A Month At Once

It was not an easy month for us. I’m going to leave it at that.

I’ve mentioned a while ago that I’ve moved temporarily to a new office.

No, that’s not it, that’s just a little joint around the corner. It catches my eye now and then. (Every day, actually, because it’s Marmorkirken (“The Marble Church”) and while this shot was taken from the street, walking by, our fifth-floor cantina actually looks directly out onto that dome.)

Our friend John had an exhibit of his Greenland photos at the E.U. Environmental Center on Copenhagen’s Culture Night, but my friendship with John forbids me from including any of the awful shots I took of him and his exhibit that night. Besides, from Molli Malou’s perspective the only thing that mattered (bearing in mind–so to speak–she sees John all the time and is a little wary of him anyway since we told him he ate a polar bear) was that Danish children’s television star Sebastian Klein was at the event as well. (It was a lot of enviro-themed stuff, obviously, a lot of it targeted to kids.)

Is it a horrible shot? Of course. But it’s the best of the bunch. Molli Malou will appreciate it, because it’s clearly him and clearly her and clearly Trine.

Molli Malou had been wary of Sebastian, however, because the last time she’d seen him on television he’d been feeding a mouse to a snake, and “that’s not very nice. Stupid snake!”

Since Trine and Sebastian had gone to school together, Molli Malou was able to have a nice chat with him, and he patiently and kindly explained that the mouse had been old and sick and was already dead.

All right, then.

We made our second annual pilgrimage to Tivoli’s 10-day Halloween extravaganza.

The hale-bay maze was the same as last year, I think, but we hadn’t memorized its layout so it was just as challenging as it had been the first time around.

The merry-go-round was in full swing.

John and Liam swung by and Molli Malou and Liam were spellbound by a scarecrow.

I mean spellbound with capital AWE.

And speaking of awe, we took a lazy Sunday stroll through the woods up north one late October afternoon.

Molli Malou has been her usual unhappy self. . .

And she helped carve her first Halloween Jack-O-Lantern!

Is she good, or what?

We’re still getting a lot of mileage out of her face paints: here she is flying around as a bat.

Molli Malou is a learn-by-doing kind of girl: here she is experiencing first-hand the can’t-be’taught lesson that you can’t eat oatmeal in mittens.

I already mentioned how unhappy she is all the time. . .

She had her first wagon-ride at the zoo in early November. She didn’t like that.

But she’s so miserable at the zoo anyway, especially at the playground. . .

On this particular Sunday, she must have run up and down the track about forty or fifty times without taking a break to catch her breath. Not an exaggeration. She wasn’t the fastest thing out there, but she definitely won on stamina.

Maybe we’ve got an 880-champ in the making.

Or a vet.

Or a mountain climber?

Oh, go ahead, call child services. She was in no danger at all. . . I’d stapled her to the wall for safety. Besides, she’s a fair princess anyway. She can fly.

Oatmeal with mittens? Lesson learned. New hypothesis: cereal with wings?

Last weekend we enrolled her at dance classes a few blocks away. She enjoyed her first class and had her second yesterday.

She’s getting good at coloring between the lines and cutting up her own food.

She has worn pants exactly once in the last month.

We rented Cinderella from Blocbuster one weekend to see if Molli Malou had the patience to sit through a full feature movie (we were thinking about taking her to a matinee of Shrek 3 or Ratatouille). Answer: we watched Cinderall straight-through four times in just under two days.

Molli Malou is unabashedly all girl, all the time. From her obsession with dresses and shoes to her rapture over princesses, butterflies, and fairies, she fulfills every single stereotype of girlishness. There are very few hints of the tomboy in her—she throws and catches better than most boys her age, though, and has a certain kind of recklessness and impatience that are anything but dainty. (She can dress inanimate objects down with the fury and enthusiasm, if not the full vocabulary, of a drunken sailor. Bumping her head on a table, she will fume: “Stupid table! You dumb table! You devil table, I hate you! Stupid!” and so on, in a furious mix of Danish and English pseudo-swears.

Oddly enough, however, she is quick to upbraid any blue language by her mother or father.

She likes spicy food but not strong cheese.

She is rarely silent, and fills our days and nights with an endless stream of random musings, half-invented songs, and absolutel jibberish. But among strangers, she clams up at once and takes as long as half an hour to open up into her irrepressible (and unsilenceable) self.

So that’s the month at a glance.

On the domestic front, after finally lining up the purchase of the apartment next door and getting formal approval of the co-op board to combine the apartments, we’ve decided to pass it up and save up for a house outside the city–one house in particular has caught our eye, but even if that doesn’t work out we’ve decided we’re ready for the burbs.

Lastly I should mention that Molli Malou remains a staunch Pats and Red Sox fan, to the extent that she understands anything about baseball or football, and I’ll be very sure to keep her sports heart free of the corrupting influences of her uncle and one of her cousins! (And, sad to say, in terms of baseball, we’re a split-loyalty household already thanks to Gene’s cunning entrapment of Trine in the Yankee nation.)

Grown-up Molli Malou, when you read this, the ’07 Patriots will either be the stuff of legend or just one more NFL cautionary tale… but if they are the stuff of legend, you can tell all your friends that you were such a loyal fan that even when you didn’t wear your Brady jersey to bed on Sunday nights, you clutched it to your heart in your sleep.)