Springless

Spring took her time getting around to Nordsjælland this year.  April showers just brought May showers and all the showers were cold.  The weather finally took a sudden dramatic turn for the better exactly one day before Nana and Pop-Pop arrived for their visit, but that’s after the period covered in this post.  (Which I’d prepped just before their arrival; I’m writing this shortly after their departure and will cover their visit in the next post.)

(Most of the outdoor pictures below suggest a warm and sunny Danish spring, but don’t be misled: I tend not to photograph gloomy gray days of rainy misery, and such days were the rule.  The photos were the exceptions.  We were virtually springless.)

I keep forgetting we have a cotton candy machine.  So do the girls.  But every once in a while we remember and it’s as exciting as the first time.  I don’t like cotton candy, I haven’t bought it for myself since I was in my early teens, but there’s something wonderful about turning your own dull sugar into wispy carnival magic.

(Those are Maddie’s friends Sara and Andrea.)

The weather wasn’t all bad all the time, as this photo of Molli and Jørgen on the court shows.  (I can’t date it because it was sent by Mormor so it has no metadata.)

For the permanent record: it was April and May when something went kablooey with the cable and internet in Værløse,  We were constantly losing all our connectivity (except for 3G/4G on our phones and tablets), often for days at a time.  This was particularly annoying over some of the long spring weekends, since we’d all settle in to watch a family movie only to discover we had no cable.  And it’s harder than you’d think to cast Netflix from your phone to your television when there’s no internet on your router.  It can be done, but it requires two 3G devices and some reconfiguration of your Chromecast or Apple TV.  We did a lot of reading.

So I leave this here as a reminder of our horrors.

Molli Malou and one of her friends ran down to the lake one sunny but chilly day, and her friend took the picture below. It’s gorgeous on a phone; looks a little washed out here.

So here’s an unwashed-out picture of Molli Malou in her handball training sweats.

One upside to bad weather is that you can’t do yard work in pouring rain.  So you need to stay indoors.  So you can make more delicious bread.

We made our annual pilgrimage to Tivoli’s opening weekend.  They’re really pushing Easter now, with more Eastery decor and stuff than in previous years.  It was eggscellent.

(Molli was, as usual, off at a handball gig or something.)

As seen on Facebook: the new Tivoli vodka and juice bar!

First ride of the year: Odin Express!

The octopus ride has been replaced by some kind of space-themed ride.

The evergreen Pirate ride!

The weather was so bad that we actually had a lot of fires in the evenings.

Easter!  (And Molli still out of town.)

We tried to lure Molli back home by sending her this photo of the Easter Bunny’s payload:

I suppose it worked, since Molli did finally come home that afternoon.  Eventually.

We had a nice Easter lunch with Mormor and Jørgen.  Still no Molli, but Didi came along.

Here is a picture of a giraffe that Maddie made in school.  It’s not particularly exceptional in itself…

But I love the iconoclasm it reveals when you look at it alongside the pictures by all of Maddie’s classmates:

(On the other hand, maybe they’d just run out of blue paint by the time Maddie got to her sky.)

We also had the semi-annual arrival of the yard waste containers.  I worked from home that Friday and started loading our piles of yard waste moments after the containers arrived.  And I’m glad: by 16:00 Friday they were full.  I post this as a reminder always to work from home on container days!

Maddie is getting very good at cooking.  She often wakes up and makes herself pancakes on weekend mornings.  She even tries to clean up after herself.

Emphasis on tries:

My big project this spring and summer is going to be converting the evening terrace into a truly wonderful nook, a peaceful and secluded spot to hide from the world.

I think I’m off to a good start:

Now and then those idiosyncratic moments of weather niceness came along and were seized with both hands:

Doesn’t it look like someone dropped a huge rock in some huge body of water way off to the west?

Another thing the bad weather did by forcing me not to do yard work was force me to confront my indoor spring cleaning tasks, which I usually prefer to postpone until fall so I can ignore them all winter.

This year I cleaned out the fyrrum.  A lot of the shelf space was occupied by electronic accessories, gadgets, converters, cables, and the like.  I couldn’t believe how much of this stuff we had, and how utterly useless all of it had become.  A lot of the stuff you see spread out below cost a lot of money when I bought it, and none of it is more than 10-15 years old.  Yet almost all of it was just pure trash given today’s tech reality.  (My laptop and keyboard don’t count!)

One day during this period Maddie approached me while I was busy with something in the kitchen.

“Can I go to the black playground?” she asked.

“I’m busy right now,” I said.

“I know,” she said.  “I mean, by myself.”

“To meet Emilie?”  (Emilie is a friend who lives a few houses away from the playground.)

“No, just to go there.”

I suddenly realized what I was being asked: Maddie wanted to wander off and do something in the outside world alone, independently.  She’d never done so before.  Once or twice we’d let her ride bikes with Molli to the playground, or to get some candy at Netto, but Maddie herself had never left the house alone unless to walk to a friend’s house, always with instructions to call us as soon as she got there.

This was a big moment.  I allowed it.  I made sure she had her phone and we agreed she should be home in half an hour.

With great sincerity and solemnity Maddie set out.  Half an hour later she texted me a photograph of Enebærvej with a note saying “Don’t worry, I’m on my way.”  And she was home a few moments later.

This is now a thing she does.  Outdoor autonomy has begun.

Once in a while when I’m out walking Didi after work, Maddie texts from home for permission to go to the playground, and then Didi and I meet her there.

The Sunday Skypes with Nana and Pop-Pop sometimes require a little extra make-up.

Dyrlægens nattemad: “the veterinarian’s midnight snack,” one of my favorite Danish sandwiches, made almost to perfection:

Danish rye, leverpostej, onion, aspic, saltpork, and some sea-salt sprinkled on top.  Sheer deliciousness!

Our annual observation of Liberation Day on May 4th.  It doesn’t take much to light a few candles, but the memory is important.

Scenes from every day life: Maddie putting her lunchbox and snack bags into the 2.b. fridge, as she does every morning of every schoolday.

(When I take her to school we’re usually among the first.)

“Daddy, what do you do at work besides have meetings?”

“Well, honey, I do stuff like this…”

“Oh.  Never mind.”

One Friday evening I had a work function that spouses were invited to join: we saw We Will Rock You at the (brand new) Royal Arena, then had a tapas dinner afterwards at a nearby restaurant.

Mormor kept the girls entertained while we were out.

And that’s more or less that.

I have lots of pictures from Nana and Pop-Pops visit this past week, but probably won’t get around to posting them until next weekend.  I won’t talk about their visit here, since that can all wait for its own post, but I should mention that not only did the spring weather arrive just in time for their arrival: summer weather began during their visit and seems to be remaining with us.

* * *

Molli has now transitioned from the 12-and-unders to the 14-and-unders on handball, and at this age group the Værløse and Farum clubs combine into a single Furesø club.  So Molli Malou is once again among the youngest on the team, and is teammates with a lot of girls who were just a few weeks ago some of her fiercest opponents.  (As Nana and Pop-Pop were able to see first-hand, she seems to be adjusting just fine.)  She has no time or interest for any other activities.

Maddie wrapped up her dance season with the big show featured in the previous post: her swimming lessons end for the season this week and that will be that: having successfully swum a little over a kilometer non-stop on her “measurement day,” she is no longer required (by us) to take swimming lesson and has chosen to opt out of them.  Choir will also be winding down within the next month or so, and that’ll be the end of that, as well.  So next fall she’ll be sticking with dance and, according to her (but not yet confirmed), getting back into handball.  She had thought about taking gymnastics, but decided instead to teach herself by doing constant cartwheels and handstands and flips around the house and yard.

That’s enough for now… coming soon: the Nana and Pop-Pop Værløse Tour 2017!