“Yes, Daddy…”

Most of you know Molli Malou’s voice by now: that impossibly sweet, impossibly high-pitched little warble of hers is hard to forget.

She’s still working through the latter stages of a chest cold (or something), so her voice has gone down a few octaves and has a slight gravelly quality to it. It’s as if one of the Rugrats were a young Brenda Vaccarro.

It is a voice that, in recent days, is often also hoarse from shouting: Molli Malou continues to exert her will in all things, and is extremely vocal about it. It isn’t just wanting noodles when she’s being served oatmeal, as in the old days, but virtually anywhere that any kind of an option exists, she picks one and insists on it. For example:

“Let’s go, Molli, time to get in the car to go to vuggestue.”

“Don’t want take car! Want take klappevogn [stroller]!”

Or:

“You want a sticker? Here’s a pretty sticker of a cute white dog!”

“Want brown dog! Not white dog, brown dog!”

We’re learning to evade these kinds of silly arguments, many of which come and go without leading to hysterics, by limiting her options severely, or by forcing her to make a decision up-front, or by circumscribing the set of options to a small subset of do-able options. Sometimes this is done by offering her a choice instead of telling her categorically what’s going to happen (“It’s time to go to vuggestue: should we take the car or the stroller?”).

Sometimes it’s done by sleight of hand, as it was this morning.

“Want noodles for breakfast, Daddy. Want noodles.”

“Would you like to help daddy make your oatmeal?”

“Yes, Daddy! Molli help make oatmeal!”

In any case, we’re getting a grip.

The funny thing is, the phrase I’m hearing the most of from Molli lately, in spite of her contrarian nature, is “Yes, Daddy.” She says it sweetly and kind of solemnly in response to almost anything I ask her.

“Do you want to go up the stairs by yourself?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Do you want to play with the Leap Pad?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Did you have fun at vuggestue?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

I never get a “yes” without that nominative appendix. In fact, she tacks it on to nearly everything she says: I also hear plent of “No, Daddy” and, most awful of all, “Go away, Daddy!” and “Be quiet, Daddy!” But really it’s much more often “Yes, Daddy,” so I ought to be grateful.

Conversationally she’s making enormous strides in Danish, using proper pronouns, declensions, and conjugations now. That is, she’s often using full and gramatically correct sentences in Danish. Her English is lagging a little again, but not by far.

Just a week ago she would tend to say things like, “Don’t want oatmeal!” in English and in Danish. While it’s still the same in English, she’s more likely now to say, “I don’t want to have oatmeal!” in Danish.

But she still sometimes parrots our lines back to us without converting them to the personal pronoun. When she wants to tell us she’s enjoying something, for example, she still says, “Do you like it?” in exactly the tone we use to ask her the same question… except she means “I like it.”

When she wants help from me, she doesn’t ask for my help: she says instead, “Daddy will help you.”

Naturally her increased linguistic faculties have made for some fun conversations recently. This morning, for example we were eating oatmeal together at the dining room table. I finished mine before she finished hers. She nodded toward my bowl.

“Daddy’s finished now?”

“Yes, Molli, Daddy’s all done with his oatmeal.”

She smiled wickedly and jerked her head back toward the toy-strewn living room. “Daddy can play now!” she exclaimed.

I forgot to mention the main thing I wanted to mention: we’ve taken one side off her crib so she now has a bed that she can get in and out of without climbing three feet off the floor. She was ecstatic with the change and has made it two nights running without falling out in the middle of the night. Or at least without falling painfully out of it: yesterday when I went in to get her up I found her lying comfortably on the floor (on the quilt we spread out beside her crib against just such a contingency).

Anyway, she’s very excited about her new grown-up bed, and continues to point to the old, dismantled railing and say, “That’s for babies,” with obvious pride.

Last night Trine and I sat beside her as she lay in her bed, just sort of playing with her as she wound down for the day. She had no clothes on because we’re still potty training and she’s good about using her potty as long as she doesn’t have to undress first. At one point last night she hopped out of the bed and scampered into the living room. She came back a few minutes later.

“Did you make a stinky poo?” we asked. (She’d been acting as though such an act were imminent.)

“Yes!” she exclaimed, scurrying back into her bed.

Trine and I both panicked at once: “Where?!”

Molli Malou thought the question over then answered, in Danish, “In my butt!”

* * *

She’s getting caught up in Bears fever.

This is the last shot of Molli in her “baby” crib.

Here she is with Liam at the zoo on Sunday.

A little closer up:

And here are some shots from her first-ever pony ride:

Just a happy shot playing with Daddy on our bed:

And a less happy shot when she decides she wants to see pictures of herself on daddy’s computer and his “Not now” response was inappropriate:

And here’s her bed as it looks now: