A Short & Dolce Month

February in Denmark has two virtues (and only two): it’s short and it includes a week of vacation.

Hybenvej 1 was wracked with illness throughout February: a terrible coughing virus going around Denmark decided to settle in with us for most of the month.  (It spent so much time at our house we should have charged rent.)

Work began on the windows and doors at the very end of January, and at the time of this writing — Sunday, March 5 — most of the replacements have been made.  Only the windows around the “iPad Couch” and the big panel windows and terrace doors of the basement remain to be replaced, and the detail work around the already-installed windows and doors needs to be finished.  We’re very happy with the results so far, but February was certainly not the best of all possible months to have the interior of the house so routinely exposed to the elements.  Especially with this virus lurking around.

I myself didn’t get to take any time off over winter vacation, and Trine decided the virus would be even more fun with a layer of pneumonia to top it off, so the girls did not get to experience a particularly memorable vacation — until Molli flew off to Rome by herself for a week with the Lees in the Eternal City to see cousin Hannah singing at the Vatican and do some site-seeing.  While she jaunted about Rome with her cousins, aunt, and uncle, Trine and I did our best to spoil Maddie with lots of special treats.

And of course, as usual February included a Super Bowl, Fastelavn, and a couple of snowstorms.

So let’s jump into the visual memories!

I don’t remember the specific context for this note Maddie wrote to Pop-Pop, but I’m going to assume it’s a holdover from his birthday in January.

Scenes from every day life: Maddie at her cubby in the morning.

I don’t know if they’re still called “cubbies” in America.  For that matter I’m not sure they ever were.  But it’s what I remember them being called — open lockers like these — so that’s what I’ve gone with and that’s what Maddie and Molli believe they’re called in English.  Let’s hope I haven’t screwed their vocabularies up too badly.

Another treat I got myself with my AFL prize money was a Bosch leaf blower and vacuum.

I’m very excited to start using it, mainly to keep the carport and evening terrace clear.  But the workers are using the carport for storage, so it will have to wait for spring.

March 28 will mark the 14th anniversary of our move to Denmark.  That means this was the thirteenth February during which Trine informed me that, “My mom says in all her years of teaching she always needed her bike lights before winter vacation but didn’t need them any more after.”

(Molli and Maddie will probably end up telling their children each February, “When I was growing up, my mor always said that my mormor always said. . .”)

I can see why it made such a deep impression on Trine.  It’s horrible going to and from work when it looks like this outside:

Speaking of horrible, poor Nana hurt her back and had to have cement injected into it — a pretty concrete example of the miracles of medical progress!

The girls wanted to do something to cheer her up:

I’m saving most of the window and door pictures for when everything is done and I can pair before and after pictures together, but it was such a joy to see the windows over the pool replaced — few of you are likely to remember, but the original windows also had rotating metal shutters over them, and the shutter mechanism had jammed so that they were more less permanently closed.

It is now all sunshine and lollipops in the (empty and abandoned) swimming pool — or would be if there were such a thing as “sunshine” in the Danish February.

sun·shine

It’s nice to remind myself such a thing actually exists, when the Danish February looks much more often like this:

Trine and I managed to arrange our lives in such a way that we could watch the Super Bowl live.

The game kicked off at about quarter to one in the morning, local time.  The 21-3 halftime score was bad; nearly halfway through the third quarter it was worse.  Down 28-3 with about 23 minutes left to play, the Patriots would need to score more than one point per minute just to tie, and that’s just not the kind of thing that happens in a Super Bowl.

Until it does.

For the second time in three years, Molli Malou was roused out of bed at an ungodly hour on a snowy February Monday by the sound of her mother and father freaking out in the living room.  For the second time in three years, she got to watch Tom Brady and the New England Patriots win a Super Bowl.

…And yes, I said snowy.  It snowed all night.

(Also from much later that day, or the day after that, I was able to enjoy the Facebook Live! video of the parade in Boston.  I don’t like parades and I don’t usually watch live events on Facebook, but I couldn’t help myself.)

(The snow angel above was not made by one of our girls — not that I know of, anyway — but Maddie did tell me that she and one of her friends had been making snow angels at school while crying out, “I’m coming, Jesus!”  I still giggle every time I picture the two of them lying in the snow, flapping their arms and legs, and shouting out to Jesus.)

The pcitures immediately above and below are from the Thursday of Doom: the Thursday before winter vacation.  Trine was home sick, Molli was home sick, and I was working from home to be able to take care of them.

That was, of course, the day the workers tore out the foyer wall: the only windows and doors that, when removed, expose the entire interior of the house to the weather.

Here’s how it looked the next morning.

They actually set up wrong, at first, with the door and the left panel of glass switched around.  I had told them it looked great.  The contractor himself had come by and agreed that it looked very good.  It was Trine, as I steered her barely conscious, semi-ambulatory person out to the car to get her to the hospital, who somehow noticed, without even looking up or around, that the door was in the wrong place.  (Though her memories of that afternoon when her fever flew up into the staratosphere are foggy, she does recall that she had noticed when stepping out the new door that the wall on the right was closer to her than it ought to have been.)  Just as we were pulling out on our way to the hospital she mumbled that I should be sure to remind the contractor that the door was in the wrong place.

I stopped the car, ran back, and told him.  We had just barely caught the error in time.  I hadn’t.  The contractor hadn’t.  The girl swooning with the insane fever had.

They kept Trine at the hospital overnight, so I was able to spring her out of the joint on Friday.

With lousy weather and two sick girls in the house, I decided to make some of the delicious focaccia bread that I get every day at work, because who doesn’t want warm fresh bread when they’re sick in winter?  I enlisted Maddie’s help.  She wanted to make a vlog of it, so we set out to do so.

Nothing with our little project went right: we couldn’t find the right kinds of flour specified in the recipe, the only sourdough starter I could find at the store was for rye bread, I couldn’t get the dough to the right consistency, Maddie kept blundering her vlog lines. . .  It wasn’t so much focaccia bread as fiasco bread.

But it was awfully tasty fiasco bread.

As I romped Didi in the woods that Sunday, she upbraided me for not having brought Maddie and her sled.

(Seriously, can you not see the disapproval in her eyes?)

So we went home, I dropped Didi, and returned with Maddie and a sled.

I don’t have any pictures of the first few days of winter vacation because I was working every day and the girls were mostly off on adventures with mormor or just relaxing at home.

By Thursday morning, Molli Malou was well enough to go to Rome and Trine was well enough to accompany her to the airport.

We were all very excited and nervous about the trip.  We had been fortunate enough to have arranged Molli’s flight to Rome to arrive just about an hour before the Lees’ arrival from Zurich, but there were plenty of things to worry about if one were inclined to worry: what if the Lees’ flight was delayed?  What if Molli got lost in the airport at Rome?  What if, what if, what if. . .?

There was a lot of texting and Facetiming and instant messaging in the pivotal hours between Molli passing through airport security in Copenhagen and her union with the Lees (a “Leeunion?”). . .  developments I tracked very closely from work, where I had Maddie in as a consultant (Trine and Mormor had remained at the airport, having promised Molli Malou to stay until the plane was up in the air).

It was with great relief that we received the following image via — well, one of those services:

I don’t know all the stories, and I obviously wasn’t there so I certainly don’t have all the photos.  But this is the Molli and Maddie blog, and it’s hard to think of a bigger event in Molli’s recent life, so I’m including some of the many pictures that Aunt Deb, Uncle Gene, Hannah, Sophie, and Molli herself shared on Facebook and other media.

With great pride and joy I should point to anyone who might not know it — as if any such people would be reading this — that the reason the Lees were in Rome (and the reason Hannah doesn’t appear in any of these tourism pictures) was that Hannah was singing at the Vatican (and elsewhere) with the Brandeis choir.

With great shame and sadness I must also point out that I don’t have a single photo of Hannah to share here — I only “stole” pictures that Molli posted or sent me, or that were posted by the Lees and included Molli.  That subset of the Rome pictures unfortunately does not include any of Hannah, the glorious reason for the entire trip!

I know that virtually all of you have seen the photos of Hannah when she was together with them, and the beautiful videos of her singing, but I’m still sad not to have anything to post here and did not want to let anyone think the omission was in any way an oversight — it’s just a tragic side-effect of my poorly thought-out picture-stealing strategy.

(On the homefront, meanwhile, Maddie and I built a very elaborate ice-cream or candy factory with a complete distribution system.)

Back to Rome:

All week long we endured these pictures of the Lees and Molli gallivanting around in their shirtsleeves, while back in Denmark the weather was worsening every day in spite of spring’s desperate and noble effort to stake its claim:

The night before Molli’s return, Denmark was put on warning for a huge blizzard.  Depending how it tracked, they warned us urgently, we could be in for as much as a foot of snow.  The storm hit, and the snow piled up rapidly as we went to bed that night.

Fortunately the snow petered out around midnight, while we slept, so by the time we woke up Denmark had already dug its infrastructure out from the worst of it.

Amazingly enough, the Lees’ flight to Zurich and Molli’s flight to Copenhagen were right next to each other.

And Aunt Deb was able to give us the final reassurance we needed with a photo of Molli actually boarding!

And we were all there to greet her when she emerged from customs a couple of hours later:

What an adventure!  They’d been to the Coliseum and Trevi Fountain and seen Pompeii and the Vatican, and she’d seen her cousin singing in the Vatican, and god knows what other adventures.  What was her favorite part of the trip?

The focaccia.

In the car on the way home from the airport she pulled out her phone and read to us her and Sophie’s “Top 10” list of focaccias.  The hotel’s own was the top of the list… other contenders including “Guitar” (“It was this restaurant where there was this guy playing guitar”) and “Orange Drink” (“It was this place where Sophie got an orange cocktail”).

I suppose it’s only natural: a 12-year-old’s gonna see the world with 12-year-old eyes.

She settled right back into her usual rhythms as soon as she got home: while the rest of got comfortable in the living room with a fire and X-Factor that night, she relished the opportunity to sit on her swing out in the freezing cold.  (Yes, she does that pretty much every single night, regardless of weather unless it’s just pouring rain.)

No idea why I took this shot of Didi, but I did.

Fastelavn!  What used to be one of the big events of every winter has devolved to the point where it’s just a school thing (and Molli Malou more or less ignores it).

Maddie was invited by a friend to see a movie the Saturday of Fastelavn weekend.  I reminded her that they’d be “whacking the cat from the barrel” at Bymidten at 10:45, so if she went to the movie she’d miss it.  She shrugged.

End of an era.

That much said, she was genuinely excited about the school celebration of Fastelavn the following Monday:

There’s a school program called SSP which is a joint operation of the school, social institutions, and the police.  It’s about reinforcing positive behaviors, partially under the rubric of the slogan “Det er da helt normalt” (“It is indeed completely normal”), which helps kids identify what’s “normal” in their culture: both what’s normal in fact (studies show…) and in belief (studies show that people believe…).

They’d run an all-day session with the 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th graders, and we were as parents presented with an overview of what had been discussed as well as what our kids, in aggregate, believed with respect to what was “normal” in terms of alcohol consumption and bullying.

(The alcohol consumption is a big deal because Danish teenagers are far and away the heaviest drinkers in Europe, and the country is trying to do something about that.)

After the presentation, all the kids of the sixth grade had “stalls” (of a sort) where they presented passers-by their own version of the findings.  Molli Malou was very unhappy because she gave up handball practice to participate, but one of her partners, Otto, had skipped out because he’d had plans to see a movie.  Plus they had the worst stall location, by her lights (and in fairness to her, it really was), so nobody was coming by to hear their presentation.

Here she is with Anisha, her other partner.

She was being so deliberately pouty and sour that it threw Anisha into giggly hysterics.

Anyway, it turns out that the sixth graders’ expectations of what was “completely normal” drinking by the ninth graders was entirely wrong, as was their expectation of how much bullying there was in ninth grade.  (Wonderfully, the correct answer to the question “How many ninth graders said they had been bullied in the last month?” was zero!  The sixth graders’ estimate had collectively leaned toward “a few.”  The sixth-graders also overestimated the amount of alcoholo consumed by their older schoolmates.)

We’re up to the first Friday in March.  I was working from home and therefore got to enjoy this view:

And I got to make the focaccia bread again with the correct recipe, and it was outstanding:

So here’s the recipe:

7.5 dl water
1.9 dl sourdough starter
600 g. normal flour
220 g. fine ground flour
55 g. rough ground flour
20 g. yeast
25 g. salt

Mix all ingredients in your KitchenAid or whatever, on high, until the dough is balling around the hook.  (It’ll never turn into actual “dough,” but will get thick enough to ball around the hook while it’s spinning.  I think I mixed ours about five minutes, let it rest for a moment or two, mixed it another 5, let it rest another few minutes, then mixed it another 5.)

Refrigerate dough 2 hours in the fridge.

Put the “dough” (the loose slop!) in two heavily-olive oiled wide baking forms and sprinkle with sea salt.  (Next time I’ll also sprinkle with fresh rosemary.)  It’ll probably be thick enough not to spread out evenly in the baking pan, but loose enough to spread sort of irregularly.

Give it 50 minutes at 175C (that’s about 350F).

Take the finished bread out of the forms and let it cool on a rack.

But be careful… it’s so delicious it may attract zombies!

March is underway now.  The weather’s not getting any better, but there are more and more signs of spring’s imminent arrival, by far the best of them the aforementioned lengthening of the days.

This month will mark my fifty-second birthday and the fourteenth anniversary of our move to Denmark.  And it also marks a strange milestone: Hybenvej 1 is now the address at which I have lived the longest in all my life.

We’ll be taking another cruise to Oslo in the middle of the month, so there’s that to look forward to.

And by the end of the month, the transformation of the house will surely be complete.

But let me close with a Maddie anecdote from today — a Maddiedote.

It’s Sunday so I’m busy going around the house doing the usual chores while Maddie plays in her room.  (Which has lately become very tidy, by the way: I note that for the permanent record.)  I have to take Didi out for her afternoon romp and no one else is home, so I poke my head into Maddie’s room to let her know I’ll be out.

She’s sitting at her desk, writing in a notebook.

I tell her I’m heading out.  I ask if she’s writing a story.

“Nope,” she says.  “I’m playing Google.”

“Okay,” I say.  “I’l be back in about a half hour.”

I shut her door and am nearly out of the house before I realize what she said.  I go back to her room.

“You’re playing Google?” I ask.

“Yep.  Or, I was.”

Indeed: she’s putting her notebook and pens away in their drawers.

“How do you play Google?”

“You answer questions.  But it wasn’t really fun, because I can only ask questions I already know the answers to.”

“I could ask you some questions.”

She stares at me incredulously.

“That is not how it works!”

# # #

Did I mention before that she and I, bored with Wednesdays, decided that henceforth Wednesdays would be the day on which you should always answer questions you have no real answers to, or comments you have no opinion on, by saying, completely deadpan, “Indeed.”

I keep forgetting this, but every Wednesday as we walk to school now, at some point I say something Maddie has no opinion on and she simply says, quite naturally, “Indeed.”

It slays me every time.

And now whenever I say “indeed” and it’s not Wedesday, Maddie gets very angry:

“Daddy!  It’s not Wednesday, you can’t indeed me!“

Funny girl.  This is all going to back and bite me in the ass eventually, I’m sure, but we do have fun!

Indeed.