The Irresistable X-Box

It’s Easter. This afternoon we’ll be going out to Klaus’s for the third Easter in a row, which is strange to me: we moved here two years ago tomorrow, so I’m beginning to encounter my Danish thirds. (This will be my third Danish spring-of-the-midnight-sun, but it’ll be Molli’s first and we’re interested to see how or if it affects her sleep patterns.)

But I’m not taking time out of a leisurely Sunday to tell you about what we’re going to do later today. I’m here to tell you about Molli’s adventures in crawling. The video of one of her early crawls is here (6MB) if you’d like to see for yourself.

She’s still a cautious crawler. She throws her arms out a little jerkily, overdeliberately, slamming her hands down on the floor as though trying to kill a bug. And she still hasn’t made it out of the living room. That may not be for lack of curiosity, however, but because her new mobility has revealed something that many of us—myself and her Uncle Gene at minimum—had long suspected: the gravitational center of the home is the X-Box.

I tell you without exaggeration, hyberbole, or any other manner of distortion that if you set Molli down virtually anywhere in the living- or dining-room and aim her in any direction you like, it’ll only be a few moments before she orients herself toward the X-Box (mounted on a little shelf beneath the television, just under the DVD player)… and then she begins the inexorable trek toward it. We usually manage to swoop her up just before she reaches it, now, but we were not so quick yesterday afternoon. We therefore know what she wants to do if she’s given the opportunity to actually reach the thing: she goes straight for one of the controllers, even though they’re bundled up, their cords coiled round them, and tucked up on top of and toward the back of the X-Box itself.

Since I promised to avoid hyperbole, I should add that at one point this morning she went rambling over to the “lovely white bookcase in the background,” as Aunt Deb described it the other day, propped herself up on its base, and began withdrawing books. I was very excited, and decided, in my superstitious way, that whatever book she withdrew would be somehow significant, sort of the way her cousins did that traditional Korean ritual where the object they pick is supposed to illuminate their destiny. I was sort of assuming, as I invented the rules in my head, that she would go for Homer or Shakespeare or even Balzac. As Molli fumbled at the books, trying to get a grip on one, I explained the rules quickly to Trine just in time to regret them. The book Molli had withdrawn was Blind Run, by Patricia Lewin. I haven’t read it and have no idea how it ended up on our illustrious shelves, but here’s some jacket copy: “…a breathless novel of unrelenting suspense and nerve-cracking tension that is also a gripping story of lost love, lost innocence, and a last chance at revenge.”

A moment later she lunged for “A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” but she missed and ended up withdrawing some other bodice-ripping thriller of dubious origin.

I’ve therefore decided the book exercise is meaningless. Maybe we’ll give the actual Korean tradition a try on her first birthday… at least then we get to pick her options.

Anyway, her days of immobility are behind us and despite months of being forewarned we’re still completely unprepared. The house is nowhere near baby-proofed and as a result we basically have to take turns being on top of her. True to everyone’s warnings, our lives do in fact appear to be over.

* * *

David, Bente, and Elizabeth move to Cyprus in a couple of days, so we had lunch with them yesterday and let the little cousins (technically second-cousins, I suppose) go wild on each other. Here’s a pictorial account:

They were a fearsome combination. Being a few months older than Molli, Elizabeth was capable of climbing over obstacles and fetching toys that Molli never could have reached&mdashed;including some toys that Molli simply isn’t ready to play with. She (Elizabeth) would then leave the toy where Molli could entertain herself with it, then move on to seek new treasure. Molli got hold of one such toy—one of those weird jumbles of colorful, twisted metal rods with wooden beads on them—played with it briefly, tried to eat it, then began swinging it around until, inevitably, she just about brained herself with it. If you take a close look at the last picture in the sequence above you can see the shiner under her left eye.

(She had two nightmares last night—obvious nightmares that require parental reassurance to allow her to fall immediately back to sleep—and we assumed they were dreams of lethal toys lunging toward her face… until Trine read in one of our parenting books that, at this age, nightmares begin in most babies because they’re realizing “that their mommy and daddy are the most important people in the world.” Well, if Molli is actually realizing that me and Trine are the most important people in her world, that certainly won’t be the last of her nightmares!)

After lunch we took a long, meandering stroll back to their apartment with them, passing by Mormor’s place on the way. It struck me that only a year ago—March 6, 2004, to be exact—I’d taken a picture of Trine and Bente, both of them pregnant, on the very same terrace. I arranged a “One Year Later” picture. Here are both.

March 6, 2004

March 26, 2005

Happy Easter!