacon. She has recently come to enjoy grapefruit. I think she’ll enjoy the variety of cereals available in America and would like to see her reaction to everything from granola to Apple Jacks.
She likes most fruit, cucumbers, and carrots. She is intrigued by radishes but never seems to really enjoy them.
Her lunchbox lunches here are most often leverpostej on Danish rye or “Russian Salad” on Danish rye, or both, but none of the ingredients are going to be easily available in the states. (Leverpostej is like liverwurst pate, Russian Salat is chopped beets in a cream dressing; real Danish rye is just very hard to find outside of places like Whole Foods and Trader Joes, and is expensive there anyway, whereas here it’s dirt cheap.) We usually give her some cucumber slices, carrot sticks, or cherry tomatoes on the side.
I’ve told her that American sandwiches have bread on top, not just on the bottom, and she finds this fascinating. We have experimented with it here and she always seems to enjoy it. We are building up America as a wonderful land of strange new foods and are making it clear that things will be different. The goal is not to accommodate her Danish tastes, but to build up her American tastes! Feel free to indulge your own curiosity! (And of course we will be helping with the groceries!)
She likes Danish-style tuna salad: tuna and mayo with corn or peas, or both, mixed in. She likes egg salad. She likes chicken and beef and every part of the pig.
She shares her mother’s enthusiasm for sauce. Curry sauce especially. Lately she has been eating durum rolls stuffed with shwarma meat and seems to enjoy them a lot.
She likes fried fish fillets with remoulade, and chicken nuggets, and the like, but it was revealing one day a few months ago when, after telling me how much she loved fish fillets, she complained because there was “too much yucky stuff” inside one of them. The yucky stuff was, as you probably guessed, the fish. So she’s really just a fan of fried breadcrumbs or batter.
She is crazy about rice and pasta, and will happily eat her own weight in them, but she prefers spaghetti to any other kind of noodle. She likes meat sauce on the side. She is suspicious of stuffed noodles — ravioli etc. She loves Ramen-style “instant” noodles and since they’re so cheap, quick, and easy we always keep a bunch on hand. (Beef flavor.)
She will eat potatoes any way they’re served, but will absolutely not touch the skins.
She loves corn on the cob and it’s very expensive here so if it’s still cheap in the states then it’s the kind of thing she could happily eat every night. She eats her vegetables.
She loves most junk food — pizza, burgers, fries, dogs, etc. But there’s nowhere near the variety of junk food here that there is in the states. I’m curious to see her tackle Chinese and Mexican food. KFC & Popeye’s! She loves homemade quesadillas and has enjoyed nachos the one or two times she’s had them, but there’s so much she hasn’t experienced yet!
She drinks water or milk (always low-fat, usually organic, but that’s hardly a requirement) with all her meals during the week, and is only allowed soda or juice on Saturdays or for special occasions. The vacation is of course a special occasion, but since it’s a month long we’ll obviously have to put limits on her. She is under the sorely mistaken belief that she can have ice-cream for breakfast if she’s on vacation.
(The same Saturday rule applies to ice-cream, candy, and all other tooth-rotting treats. In fact, Molli Malou calls the entire food group “sugar,” by which she means candy, sweets, desserts — everything from Pez to chocolate to gummi bears to soda to ice-cream to cookies and cake.)
Like most kids her age, appearances are paramount. Food that looks slimy or “weird” or too much like its animal source is unlikely to go over well. She did dare to try some of daddy’s octopus in Italy–in the end she spit it out, but the fact that she tried is important.
ANIMALS
She’s timid and shy with animals at first, and may possibly even be frightened of big Winnie. What we’ve learned about Molli Malou is that she is an extremely brave and reckless girl, but only if you let her go at things at her own speed. Her courage is great, but it takes a while to warm up. Probably she will be nervous with your various pets until she realizes they pose no threat, at which point she will play with them until the inevitable moment when the animal in questions does something to communicate its desire not to be played with any more. Then she will get mad, cry, and insist the animal apologize. Yes, really.
PLAY
Her favorite doll is Dolly. She likes all her dolls – Haddie and Mathilde cannot complain of neglect – but Dolly is still the one that gets rolled around in the stroller, that’s specifically requested at bed time, and that talks back (via Molli Malou) in that creepy “redrum voice.”
There is no ambiguity allowed when you, Molli Malou, and one of her dolls or animals are engaged in conversation. You must differentiate your voice to make it perfectly clear when you are speaking and when the inanimate object is speaking, or Molli Malou will ask quite directly (for example), “Who said that, you or Dolly?” Also, if you or the inanimate question make a remark, Molli Malou will ask who it was directed to if it’s not 100% clear to her. It’s kind of jarring — like being on stage with an actress who is totally into the scene, then suddenly stops acting, cocks her head, furrows her brow, and asks, “Who said that, you or Hamlet?”
She loves to cook, but imaginary ingredients are no longer enough. If she’s not watched carefully, she’ll fill her toy pots and pans with water and then throw other little toys – beads, dollhouse accessories, hair elastics, legos – into them and stir them about. Usually she makes pancakes or soup. Sometimes she pours daddy a “coffee” or “whiskey.” Most of her projects end up splashed about the floor. One recent afternoon I nearly tripped over Blackie as I stepped out onto the patio. Looking down, I noticed his fur looked all damp and matted and weird.
“Oh my God, what happened to Blackie?” I asked in genuine concern. It looked like maybe he’d been in a fight with a drooling Saint Bernard.
“Molli Malou washed him,” Trine said.
So apparently that’s another thing she likes to do with water now: wash things.
She loves worms and if you hand her a little gardening shovel she will spend hours happily digging in the dirt for worms and bugs, whom she will name and talk to as they wriggle in her hands. This warm regard for creepy crawlies does not extend to bees, even harmless bumble bees, which terrify her. She believes she has been stung every time she even sees one. She despises the “dræbersnegle” (giant slugs) that have invaded Denmark, and she insistently calls on us to boil them whenever she spots one. Yes, she likes watching giant slugs being boiled alive. (I’m assuming that’s normal for a little girl…?)
She likes to play catch and is pretty good at throwing and catching. She is good at kicking a ball around, too. As you all know by now, she has just learned to ride her bike without training wheels. She climbs trees, fences, and rocks pretty fearlessly, but curiously seems a little afraid of heights in other situations. Just yesterday I got home from work and looked out the window expecting to see her riding her bike around the yard: instead she was a good 6-7 feet off the ground, having pulled herself up to the top of the swinging mesh fence door to the ball court, and I could see she wasn’t sure how to get down. I managed to run down in my socks and reach her only about thirty seconds after she’d fallen a couple feet down onto her elbow. Nothing serious this time, but my heart is in my throat: sooner or later it’s going to hurt! (She is always a mass of bruises and scabs, and describes them to me proudly as her “injuries.”)
She likes to hide and be found, but she’s still blissfully ignorant at the art of hiding and will usually just pull a blanket over her head and giggle while you look for her. She will tell you all the places to look for her, and what to say, so that a game of hide-and-seek usually goes like this.
You: “Where’s Molli Malou?”
Jiggling Pile of Blankets on the Couch: “Hee hee hee!”
You: “Where could she be?”
Jiggling Pile: “No! Look in the kitchen. Say, ‘Is Molli Malou in the kitchen?'”
You: “Is Molli Malou in the kitchen? No.”
Jiggling Pile: “Hee hee! Say, ‘Is she in the lidding room?'”
You: “Is Molli Malou in the living room? No…”
Jiggling Pile: “Hee! See under the table! You have to look and see she’s not under the table!”
And so on.
She likes to draw but must be carefully controlled when she has a writing or drawing utensil in hand. We have the graffitied apartment to prove it.
She likes board games but gets bored with them quickly, even if she’s winning.
She likes computer and internet and video games appropriate to her age.
She loves toy jewelry and makeup, face painting, and that whole of girly stuff.
DEMEANOR
She is a magnificently creative story teller and is surprisingly good at selling her lies. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, she’ll pretend to be seriously hurt, then bust out laughing when you rush to help her. I think I’ve mentioned how we’ve caught her out in lies she’s told other parents — what inspires her to say she had chicken pox so large a doctor had to cut them out with a really big, really sharp knife?
She likes to pretend her dolls are sick. Often they are even dying. Sometimes her diagnoses can be jarring.
“What’s wrong with Dolly?” you ask, having noticed Molli Malou wrapping the poor thing in blankets and jamming her play thermometer up her butt.
“She’s very sick. Poor Dolly. She’s dead.”
She has a violent temper. She will, honestly, sometimes threaten to kill you. Just the other night she told me she was mad at Trine. “I’m going to slå her to death!” she exclaimed in a mix of languages. I have used “replacement” teaching to modify her more physical assaults, telling her that she should tell me she’s angry instead of hitting or kicking me. So now I have a child who says, “I hate you. You a dumb daddy. You a stupid daddy. You an evil man! I want to kick you to death!” — but mercifully no longer kicks or hits me. (As much.) And she’s not always homicidal: the other day she confided angrily to Trine that she wanted to give me a bloody nose.
She says “what?” in response to almost everything now (in both languages: it’s “hvad?” in Danish). There’s nothing wrong with her hearing: she herself admits “I just like saying it.” She’s also a heavy user of “yes yes” and “yeah yeah” and “no no” in both languages, and these are exactly what they soundlike: dismissiveness amok.
She is suddenly very curious about death and we haven’t been very good at dealing with her questions. Trine talks about happiness in heaven, I tend to shrug and talk about mystery. A few weeks ago Prince Joachim got married again and Molli Malou and I were watching the big splashy wedding on tv. There was a closeup of Queen Margrethe.
“That’s the queen,” I said.
“Okay.”
“She’s Frederik and Joachim’s mor. When she dies, Prince Frederik is going to be king.”
“Is she going to die, daddy?”
“Eventually, but–“
“Is that why all those people are there, because she’s going to die?”
“No, honey, it’s a wedding, she–“
“Is she going to die today?”
“It has nothing to do with–“
“Where does she go when she dies?”
“I don’t know, but it’s a wedding, it’s a happy–“
“Is the princess going to die also?”
Death isn’t the only awkward subject: she remains intensely curious about anatomy. The other night she crawled into my lap, stared at my chest, and announced, “You don’t have boobs, daddy.”
So you can all look forward to some interesting questions and observations.
WARDROBE
The ban on pants remains, but she seems to be okay with shorts now that the weather has turned. We’re hoping that the introduction of shorts will allow for the re-introduction of pants this fall.
She likes to wear fancy clothes — glittery stuff, lacey stuff, frilly stuff. She likes jewelry. She is dying to wear make-up: the obsession with face paint is surely just an expression of her yearning for make-up. I imagine Hannah and Sophie will have a blast using Molli Malou as a living, breathing dress-up doll. If she had her way, every day would be a prom.
She can usually zip her own zippers and sometimes (rarely) snap her own snaps, but buttons and laces require assistance. She likes to put barettes and clips and things into her own hair, but she’s not very good at it. Their effect is purely comedic.
TELEVISION
We have begun clamping down hard on the television. Up until the weather turned we let her watch about an hour of morning television before kindergarten (while she ate breakfast, etc), and then “børnetime” in the evenings (literally “children’s hour,” the thirty minutes of children’s programming shown on state-run DR1 every evening at 5:30 pm). We also used to let her watch DVDs whenever we didn’t know what else to do with her. Now when she asks for the television we almost always tell her the weather is too nice for tv, and tell her to go out and play. And she does.
In case it’s not clear from the recent blog posts, Molli Malou is currently obsessed with the world of Astrid Lindgren. Most Scandinavian kids her age are. (I know a lot of American kids her age are, as well, but for all her popularity Pippi still has enormous competition in the states, and personally I don’t remember anything at all about Emil.)
She uses Pippi and Emil the way the Greeks use the Iliad and the Odyssey. She sees the world through their metaphors. Her inner world is populated with their characters.
Despite this love affair I should warn against American Pippi or Emil books, movies, or toys as gifts, because we get the real deal – the original Swedish (with soothing Danish narration over the Swedish dialogue) – and since 90% of her DVDs are in English anyway, it’s nice to have a Scandinavian collection. Also, the American versions are different, and you never know how that’s going to turn out.
It’s not that Molli Malou isn’t intellectually flexible. She didn’t seem too upset, for example, that the Pippi we saw at Tivoli wasn’t quite the Pippi she’s used to. (Tivoli’s Pippi appeared, in fact, to be about 20 years old, which gave her garters and stockings a different effect than usual.) So I’m not afraid she couldn’t adapt, only that if you surprised her with birthday gifts on the Pippi and Emil lines, she wouldn’t be very appreciative at first and might even complain. Weird enough that half her family says Santa’s from the North Pole and half say his workshop’s in Greenland, no sense muddling her head over Pippi and Emil.
We’re going to be sure and buy up a good pile of American DVDs for her–Hannah and Sophie will be valuable tour guides in that respect!
BEDTIME AND SLEEP HABITS
At bedtime we change her into her nightgown and brush her teeth then one of us puts her to bed, lies in bed beside her, and reads her (or in my case for the past few months, makes up) a bedtime story. Molli Malou then lies awake and fidgets a while and falls asleep after anywhere from 2 minutes to an hour, at which point it is safe to get out of her bed and let her sleep all night. She only rarely wakes up at night, but the disruption of jetlag, new surroundings, etc could either make her sleep easier or more fitfully, we won’t know which until it happens.
Also for the past week or so we’ve fallen into a bad habit of letting her lie in the living room with us and watch television with us until she conks out — because this sometimes only takes 10 minutes, whereas the “normal” routine can take as much as an hour. We’re fighting our way out of this trap now.
Most mornings she gets out of bed on her own. If we’re sleeping, she will wander into our bedroom and tap our feet or heads until we wake up. If we’re already awake, she’ll just wander into our midst and say what she wants for breakfast. It is very rare now that she wakes up in bed screaming for attention, but it still happens sometimes. It is very, very rare that she gets up in the middle of the night — but the disruption of jetlag and new surroundings could certainly change that.
THAT MUCH SAID…
She is a cyclonic storm of energy when she’s happy, and a monsoon of fury when she’s not. Homes do not need to be “Molli-proofed” like they did on the last visit, but it’s still a good idea to keep valuables and fragile stuff high up or locked away. EVERYTHING SHE CAN REACH will sooner or later become a toy, usually when you’re not looking. She loves to play “can’t touch the ground” (in Danish, “jorden er giftig,” meaning “the ground is poisonous”), and will sooner or later end up trying to climb around your living rooms without touching the floor.
She has a wicked sense of humor offset by a devastating temper. Like the poem has it, when she is good she is very good, but when she is bad… holy mother of god!
She is fiercely independent and you should never offer to help her do something until she asks for your help. On the other hand, she THINKS she is capable of pouring cereal into a bowl, pouring drinks into cups, pouring ketchup or mayonnaise onto her own plate, working the remotes to the TV and DVD player, etc, but these are things she should not be allowed to do without the closest supervision, unless you’re dealing with plastic cups and dishes in an environment where crumbs and spills are a matter of indifference–and her clothes are already a mess. And you have a roll of paper towels on hand.
BIRTHDAY WISHES
All she wants for her birthday are roller skates and a scooter. We have already bought her the skates and are going to buy her a scooter later this week with some gift money Oldemor gave her. Beyond that, she doesn’t know what to ask for and if you ask she’ll start listing strange things like “a tiger,” “pizza,” or “a baby,” or whatever she happens to spot out of the corner of her eye when you ask her. Any other guidance I can give you can probably be surmised from the preceding description of her personality and likes and dislikes.
I could obviously talk about her forever and have probably already wasted too much of your time telling you things you would learn for yourselves quickly enough on our arrival. So forgive a father’s pride and take it all for what it’s worth.
She is so excited about this trip she’s even bragging about it to anyone who will listen. Last night, after I helped dust her off from the fall in the yard, a 6-year-old girl who was watching asked if I was Danish.
“He’s American,” Molli Malou said (in Danish).
“So are you,” I reminded her.
“Yes,” Molli Malou said, still in Danish, “I am also American, and also Danish, and I am going to America for vacation, to real America, and New York! REAL New York!”
Probably she’s not, but why dash her hopes?
