Out of March and Into April

I’m sorry there hasn’t been more lately. I’m going to try and get back into the swing of at least one Molliblog per week. Even if there´s nothing new to say, I can at least post a new batch of pictures now and then.

Molli has made huge strides this month. She now knows her name is more than just “Molli,” and will frequently refer to herself proudly as “Molli Moo.”

She is saying more and more polysyllabic words and putting more sentences together. This week she’s hit us most impressively with “frikadeller” (Danish meatball) and “dinosaur.”

She´s also getting more willful, which was pretty hard to imagine as she´s been headstrong as hell from the moment she came into the world. When she wants to do something, she´ll roar “mere” (more) plus the verb or noun of choice until she gets what she wants or realizes it´s a lost cause. “Mere happy,” for example, means “please play Barney´s singalong version of ‘If you’re happy and you know it’ on DVD another ten thousand times.”

Speaking of please, she seems uncommonly polite in her use of please and thank you (and tak). She´s also good at apologizing.

She’s getting very climby and we’re probably not too far off from the day when she climbs into or out of her crib on her own. We’ve already seen her trying. (Fools that we are, we’ve actually tried to teach her how to swing her leg over the rail, the only part of the climb she can’t seem to figure out on her own.)

She’s become very engaged with television. Aunt Deb sent a bundle of DVDs, and Molli Malou now watches about half an hour of television a day. Barney seems to be her particular favorite right now, giving Trine and me a welcome respite from the Teletubbies.

Oh… I meant to post these pictures of Trine and me at the go-cart track a couple of weeks ago. Here they are.

Also, Nana was worried that the beautiful sweater she knit would be too small. Not a problem:

We went to the zoo last Sunday, March 26th, and a sudden storm dumped more than an inch of snow on us in under an hour. (Molli Malou loved it.)

…so we spent most of our zoo time at the indoor exhibits. Here’s Molli Malou terrifying me by trying to climb up the railing around one little exhibit… you know what’s on the other side of that rail? An eight-foot drop to a little pond that’s home to a crocodile!

And here she is just enjoying the sight of a tropical bird or butterfly fluttering around the crocodile’s exhibit.

I still haven´t put any videos together since December, and I do mean to get around to that just as soon as my schedule opens up. (June at the latest.) Also, now that we have our DVD burner and the appropriate software I´ll be able to put together great sprawling epics that are whole gigabytes in size and send them to you in the mail… and then you can just pop ’em in your DVD player instead of your computer to watch them.

For Molli´s ongoing medical file, we´re still trying to get rid of the rashes she developed on her arms after we accidentally did a load of wash with non-sensitive detergent. That was three weeks or a month ago, and the rashes are still there. We finally got her on a new lotion courtesty of a call to the doctor earlier this week, but the rashes persist. She scratches them like mad when her clothes are off.

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I began this Molliblog last Friday and never got around to posting it. Now it’s Tuesday evening, and I’ve got a few more pictures.

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She’s taken a shine to her rubber boots. She loves to wear them, even when she’s not wearing anything else. She can actually put them on herself. She does this by setting them up on the floor and carefully lowering her feet into them. She then stomps around the apartment with glee, and will loudly proclaim (in Danish), “Molli’s rubber boots!”

This is not a great pic of Molli, but it’s a good illustration of the boots thing. (Sometimes she gets frustrated with the second boot and just storms around in one.)

She’s also become interested in hats, and her favorite hat of all time remains the mixing bowl she first wore last summer as Molli Quixote.

She’s getting better at better, thanks to the Barney video, at playing out the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” song. (“Lille Peder Edderkop” in Danish.) Here she is going up the water spout…

And here she is just being cute (I think she’s removing the hat and holding it behind her head).

One of her first regular gestures was a “Where is it?” gesture. She’s been doing it for a long time—long before she was talking at all. When she wants to know where something is, or wants you to guess where something is, she does this kind of shrug thing with both hands held upward. This evening she was playing hide-the-spoon with us.

Where’s the spoon?