February: the Lost Month

First you’ll want to download a couple of movies. The first is about 19MB, and it’s something John put together at some point in early March after a Liam and Molli play date. It’s called Ob-La-Di for obvious reasons. I forgot that was another song with a Molli in it! (Spelling doesn’t count in music.)

The second is 23 MB and is just a no-frills, quick-and-dirty tour of the house. By way of disclaimer: yes, it’s a mess. Morfar was out of town and our stuff is everywhere. (I shot the video this past Easter week while we “vacationed” there.) Also a lot of the rooms are piled with stuff he’s preparing to move out. But it covers the house almost completely so you’ll have a kind of context for the place.

Now the excuses (culled from an email sent to my own family some time last month).

This long delay was partly because we’ve been so busy and haven’t really had much call to take pictures, but also partly because February was the month of Monsters. They were under her bed, behind every door, lurking in every shadow. At the first onset of this monsterphobia she would actually have a kind of anxiety attack the minute she finished her dinner. She would say she was done, like she normally does, and then announce, “I don’t want to sleep in my own bed tonight.”

She could only be persuaded to sleep in her own bed if one of us lay down with her until she fell asleep and promised to stay with her “a long time, a really long time, all night, until another day.” (For some reason she almost always refers tomorrow as “another day” or “another time.”)

The going-to-bed anxiety has subsided a little, in fact we’re close to having licked it completely, but although the middle of the night monster terrors have decreased quantitatively, they haven’t lost any power in terms of her pure horror. She wakes up screaming for one or the other of us, hysterical, crying and frightened, an absolutely blood-freezing scream. There has generally been nothing to do in these cases but take her into our bed, where she no sooner lies down between us than she is out like a light and sleeps the rest of the night in peace. This has only eased the past week or so: for all of February and half of March there was simply not one single full night of sleep for any of us.

There are still monsters in the apartment and she likes us to go with her or hold her hand when she needs to go anywhere dark or with corners or recesses, although this to seemed to have wane a little while we were at Morfar’s. The monster spray helped before we went up there, but she didn’t use it while we were there. (There will be more about the monster spray in subsequent blogs.)

I know I’ve mentioned this to all of you at some point or other in the past six weeks, but I don’t think I stressed how hard it was on us to not only be this busy, but to be having our sleep disrupted every single blessed night as well.

Molli Malou is by no means warped by her monsterphobia in any way. She is still her happy, willful, dictatorial self. One day we fought for an hour over her wardrobe, so the next day I told her very nicely that she could bloody well dress herself. And she did. Undies, tee-shirt, stockings, skirt, shirt, snowsuit, boots, everything. The only strange thing is the way she puts on her tee-shirt: she steps into it and pulls it up over her, instead of taking it on over her head. Anyway, that’s probably why she put up such a fight the other day: she’s ready to dress herself. More power to her.

In the happy hour between us all getting home and the start of dinner, one night, the three of us sat around the table doing Melty Beads. They’re the little plastic beads you set out in patterns then iron into plastic doodads. We were all three doing our own Melty Bead projects when Trine got up to start dinner. Molli Malou was beside me making a multicolored heart. I was a little too focused on what I was doing until she suddenly said, “Daddy.”

I turned my head and looked at her. She was smiling, awaiting a reaction.

“What?” I said.

She wiggled her eyebrows as if to say, “What do you think of this?” – except there was no “this” I could see to react to.

“What?” I said again.

She blew air out her nose, hard.

“What are you doing?”

She laughed and blew out her nose again.

“You didn’t put one of those things up your nose, did you?”

“No.” (Blow, blow.)

“Honey, really?”

“Yes.” (Blow. Giggle.)

“Yes you did, or yes really you didn’t?”

“I did put one up my nose.”

Indeed she had, so far up we had to use tweezers to reach up into her nostril and pluck it out.

So she’s afraid of monsters, but will fearless cram Melty Beads up her nose.

Go figure.

Let’s get to the pictures now. Tonight I’m just posting leftovers from February. Later in the week I’ll slog through March. There’s a lot coming, including more videos.

For fastelavn she wanted to be a tiger. Trine found a great costume on sale for her and she loved it.

But the costume wasn’t enough. She wanted to live the role.

You may recall from the previous post that we’ve upgraded our face paints. Well, we’d also been studying up on how to do it better.

Molli Malou is always a willing guinea pig for our experiments, bless her heart.

Though her patience is not unlimited.

How about that? Yes, I did that. Me, Greg Nagan, the guy who nearly failed out of make-up at Carnegie.

You like that make-up, Molli Malou?

Well, it seemed like a yes… until she looked in the mirror.

She terrified herself.

And when she saw her blood-red nails, it was all too much.

This was just a trial run. For Fastelaven itself, we now knew we would have to be much more subtle. Make a happier tiger face, a gentler tiger face.

John brought Liam by for some make-up too.

Those are Fastelavn boughs Molli Malou is greeting them with. I’ve explained them before.

Liam was, unfortunately, all too willing a victim for my will to paint.

“What do you want to be?”

“A blue and red cat!”

Okay…

And then it was time to prep Molli Malou.

Kinder. Gentler. Smiling. . .

By this point we realized Liam’s makeup was horrible so we gave him a do-over.

We beat the cat out of the barrel at Molli Malou’s kindergarten.

And walked back home together for a pizza lunch. Trine was holding Molli Malou’s hand, and John was holding Liam’s, as we strolled. Then the kids joined hands on their own.

“Now you hold John’s hand, Daddy!” Molli Malou commanded. We laughed ourselves silly.

A few days later we reprised the ice skating experiment.

Original findings confirmed.

And look who learned to cross her eyes and make silly faces!

That’s nowhere near to catching up, but it’s a start. A little bit every night this week, or at least most night’s this week, and we’ll finally be back up to speed.