Ging Gang

David and Bente (now 4 months pregnant) are in town, and visited Friday evening with Molli’s second cousin Elizabeth. The two little girls hadn’t seen each other since just before David & Bente moved to Cyprus this spring.

Molli was distressingly possessive with her toys. Elizabeth tried to be patient at first, as though she understood that as the older child she had a certain responsibility.

Eventually she got tired of Molli’s harassment and gave her a two-handed shove that landed Molli back on her bum. Molli was a little more deferential afterwards—but still annoyingly possessive.

We mostly took video of the visit, and eventually I’ll edit it into something fun. Right now, though, we’ll just skip straight to the bubbles. The visit was more or less over when all of a sudden Bente pulled some bubble stuff out of a bag and asked if Molli liked bubbles. We didn’t know—but I knew I’d want the camera on.

So here are the girls noticing the first few bubbles…

Now just enjoy the bubble experience without my annoying narrative disruptions.

The swings in our backyard are tire swings. There are two of them. Molli loves them, which I think I’ve mentioned, and spends a good portion of every morning standing on the flour sack in the kitchen on her tippie-toes to peer out the window and gaze longingly at the swings, murmuring, ging gang, ging gang.

Of course she’s too small to swing on the tires, but we often swing with her in our laps and she loves it. Ging gang, ging gang…

Friday afternoon she and I were taking a break from the swings when another little girl from the complex, Kamille, got plopped on one of the swings by her mother—who left her to swing for herself! Now, Kamille’s at least a year older than Molli, if I’m not mistaken, and is old enough to grasp concepts such as the importance of holding on tight and the fundamentals of gravity. She’s also got the power of speech and can say things like, “Mommy, push me!” or “Mommy, let me down,” or, as I overheard Friday, “Mommy, it’s windy!” (“Moooo-ar, det blæser!“)

Molli stood in the sandbox transfixed watching Kamille ging-gang on her own.

“Oooooooh,” Molli said. (Actually, “ååååååååååh!“)

There was no misunderstanding her meaning. I very cautiously sat her in the tire swing and put her hands on the “ropes” and very, very gently pushed her back and forth without taking my hands off her.

She was in heaven.

Gradually she seemed to be getting the swing of it, so to speak. I took my hands off her and kept them just a few inches behind her as she swung, ready to catch her if she let go and fell backwards.

She was in nirvana.

At last we were both more confident and I started pushing her without following her with my hands. Not hard, not high, but enough that she was swinging a good three feet away from me on each swing. “Ging, gang!” she exclaimed. I was so proud of her. I turned to Kamille’s mother to explain that this was Molli’s first real swinging.

She was in the sand.

Forunately she’d fallen forwards, not backwards, meaning she’d slipped feet first down onto the ground, and had managed to grab the inside of the tire as she fell. She didn’t cry, but she was certainly shocked.

And she was damned if she wasn’t going to get right back up there.

So we’ve been working on this swinging thing all weekend, and finally Trine and I got some pictures and video of her tonight.

Mommy loads her in…

Daddy gives her a push…

Ging Gang!

One last thing: she has another word! And the word is cat. Unless you ask Trine, in which case it’s kat. I guess we won’t know for sure until she gets plural with it: cats or katter. Anyway, whenever a cat (or kat) comes strolling by her, she exclaims, “cat!” Which sometimes comes out as “gat” or “kit” or “git,” but she obviously gets the point.

She’s also been forming some weird nonsense sentences lately in ways she never has before. She’ll talk for whole minutes at a time, but instead of just repeating variations of a single sequence of syllables over and over (“badaba… badaba… dababa… babada…”) she weaves all kinds of ridiculous sounds together with minimal repetition. For example, “Durr burgly grr flurby too lobba. Garr flurter ta floo floo gobee doyng fwa fwa koogle!”

And her whistling just keeps getting better.

Videos to follow later this week…