Planes, Cars, and Stags

Molli Malou is now conversational. She asks questions, expresses opinions, voices dissent, and, most annoyingly of all, remembers promises and holds promisers accountable—which is to say, she is now capable of saying, with some irritation, after having been promised several hours ago that she would get ice-cream later, “Daddy said ice-cream later. Daddy said that. Ice-cream later. Ice-cream now?” Not only that, but she’ll look up at me adoringly as she says it and bat her eyelids coyly while adding: “Pleeeeeeeease?”

And yet she’s young enough that a quick change of topic, a distraction from the television, and the bribe of a refilled Pez dispenser can still buy dispensation. (And for the record, I really did intend to get her that ice-cream.)

We had a lovely chat Friday afternoon while she snacked before our trip into Tivoli. She posed for me as I took pictures—yes, these are all her ideas of “poses”—and if you click on the image, you can download a 9MB movie (.wmv format) of a very minor but very pleasant conversation I had with her — up to and including her expressions of amusement at her own clumsiness.

But wait… did we tell any of you she’s been taking books to bed — and actually reading? Okay, so she’s just parroting what she can remember of what Mor and Daddy have said when they read the books aloud to her, but there’s something about this picture that just says, yeah, we’re related.

The next picture is not for me or any of you. It’s for Molli Malou, who will doubtless some day stroll through these pages and feel alternating waves of boundless gratitude and murderous indignance. This is the statue of Pierrot in Tivoli. Molli Malou adores it. We must gather round its base and genuflect before it on every visit. Tivoli without Pierrot would be unthinkable to Molli Malou. She talks about him at home (in the conversation movie above, in fact, I’m surprised she doesn’t mention him along with John and Liam when I ask whom we’re going to see).

Here, Molli Malou, is the picture I promised to print and hang on your wall when we got home.

(And hopefully you’ll be able to remember that as a promise kept!)

So, yeah, anyway, it was our last trip to Tivoli for the season on Friday. We took Molli Malou out of vuggestue early to give ourselves a little more time there. Her friends were envious. Molli Malou was very proud. Who doesn’t enjoy being the object of envy?

After paying homage to Pierrot we met John and Liam and meandered over to the horse race arcade. Molli Malou and Liam watched about a half dozen races with fierce interest while their fathers hung back and tried to handicap the horses.

Directly opposite the horses were the airplanes, and Molli Malou wanted a ride. She got one.

The planes can go up and down—you control their vertical bearing with a stick—but Trine said Molli Malou didn’t care for the down position. They went up as soon as the ride went in motion, and only descended when the ride came to an end.

Molli Malou was laughing and squealing the whole time, Trine said, and got off the ride begging “more! again! one more time!“, garbled and repeated in both languages, peppered with “pleeeeeeeeases.” She needn’t have bothered: I was dying to get up there with her anyway.

Well, yeah, there was that: my legs were too long to fit in the stupid plane. I shouted urgently for Trine to come and take my place before liftoff, but the attendant assured me I could fly side-saddle.

Who knew?

Trine, as I mentioned, had told me that Molli Malou “didn’t care for” any low flying, which automatically earns Trine a postgraduate degree in understatement.

The plane no sooner began revolving than Molli Malou was gleefully repeating, “Up! Up! Up in the sky!” I drew back on the stick. Once we leveled off at our cruising altitude of about eight feet, she immediately began chanting, “Ikke go down! Ikke go down! Ikke go down!” It was no good giving my word; the first forty seconds of the ride were spent with my nodding politely as she begged not to go down. She was rapturous with the fever of her own excitement. Eventually the ride ended, and the stream of requests for an encore began.

“Maybe later,” I said.

“Later!” she exclaimed, thrilled at the prospect.

Next stop was the kiddie cars. We got Molli Malou and Liam into a little sports number and I have never seen Molli Malou light up like that in my life. Her radiance on the airplane was nothing beside this, and I’m not exaggerating. Once those cars kicked into gear she worked that wheel like a pro, laughing and shrieking and giggling and shining and chatting to Liam in an endless rush of giddy enthusiasm.

Liam sat aloof and unimpressed, arms at his sides, equally uninterested in the steering wheel before him and Molli Malou’s exultant babble. He had the look of a long-suffering husband being dragged to the mall by a chatty and possibly crazy wife.

Remind me to post the video… (I’d load it right now, but Trine’s sleeping in the bedroom and I don’t dare wake her, which is why I’m working on this rather than the novel.)

I should add in Liam’s defense that he was just as eager as Molli Malou to take a second car ride later in the afternoon (by which point my camera’s batteries had died), and that he seemed much more engaged the second time around. Given his intellectual nature, I’m assuming that when he saw Molli Malou grab the steering wheel as soon as they boarded for that first drive, he reasoned that it was pointless to grab his own wheel since logic would dictate that a car could only have one functioning steering wheel.

And even on the first ride he couldn’t hide his enthusiasm entirely:

That last one’s my favorite. It’s my desktop wallpaper now and I need to print it as big as I possibly can. I’d like to wallpaper the apartment with it. If you want a full-size version, let me know and I’ll email it. It’s spectacular when you see it full-size.

Molli Malou will no longer let me undress her without bundling her shirt or onesy over her head as a “silly hat,” with which she will then scamper off to the mirror and laugh at herself for five minutes. She is awfully fixated on seeing herself in the mirror and on the computer and on television videos, and we are trying to keep her self-absorption down to a healthy level, but as long as she’s laughing at herself, rather than admiring her beauty, I don’t see the harm. Unless she’s going to get some kind of weird clown-syndrome thing. You think? Is the Pierrot obsession some kind of symptom?

Daddy’s no help in this area, anyway. I told her it’s only funny if you wear silly things and act serious. I guess it’s all fair since I’m the one who’ll end up paying all her therapy bills some day.

We met some friends for a picnic in Dyrehaven today — that’s the erstwhile royal hunting reserve beside the amusement park Bakken, up in Klampenborg. We’ve been there before, I think, somewhere on this blog. Anyway, Bakken closed for the season a few weeks ago but the woods are always open.

We were no sooner in the park than Trine, Molli Malou, and I were startled and a little frightened by the weird baying, the strange moo-roaring, of a wild stag. He stood just twenty yards off the main path, rattling his antlers against a tree and groaning his awful angry moan. I tiptoed as close as I dared (not very close: he’s bigger than he looks) and took this picture.

As we enjoyed our picnic we were surrounded by deer of all sizes and genders — but the angry moo-roars (or braying, or groaning, or whatever you want to call it) of the stags was deeply disturbing and a little intimidating. It was the kind of dark and otherworldly sound you might expect the ghost of Jacob Marley to make if he’d stubbed his toe.

I kept trying to get pictures, but I also kept wanting to not get gored on the antlers of a 500-pound stag. So I never got any closer to a stag. And whenever I tried to sneak up on one of the many deer families hanging out deeper in the woods, the sudden appearance of a stag militant ensured I snuck right back where I’d come from.

So much for my career as a wildlife photographer.

The kids had a lot of fun playing around the felled trees, whose hulks lie sprawling throughout the woods like dinosaur skeletons.

We kept Molli Malou up way past her usual nap-time.

But she had captured Holger’s attention, so I don’t think she minded.

Trine said she’d been to the park many, many times in her life without seeing that kind of deer activity before. We both wondered what could have been behind it.

As we left the park, an answer:

Can you translate it? No? Let me do it for you:

“The stags are in heat.”

It was mating season.

* * *

The cranky and stubborn behavior Molli Malou was exhibiting earlier this month has disappeared. She’s her normal sunny self again, and a joy to be with.

She has her first favorite television show now: “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”

It’s not a show either of her parents ever would have watched, but we do watch South Park at dinner sometimes, and “AFHV” comes on right after South Park. Molli Malou caught it starting one evening and stood transfixed. Her fascination fascinated us: we didn’t dare change the channel. Did she actually like it? People falling down. People getting hurt. Things going bonk and whack and blam. She immediately dubbed the show “Ow!” and begs to watch it before she goes to bed each night. (They air episodes at 7 and 730.) She especially likes the clips of people falling down or bumping into things.

She’s also become incredibly imitative of things she sees on television. When Barney starts singing “Clean up, clean up,” for example, she grabs her wagon of giant Legos and upends it all over the floor, then spends the next few minutes singing the Clean Up song while tidying up. When she sees the video of herself (age about one year) racing around the living room with her little plastic trike and shrieking with joy, she begins doing it in the here and now. She even “trips” and falls down ovr the trike, just like she does in the video. When she sees herself wearing the mixing bowl as a hat, she runs into the kitchen to get it.

She will no longer tolerate assistance on stairs, and can actually climb up the three flights to our apartment fairly quickly without using the bannister. She’s a little more cautious—at our insistence—coming down.

She’s regressed a little at her swimming lessons and is suddenly very afraid of her head going under water. The instructor assures us it’s a normal phase, and that if we don’t make a big deal out of it she’ll get right back into it on her own soon enough. Otherwise she still very much enjoys her swimming.

She can draw a circle, sort of. She counts to ten in both languages effortlessly, and can get through the American alphabet song eight times out of ten, although she still gets hung up, as all kids seem to, on the LMNOP run.

She likes that Alphabet Song / Twinkle Twinkle melody so much that she makes up songs of her own to it all the time. They’re usually pretty simple. For example:

Up to, up to
Up to Daddy
Up to, up to, up to Daddy.
Up up up, up up up,
up up up, up up up,
Up to, up to, up to Daddy,
Up to Daddy, up to Daddy.

Or, while changing her diaper:

Stinky, stinky
Stinky poo
Stink stinky stinky poo.
Stinky poo, stinky poo,
Molli make a stinky poo,
Stinky stinky stinky poo,
Stinky stinky stinky poo.

Although, when changing her diaper, she’s much more likely to default to my own compisiton, “Molli Made a Stinky Poo,” which goes to a melody from a song I apparently know but don’t remember and has verses describing the reach and power of her stinky poo’s stench. She’s all about stinky poo these days, and likes to stop in the street and examine any droppings she comes across.

She also likes to have a peek at the contents of her diaper when she’s being changed. “Molli see stinky poo?” She asks with disturbingly excited anticipation.

She’s still biting her nails, toenails inclusive, but we’re still trying not to make a big deal out of it, which is how the literature suggests one deal with it.

She’s very proud of her boogers and likes to show them off.

She has learned how to catch a ball but still throws like a girl. She gets very excited when she manages a catch, and jumps around squeaking in ecstasy.

Best of all, she still has that fresh baby smell after a bath, and, wrapped in her towel, snuggles into your arms with all the love in her little heart.