May Flowers?

For the first time in years it’s a monthly blog entry written and posted (hopefully) within the month in question!  From this point forward, I may even go back to the old ways of posting now and then with just a few pictures, or maybe videos — yes, almost certainly videos — just from a particular event or a recent period.

[Well, almost: I was up too late editing it on May 31, so had to give up, then woke up on June 1 with another horrible ear infection — or, more likely, the re-emergence of the original infection from its month-long slumber.]

In any case, I’m also going to try to cut down on the dog pictures.  Starting… next post.  Meanwhile, I’m going to open May 2015 with a parade of Didi anyway.  The first isn’t really about her, anyway.  It’s just that spring had sprung and Didi was done with her first heat and was closing in on her first birthday.

And the waters of Hareskov were finally losing the frigid feel of March and April.

And there were friends galore at the Old Golf Course (which, as you may remember, is neither old nor a golf course).

One thing I’ve remarked about Didi in the past is that walking her has really opened my eyes to the beauty of where I live.  Look at the spectacular sky in this next photo: I never would have seen it if I hadn’t been out walking Didi.

In fact the whole effusion of spring is much more in-my-face due to the necessity of wandering the neighborhood with her a couple of times a day.

(Shame I’m such a lousy photographer.)

For the permanent record: Molli Malou chipped a tooth one evening in early May.  You can see the horror of it here:

She was just having a drink of water, but took the glass to her mouth with a little too much urgency and the glass smashed her tooth.  We’ve already been to the dentist, had it looked at, had it fixed.  But for one night in May 2015 Molli Malou was convinced she had transformed herself into Quasimodo.  She was beside herself with anguish: this was a permanent tooth, she was disfigured for life, the horror!  I couldn’t calm her down and Trine was out.  So I made a bet with her: I said, “look, you wanted to go over to Fie’s house to play before you so horribly difigured yourself.  Go on over and play.  You can’t tell her anything about your tooth; just smile a lot and talk a lot and see how long it takes her to notice there’s even anything different about you.  In fact, I bet she doesn’t even notice.”

I won that bet, and a very relieved and calm Molli Malou came home from Fie’s about an hour later.

Maddie asked me to take the following picture, to my discredit I no longer remember why.

Again: the eye-opening walking of the Didi:

…who, I should mention, has become addicted to a particular pond in Hareskov.  It’s not so bad, really: the woods can be muddy, and I’ve figured out a bunch of routes that let us end at the pond, so it’s kind of an opportunity for the dirty dog to hit the showers before we head home.

Here’s a familiar site: from time to time Molli Malou brings her computer into Maddie’s room and the girls play side by side.  The picture is also a good reminder that Molli Malou is way too big for the kiddie desk and chairs in Maddie’s bedroom… and Maddie’s right on the brink.

Maddie’s still obsessed with Minecraft, but handball has displaced nearly everything else in Molli’s life.  I was surprised when she asked me to install a game on her computer early in the month — and even more surprised when the game she asked for was Counterstrike.  I bought it off the cloud (off of Steam) and installed it one Sunday afternoon.  It took an unusually long time to install, firstly because I had to download the multi-gigabyte package, and secondly because, well, I installed the damn thing so I figured a few rounds were my right as part of the installation privilege.  But shhh!, as far as Molli is concerned, it just took a wicked long time to install.

Family history: girls, this is great grandma with her mother.  (I forget who posted this on the family group in Facebook.  Thinking it was Deb or Pam?)

May was a rough month for me at work: Responsive hit a rough patch, so to speak, and my days often took me places I hadn’t expected them to as I found myself being assigned to cover for people who were suddenly not working for us any more.  For example: Stockholm, capital of Hell.

(Although seriously, give the Swedes credit for having one of the coolest control towers ever.)

But immediately subtract points for their English: “If you need more allergic information of your meal…”?

We all know what April showers bring in America, but in Denmark they just bring May showers.  May showers bring snails.

Lots of snails.

The next picture was posted on Facebook and got a lot of “yum yum” comments from Stéphane and his wife, who obviously know very little about Danish snails.  Pictured: little annoying garden snails.

A follow-up picture the next day: this is what the French would call “an eater.”  It’s about 3-4 times the size of the ones in the picture above, and is indeed edible.  I may try to inflict some on the family this summer.  (We’ll have hundreds of these golf-ball sized suckers in our yard by August.)

The next picture just needs to be compared to the picture taken in the same location on Christmas Day of 2014.  Here’s May 2015:

And — FLASHBACK ALERT! — here’s the same location on Christmas Day 2014:

In the middle of the month Trine took a long weekend to visit her friend Janne in Edinburgh.  The airport goodbye to Maddie was so heart-felt that I had to post the picture.

Trine left on a Friday, the second day of a four-day weekend.  (I believe Thursday was Ascension, and Friday is just a work day that everyone takes as a holiday to get a four-day weekend.)  Trine would not return until Tuesday evening.  That left me alone with the girls for four days, and I really didn’t anticipate many problems.  The girl I worried most about was the now one-year-old Didi.

Friday afternoon I’d arranged with Mads to take all our kids fishing.  We agreed to meet at Furesø, and we did.  The girls and I got there first, and it turned out to be a good thing, as I spent at least twenty-minutes trying to untangle our old, rusty, but hopefully still useful fishing rods.

We quickly discovered there were no real good fishing spots, but the guy occupying the one good spot that did exist suggested we try Søndersø — the very lake at the bottom of our hill.

“Try over by the water plant,” he suggested.  The water plant is on the other side of the lake from us.  We drove over there, parked where we had to park, walked half a mile to the spot he’d recommended, and decided the whole thing had been a practical joke on his part: there was no decent fishing spot to be found.

So we ended up fishing within about 200 meters of our front door.

Where we discovered our fishing rods aren’t just old and rusty, they’re worthless: the reels kept jamming, making casting impossible, and even Maddie quickly realized that dangling a hook in six inches of water isn’t likely to attract many fish.

Saturdays are all about handball these days: Maddie has to start standing around the handball court at 10:00 Saturday mornings.  (She’s going to be good at this sport eventually, but right now she still has a hard time keeping track of where the ball is.)

Since Molli didn’t have enough handball in her life already, she’s volunteered as an assistant coach on Maddie’s team and seems to have a good time training the wee ones.  Here she is blocking their practice shots on goal.

Molli’s handball friend Mille spent the night, and it was a great help for me to have them around, because Maddie had abruptly decided she’d had it with her elevated bed.

Yeah, those are the before shots.  The after shot comes later, but don’t hold your breath.

That Sunday morning after a feast of pancakes, and after Mille had gone home, we took Didi to Puppy Lake.

Trine had emailed us a picture of the fantastic meal she was settling down to in Scotland; we replied as best we could.

The next day was Monday, and the birthday of both Hannah and Morfar.  Dealing with the girls and the dog by myself was more challenging than I’d expected.  I got into work late and had to leave early and still barely seemed to be keeping things together.  The day was a frantic blur.  We left video messages for Hannah and Morfar on Skype, I got the girls to bed, made their Tuesday lunches, then finally just had to walk the dog.  At which point it started to pour.  Pour.

You can’t tell how hard it’s raining in this picture (Didi’s reflection in what is normally dull, dessicated wood is a hint), but I loved her stoicism and poise in the toerrential rain at the doggy playground.

When we got home, soaking wet, I managed to have a nice Skype talk with the actual human adult Hannah Gabrielle Lee, then collapsed into bed at woke to another gruelling weekday Tuesday.

At last it was time: Maddie and I rushed to the train station Tuesday evening to pick up Trine.  We were all so happy to have her back, but I guarantee I was the happiest of all.  The nightmare was over!  We were back to the usual division of labor!  Hurray!

I took Didi out for a romp without worrying whether the girls were burning down the house in our absence.

Wednesday was our first normal day back in the daily grind, and it was a joy to be relieved of the burden of having to do everything on my own.  It was a little frustrating to me that on her first full day back Trine had to rush out for a meeting about Molli’s handball team followed by her own handball, — leaving me to take care of dinner and the dog and lunches and getting the girls to bed, but in my joy of having her back I didn’t even mind.  (Much.)

Then she called at about nine o’clock: she’d, uh, “done something” to her ankle.  There’d been a sound…

Seriously, is that like something out of Alien, or what?

So I was back to sort-of single parenting for another few days, but I’m happy to say that all of that is behind us now (including Trine’s handball, at least for the time being!).

AS SEEN ON FACEBOOK: For all the thousands of pictures I’ve taken of Didi since she was a puppy, none compares to this one, which is one of maybe 5-6 pictures of Didi that Molli Malou has taken in her whole life.  (The frame is also from Molli Malou, who posted this on Instagram.)

We’re stepping up on Molli’s English education, and it cracked me up to see this image in her textbook (which is much more British than American English in many ways):

I don’t know why it cracked me up, except that seeing your own country treated as some kind of weird foreign entity is just… weird.

The one good thing about April showers leading to May showers is that they both lead to rainbows.  Lots of them.  I’ve actually deleted more pictures of rainbows this month than I think I’ve taken in the past five or six years!

The after shot of Maddie’s de-escalated bed was lousy, and is therefore totally dropped in favor of the closeup of Maddie sleeping in it.  (The dog is “Woofie,” a little stuffed dog she got at one of the attractions of “Open Late Night” in Bymidten; you stand in line for ten minutes, select a “skin” for your animal, then wait in line for another twenty minutes to have a guy jam a tube in its back and pump it full of stuffing.)

The last weekend in May was the Furesø Cup at Farum Arena.

Molli’s Team — the Under 12 Værløse team — had a rough day Saturday, winning their first game but dropping their other two.  They rebounded Sunday with three straight wins and won their bracket, meaning Molli Malou came home ecstatic Sunday night with her first-ever trophy.

Here’s a shot of the court they played on — this is actually the players from the previous game shaking hands after their bout.

And the next shot is the only picture I took of Molli Malou’s game, unfortunately:

It’s the only picture because I got a lot of video.  I got an especially nice one of Molli scoring a goal and posted it on Facebook, but getting it posted here will have to be deferred for the time being.

That actually gets us up-to-date, except that once again the miracle of Irfanview’s naming conventions has caused some of the pictures from very early in the month to appear here at the end.

First just a lovely shot of Didi in the woods:

I just love the way Hareskov has little pockets of particular kinds of growth, so the light and feel of the environment change as you saunter along.

Closer to home, this is looking west on Søndergårdsvej at about 9:30 pm one evening while walking Didi:

And here are some shots of the house looking clean.  It’s so rare I just love to see it.

And another shot of Didi’s “showering off” station.  I include this one because I’m pretty sure she’s swimming here. or is just about to, and Trine still hasn’t seen her actually swim.

In a previous post I showed a picture of the trolls carved into the trees of Hareskov.  You’ve really got to keep your eyes open in those woods — think how easy it would be to walk right by something like this:

And look a little closer to realize what you’d be missing!…

And lastly… there are just never too many pictures of Molli Malou.

So there we are!  All caught up and back on track.

# # #

Molli Malou just got home from handball practice about an hour ago and nearly exploded with joy as she told us she had made the first team.  We’re very proud of her, obviously, but — and please understand this, future Molli — strange as it sounds, she’s getting so good and doing so well that I am almost feel like we have to downplay these things just a little to keep her from getting a big head.  I did tell her I was proud of her and that it was a great thing for a not-even-quite-11-year old to be starting on the 12-and-Under squad (remember, her triumphs of last season were as one of the older girls on the 10-and-Unders), but that it was going to be a lot harder now and she shouldn’t get frustrated if things seemed a little tougher this season than they did last.  I don’t know, I’m awed by her athletic ability and can never seem to figure out when to dole out the unadulterated praise and when to whack her with the old, “don’t get cocky, kid.”  She needs both, I just hope I’m giving them to her at the right times.

It’s sort of the same with Maddie’s reading (we’re going through James and the Giant Peach, now, and she’s reading along with me and correcting all my mistakes): I think it’s fantastic and am doing everything I can to encourage it, but she gets so impossibly frustrated when there’s a logical gap in anything, — whether, as in the case of a Danish book we read recently, it’s because the artist has drawn something (someone throwing forks and knives off a wagon) quite different from what the author is describing (forks and knives falling off a whon), or whether, as in the case of James, it’s because the author is asusming familiarity with processes Maddie hasn’t yet been told about — specifics on that in a minute — anyway, she gets so frustrated when she doesn’t understand something that I feel like sometimes I have to coax her into accepting ignorance, which isn’t a lesson I want her to embrace too completely!

“You can’t get so upset about not understanding everything,” I say, “nobody in the world understands everything, and although Mor and Daddy will explain to you everything they can, as well as they can, there are some things that either make no sense at all, period, or are just really, really hard to understand.”

You have to understand, she’s not just piqued when the logic eludes her: she’s outraged.  She screams and cries.  She curses!  (Age appropriately.)

It seems like a happy medium.  Works for me, anyway, but if she ends up working the cash register at a 7-Eleven because “Daddy taught me you can never really understand everything, so I figured, why try?”, then you all know who to blame.

Now back to the James and the Giant Peach thing: Maddie was howling with outrage because James had spilled the magic green crystals on the ground, and yet it was the peach tree that received the magic.  IT MAKES NO SENSE, DADDY!  WHY?  WHEN HE SPILLS THEM ON THE GROUND, WHY DOES IT DO MAGIC TO THE TREE?!  THE TREE ISN’T THE GROUND!“

So we took a moment to calm down, and I quietly and monotonously explained the way trees work.  How they have roots, trunks, branches, leaves.  A dumbed-down explanation of photosynthesis.  An aside on how very tall, skinny things will fall over too easily if they’re not somehow secured to the ground.  An illustration of that aside in which we took turns trying to balance a magic marker on its end.  When I finally got to the kicker about roots not only helping trees stand tall, but also drawing in moisture and nutrients from the earth, she burst out laughing.

“They eat through their toes?!”