Keepin’ the Faith

There’s no point sugarcoating it: June has not been kind to us.

Even though Trine has been sick, and Molli Malou has been injured, and Didi has been sick, and a horrible tragedy in Chelmsford coincided with a lovely holiday in Denmark in the worst possible way, and even though the very computer on which this post is being composed was stone cold dead for three days of the month… here we all are anyway. And that’s something.

Also there was an election in Denmark, and the result is a government composed entirely of the party that finished third overall nationally. Which actually makes sense to me now, so I’ve officially lived here too long.

I think I’ve mentioned before that Danish seasons begin on the first of the month.  It’s not astronomically correct, but it’s surprisingly accurate anyway — usually.  The first 4 weeks of this June, however, were decidedly unsummery.  Our best days were about fifteen degrees celsius.  More often our daily highs were just a tick or two above ten, with overnight lows still in the low single-digits.  It was frequently overcast and there was plenty of rain.

Which makes a picture like this, from early June, so misleading:

Maddie was showering one evening when she began writing “Daddy” in the mist on the shower door.

I was about to tell her, “that’s sweet, but how do you think it looks to me?” when she abruptly cut herself off and simply wrote it entirely backwards (from her perspective) so that it looked entirely proper to me.

She did it so quickly, so effortlessly, it startled the hell out of me.  It was a little creepy.  Like, with the right soundtrack, it would have been an excellent scene in a horror movie.

But “creepy” and “Maddie” are not words that meet often in the same sentence.

Here’s a nice establishing shot of Molli Malou’s after-school program sommerfest (I assume with words like that I don’t need to translate, right?).

And while Molli Malou was having a blast with her friends, her sister was more than enthusiastic.

The walks with Didi got more and more pleasant as nature lightened up.  (15C isn’t summer, but it’s not bad after a long, rainy spring of 5-10C.)

I know I said I’d try to keep the dog pictures to a minimum, but I want it down for the record that I’m officially trying to get a picture half as good as Molli’s.

The following picture is from the big handball tournament at Albertslund.  Both Maddie and Molli’s teams played.  The whole thing flooded Trine with flashbacks, since she had so many happy memories of her own Albertslund tournaments.  Most bittersweet for her: her own daughter helping Værløse defeat Ydun.  (Ydun was Trine’s team.)

I realize I’m completely contradicting my introduction about the awfulness of June with each new happy, sunny picture.  But who takes pictures of cold, rainy misery?

The rhodies exploded into life late this year, but that only made them all the more enjoyable.

(* chilling musical score *)

You know what this is?

It’s a moor.  Seriously.  For over a year now I’ve been taking Didi out for romps on the moors of Værløse and I didn’t even know it.  (Mostly because I never quite knew what a moor was, and anyway assumed they only existed in 17th and 18th century England.)

Didi developed some kind of insane stomach ache coming into the middle of the month.  The only real symptoms were that she was gulping excessively and eating a lot of grass and leaves and stuff.  It didn’t seem too serious, so we assumed it was just a passing case of indigestion, until on day three of her irritation I woke up to this:

And you know how we always grow a little basil plant into a freaking basil tree?  This year we were working on a basil tree and a cilantro tree — and here’s what was left of those enormous herb plants:

And the last picture doesn’t look so bad:

Until you look closely enough to notice that one of the shoots is entirely bereft of leaves — and realize it had had just as many as the other shoots before it went to bed for the evening the night before….

Her leaf-eating had become compulsive and the gulping was still too frequent for our liking, but it was a Saturday.  (Which is why I had time to take pictures!)  We figured, okay, not much we can do, we’ll see how she fares over the weekend and call the vet Monday if she’s still having a rough time.

Despite the gulping and plant mania, she was otherwise entirely herself: happy, playful, energetic, stupid.  So she could continue in her role as my Dantean Vergil, guiding me to the glories of Værløse’s natural beauty.

…or maybe she was just trying to drag me out into the lake and drown me.

One of the great things about kids is how they sometimes direct your attention to the kinds of things normally only brought to your attention by people on psychotropic drugs.  For example, you might be rushing them out of the car into the gym when running late for a handball practice, and they might suddenly stop and dig in their heels and say, “Wow, look at all the red cars!  Take a picture!”

So (obviously) you do.  Because in the back of your mind you realize, “Hey, that is kind of trippy, what are the odds?”  And because a six-year-old is entitled to issue such a command.

A thirty-year-old with a scraggly beard and a neck tattoo?  “Whoa, dude, look at all the red cars!”  Just keep walking.

I was working from home the Monday that Trine’s hospitalization began just to make the domestic stuff easier.  So instead of calling the vet, I figured I’d walk poor Didi by and have them give her a look and say, “Yeah, bad stomach, give her soft food for a couple of days and she’ll be fine.”

Instead they said, “we’re busy right now, but bring her by at noon and we’ll have a look.”

So I did.  And they looked.  And they measured and poked and prodded.  And then said, “Bad stomach, nothing serious, give her soft food and call us tomorrow if she’s not improving.”

I worked from home again the next day and unfortunately had to avail myself of that call.  I brought her back in at their request.  They looked and poked and prodded again, and decided to take an x-ray.  They showed me the x-ray and explained it looked like besides having an astonishingly irritated stomach, there might be a blockage between her stomach and intestine.

“But she still poos like a champ,” I explained.  “Trust me: nothing is blocked.”

They explained that the blockage might be new: whatever had irritated her stomach so severely might have just been jostled into her intestine, which, being smaller than her stomach, could now be blocked.  They said they were going to keep her, give her some barium, and take x-rays at one-hour intervals to see whether it was passing through her.  So I could pick her up at closing time and we’d discuss what to do next.

So the dog was left at the vet’s for the day.  And I swear to god she was smiling when I returned to pick her up.

Prognosis: just a very, very irritated stomach.  Give her special easy-on-the-stomach food, we’ve given her some antibiotics just in case, give her these pills three times a day and this pill one a day, don’t let her eat any more grass or leaves, but otherwise just give it time and she should be okay by the weekend.

This was obviously fantastic news.  I brought Didi home and took care of the girls and went to bed very excited to be going back to the office the very next day — if a little disappointed that, for no apparent reason, my computer had simply died and could not be restarted.

Which I did.  And I laughed with my colleagues about what a hell week it had been so far: of course the dog would get sick while Trine was in the hospital.  And of course my computer would die.

And I’d been yukking it up there with my colleagues all of 2½ hours when I got a call from Trine (still at the hospital): the school had called her.  Molli had hurt her leg.  Badly.  She needed to be brought home… and should probably get medical attention.

I got her home, we iced it, we elevated it, we waited for the pain to fade of its own free will… but eventually I had no choice but to call 1813, and their verdict was: you need to bring her to Herlev hospital.  We’ll set a time for you at 18:00.

Maddie was off on a play-date: I scooped her up and fed the girls some snacks (“dinner will probably be late, we may not be out of the hospital until 19:30 or 20:00!”).

And so we found ourselves in the Herlev hospital emergency waiting room.

It quickly became clear that we were in no way going to be out of there by 21:00, much less 20:00.  Mercifully our neighbor Marianne, mother of Molli’s best friend Sofie, came by to pick up Maddie and bring her to their house while we waited.  She also brought us sandwiches and sodas.

And the wait went on.

I used to think it was off that pharmacies sold cigarettes; now I think it’s odd that hospitals have vending machines like this:

We got out of the hospital at 2:00 in the morning with a diagnosis of: “nothing broken, nothing sprained, wear this elastic brace at night for a few days and things should take care of themselves.”

At 3:00 in the morning I was making Maddie’s lunch.

At 7:00 in the morning I was awake and getting dressed; I was ready to receive Maddie from Marianne at 7:30 and then bike her over to school, bike home, walk Didi, and go back to bed.

And of course it was, as the Danes say, pissing rain.

Molli woke me up repeatedly asking if she could go to school.  I kept saying, “Do you feel better? Can you walk?”  And since the answers were always no and no, I kept answering, “Then go lie down and let me sleep.”

Eventually I succumbed: “Sure.  Hop to school, limp to school, get there any way you can if you insist on it, but let me sleep.”

And I woke up at like two in the afternoon to an empty house.

Molli came home from school overjoyed: she’d figured out how to ride her bike using just one leg to pedal!  It was so exciting she made crazy braids in her hair and actually asked to have her picture taken.

And rummaging through Maddie’s knapsack, I found this:

I’ll just paste in the story as I posted it on Facebook:

Rooting around Maddie’s backpack this evening I come across the usual bits of paper, drawings, small stones, etc. Among them was the one pictured [above]. I wondered who on earth at her school she loved because they spoke English. How many of the forthcoming first-graders of Søndersøskolen spoke English? Or had she fallen in love with a teacher? I’d just put her to bed so I went in and asked her, “Who was this for?” And she answered in her sleep-drenched, sweet, impossibly innocent little voice: “For you. For Daddy’s Day.”

I was deeply touched. 

Because she’s six. 

If Trine wrote me a card expressing the same sentiments I’d be more worried than touched… for her grammar, if not her sanity — to say nothing of the sudden revelation of the surprisingly shallow source of her affection for me. 

But from a six-year-old? Touched.

Thursday night was exciting: Trine was going to be allowed to come home for the night, and it was election night in Denmark!  To rise to the occassion, I took the girls to McDonald’s for dinner on the way to the hospital.

The election results were astonishing: the Social Democrats won the most mandates, so of course they lost the government, and the winner of the second-most mandates was Danske Folkparti, who therefore announced they would not take part in the new government, which would of course be led by the former prime minister who was head of the party that had won the third-most mandates.  (Mandates = seats in folketing, or parliament.)

The only thing more bizarre than all that is that I actually understand it.

Anyway: here’s Maddie riding in circles at Bymidten.  Good practice for someone who’s going to have to someday make sense of Danish politics.

One thing I learned over the course of that difficult week was: every man needs his cave, and I really like mine.

It was such a joy to have Trine back home: for good on Friday night that Maddie made her a card, too:

(“Mor, I am glad that you came home from the hospital!”  No spelling or grammatical errors!)

The very next day we were able to attend the annual Bertram sommerfest.

We made it without any serious injuries this year.  The same could not be said of the pigeon that literally dropped out of the sky in front of me at one point.  (No, it’s not dead, I would never post a snuff pic, not even of a pigeon.)

The pigeon rescue team was called in (yeah, that’s a thing) and the bird was taken away by a pigeon rescue specialist, so for all I know the birdshit all over our terrace is one bird’s friendly way of saying, “Thanks.”

School ended last week.  Here are some shots from Maddie’s class breakfast that Tuesday:

Oh… you know how you can tell you’re getting old?

Well, sure, by how many years you’ve been alive.  But besides that?

How about seeing two posts like this back-to-back in your Facebook feed, one from a childhood friend, one from a college friend?

With Trine still sick, and having overcome the kind of week we’d just been through, we were tempted to skip the annual Skt. Hans celebration, but Maddie would have none of it.

We stressed how little time there was and how much still needed to be done.  We reminded her there was no hay in the house with which to stuff a witch.  Trine reminded her that in previous years she had sewn the witch’s clothes together and she didn’t have any fabric this year, much less the time or energy to do any sewing.  Also we had no bonfire prepared, nor any neighbors whose bonfire’s we could crash this year.

But really… it was like trying to tell a 6 year old that Christmas was going to be postponed, or that instead of Easter Eggs we were going to dye cauliflower this year.

In the end we negotiated a settlement: in the time it took me to clean up from dinner, feed the animals, walk Didi, and make the girls’ lunches, Maddie would make a witch out of cardboard and get ready for bed.  If the witch wasn’t done and Maddie wasn’t ready for bed by the time I got back from the walk, the deal was off and it would be straight to bed! — and we would shoot for a bonfire over the weekend.  Which is what I thought we’d end up with.

Damned if she didn’t make it all happen before I got back to the house with Didi at about 19:55.  I quickly prepped a little fire in the outdoor fireplace, the family gathered around, and we had our insta-bonfire ready to go!

The witch was entirely Maddie’s design: the only thing she got help with was cutting some of the rougher angles of the cardboard.  The text says: “Witch.  I am not one.”  Ceci n’est pas un pipe indeed!  (I actually told her we shouldn’t burn her if she wasn’t a witch, and Maddie said, “Of course she’s a witch.  Witches lie!”)

Even Didi was shivering with anticipation!

“Vi elsker vort land…”

# # #

There’d been a lice alert at the school, so we all had to shampoo with special anti-louse medicine the following night.  It can make your hair a little greasy the next day.  So such a day is not the best time to forget to wash around your mouth after snacking, or you could end up looking like some kind of crazy Appalachian hillbilly child.

Quick palate cleanser:

Okay, that was cute, but how about restoring a little of Maddie’s dignity?

Finally it was the last day of school.  Molli was non-compliant with my request for a picture of her last day of fourth grade.

Your honor — move to declare subject hostile!

The girls of 4.b. put on a great skit.  Here they are taking their metaphorical bow.  Future Molli Malou: I can still name every kid in my fourth-grade school pictures.  (Hell, half of them are my friends on Facebook now!)  It’s crazy to think that 39 years from you, probably at least one or two of the girls in this picture will still be among your very best friends!

# # #

It’s the first of July today, and summer has finally arrived in Denmark.  The girls are enjoying the time off from school.  We’re all enjoying the better weather.  (All of us except the furry one who prefers frosty nights and nippy daytime weather.)

It’s Molli’s birthday in two days — on Friday — and she is unusually circumspect about her wants and expectations.  We pressed her and pressed her for a birthday wish list, and all we got was a general sense that she wanted clothes but didn’t just want to get clothes for her birthday.  “Why don’t you just suggest things I could get, and I’ll let you know if they’d be good presents,” she actually suggested at one point.

We’re going to celebrate with a little family dinner at home, featuring her favorite menu: thick ole rib-eyes with bernaise sauce and steak fries.  And two days later we’re packing her and her sister up and they’re heading off to a summerhouse with Vibeke and Jørgen for a few days.

And not long after they get back, I’m on vacation.

And I kinda like the sound of that.