Don’t Panic (Again) — I’m Serious!

Once again my website host (Verio) has apparently screwed up somehow on the renewal of my website. This happens every time. But don’t worry, the images will come back online once we’ve straightened everything out.

On the one hand it is a shame, because I have so many wonderful pictures and videos from the last couple of weeks: our hyggelige Christmas Calendar evenings at home, our family trip to Tivoli, our Christmas Tree quest adventure (and Pony Ride), and plenty of shots of Molli Malou warming up to the season.

On the other hand it’s just as well, because I haven’t had a spare second to invest in the usual blogging since I started the new job two weeks ago.

But there are anecdotes, and I do have a few moments to kill while I run some programs here at work.

The first anecdote is just a status report on Molli Malou’s health: Trine was called to pick her up from vuggestue yesterday afternoon because our little bean had been complaining of stomach pain, had vomited, and had become completely listless. Trine brought her home at once and ministered to her all afternoon. Moster Mette had arrived earlier in the day from Chicago and the plan had been that she should come over for dinner and to spend the night, but it became quickly clear that Molli Malou was too ill to make that worthwhile–and that, from what Trine had heard from neighbors and vuggestue, this particular stomach virus was fierce and highly contagious. The family on the fourth floor, for example, had taken a fortnight to work through it. We took turns tending to Molli Malou after I got home. She threw up several times, substantially, and lay limp in our laps, uninterested in anything. Finally at about 6 o’clock she asked to be put to bed. We complied.

She woke up a little before eight in the evening, ravenous and energetic. She ate a whole bowl of oatmeal and put a substantial dent in a bowl of noodles, babbling happily all the while, then insisted on Christmas Calendar–and had the gall to complain about not getting any candy! She then went to bed without a fuss, slept through the night, and seemed her normal rowdy self this morning. (But told us she had dreamed all night of throwing up at vuggestue.)

When I dropped her off, the pedagogs told me this was typical of the illness, and that I shouldn’t get my hopes up: it was often the case that a 6-8 hour bout of illness and vomiting was followed by a window of apparent good health, only to be interrupted by another bout of illness, on and off for up to a week. So we’re crossing our fingers. Molli Malou has rarely been sick for more than 24 hours at a stretch (last Christmas among the only exceptions to the rule).

But on to the fun anecdotes.

The best of all came Tuesday evening. It was Molli Malou’s last swimming class of the season (and into the foreseeable future, since we dropped the class due to time constraints). Normally we feed her before the 6:00 class, since she becomes too hungry to enjoy herself if she doesn’t eat beforehand. But she resisted all Trine’s attempts to feed her on this night, so Trine called me when they were on their way home and said Molli Malou had requested noodles and she had consented, so I should please have some ready. I did, and Molli Malou ate her way through them in record time.

“Want more noodles,” she said.

“That’s crazy,” I said. These noodle packages are enough to satisfy even me when I’m hungry, so I couldn’t imagine Molli Malou actually needed more after having consumed every last drop of this package.

“You’ve really had enough,” Trine said.

“Want more,” Molli Malou insisted.

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“You don’t mean that,” Trine said. “By the time daddy makes you more, you won’t even be hungry!”

She scowled angrily at both of us and exclaimed, with perfect pronunciation: “I’m serious!”

We all three froze for a moment, staring at one another incredulously, then burst into laughter. No one laughed harder than Molli Malou, who nearly lost her breath from laughing. The whole rest of the night, whenever things got quiet she would suddenly give us one of her shifty looks and mutter, all seriousness, “I’m serious!” and then burst into laughter.

The very next night she very earnestly asked for more of something.

“Are you serious?” I asked, my voice perhaps betraying the fact that I anticipated a reprise of the previous night’s hilarity.

“No,” she said. Then she looked from me to Trine and back to me before she burst into laughter. She had played her little joke, and Daddy had walked right into it.

We anticipate a sense of humor that’s going to be the joy and bane of our existence.

She has completely glommed onto the Christmas Calendar ritual, and the whole thing (age of tradition: 15 days) has already become a mere bit of bureaucracy to rush through on the way to her Christmas Calendar present. She hardly even looks at the calendar itself anymore, instead standing on her chair and leaning on the table to try and peer around the calendar to where we’ve hidden that night’s gift.

(These gifts, of course, are brought by elves, whose approach is apparently signalled by the ringing of the bell on the end of daddy’s Santa hat… a tradition she seems to have invented herself.)

She can sing along to more Christmas Carols than I can count. Most of them are in Danish, though she’s very fond of her own little version of Jingle Bells:

Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells,
Jingle all a way…

(Repeat 10,000 times.)

She calls her snowsuit her “spacesuit,” because I could never remember the Danish word and didn’t even recall the phrase “snowsuit” until a week or so ago, and therefore always called it her spacesuit.

She is more attached than ever to her Cabbage Patch doll “Haddie” and is constantly transferring her own experiences onto her poor doll. After scraping her own knee a week or two ago, and getting a band-aid from mor, Molli Malou spent the next week helping Haddie “fall down” and “hurt knee” just so she could make her feel better with a band-aid — in Haddie’s case, a little strip of tape.

I have no doubt poor Haddie will be throwing up all weekend, with Molli Malou helpfully shoving the doll’s head in one bowl after another and urging her to “get it all out!”

My program is done now, so it’s back to the salt mine…