Thanksgiving &c.

We didn’t do anything on Thanksgiving. It’s not a holiday here, and Trine had to go to class that evening anyway. On Friday we invited some American friends (with their continental spouses) for a late Thanksgiving dinner. That was all the excuse we needed to doll Molli Malou up in some holiday gear.

We fed her before any guests arrived, in hopes of making the evening run more smoothly, but then I forgot to roll her sleeves back down before chasing her around with the camera. I therefore have a lot of shots of Molli in her lovely Thankgsiving attire but with her sleeves rolled up. This is the best of them (alas):

Trine caught the error, but by then I’d used up most of Molli’s goodwill. She was no longer interested in even pretending to pose. So I had to settle for shots like this one of her lumbering down the hallway with my sneaker in hand:

Or this one (I have no idea what she’s pointing at, or what’s “number one!”):

Or this one, in which she’s climbing up on Trine’s desk and contemplating a lunge for the screen:

The next morning she was back to her playful self:

On Sunday we had a flash visit from David, Bente, and Molli’s second-cousin Elizabeth. Older, bigger, and stronger than Molli, Elizabeth took what was to us an unfamiliar approach to the cats:

I suppose Molli will be lugging the poor critters around by spring, but for now she’s still perfectly content to let others entertain her (she loved David and showed off for him the whole time they were here):

It wasn’t all roses between Elizabeth and the cats:

Sunday afternoon we went to mormor’s to help celebrate her birthday. She ravaged a plate of shrimp and salmon and then didn’t stop eating for the rest of the night. Here she is drooling in anticipation while her mormor prepares a dessert:

And here she is just adoring mormor while consuming an apple (it’s a little blurry, which is the price we have to pay for non-flash photos):

This was near the end of our visit, and somehow Molli managed to bring the apple home with her without our realizing it. I know this because I found it festering away in the middle of her pram this morning. (Fortunately it’s quite cold outside, so “festering” is probably an exaggeration.)

Molli is saying “no” to me more and more often while sticking to “nej” with everyone else, but her most impressive bilingualism is her use of the word “key.” When she’s talking to me, a key is always a key (although she did once seem to try and pluralize it into “key-er”). When talking to Trine, though, she actually says “nøgle,” or something very damn close to it. Same object, same circumstances, but different words for different parents. It’s very interesting.

Her vocabulary is expanding with astonishing speed. She rumbles around the apartment in endless conversation with herself, her stream of babble tossing up strange new sounds and combinations all the time. Usually it’s nonsense, but we have to be careful because from time to time she actually comes up with a real word and we have to be sure to reinforce those. In the kitchen this morning, for example, I had her in my arms and was letting her babble wash over me while I made coffee, until suddenly she seemed to get very fixated on a “ka” sound. She was pointing at the spice rack going, “ka! ka! ka!” She had her eyes trained on the bottom of the spice rack, twisted her head to maintain that eye contact whichever way I turned, and wouldn’t stop with the “ka.”

Finally I inspected the spices to see what on earth “ka” might be. Cinnamon is “kanel” in Danish, and we put it in her oatmeal every morning, so I thought maybe she was talking about cinnamon.

Then I noticed the cast-metal New York taxicab resting on top of the oven hood, just below the spice rack. Molli was straining after it with her hands. I gave it to her and she cried “ka ka ka!” with glee while waving it in the air.

She hadn’t been saying “ka.” She’d been saying “car”—exactly as if she were a little girl from Swampscott.