January through April 2015

[Note: the title of this post was “2015 Draft” until I realized I’d published it under such a stupid title on 2 June 2015.]

This is it, dear family and closest of friends: I am finally blogging into the current year.  Not only that, but this post will take us all the way up to events that happened less than a month ago!

We left off, surprisingly enough, on New Year’s Eve of 2014.  So it should be equally astonishing to find that we resume on New Year’s Day of 2015, on which date we spent a leisurely morning at home before packing up and pointing the car south to Lalandia.

But I need to digress a little first.

In my rush to get through the 2014 catch-up posts, I left a pretty significant event out.  It wasn’t a deliberate omission, just the kind of thing that time smooths over and you forget the significance of (like the awkwardness of thissentence, only more serious).

In the previous post, the end-of-year 2014 post, I covered our autumn trip to Lalandia pretty tersely. “For efterårsferie,” I wrote, “we took the girls to Lalandia, a cottage resort built around a waterpark and activity center way down in Rødby, on the island of Lolland way down under Sjælland.”

What I forgot (besides the sound editorial principle of not using the same prepositional phrase twice in a single sentence) and therefore omitted were the events leading up to that trip.

One night about five or six days before the trip was to take place, Maddie had had a hard time falling asleep.

“My neck hurts,” she kept telling me.  “It really hurts, I can’t sleep!”

Trine was out for the evening.  I was tired and busy and trying to get something or other done and told her to tough it out.  It’d be fine in the morning.  Try not to think about it.

She called out a few more times from her bedroom along similar lines before I went to bed, but finally she fell asleep.

The next morning she was still complaining about her neck.  She was moving around a little stiffly, and said she didn’t feel well, and Trine and I both told her to suck it up and go to school: she had a crimp in her neck or something.  Time would heal it.

Later that day we were called by the school.  She was sick and needed to go home, and the teachers thought she was sick enough that she should probably see a doctor.  Immediately.

That got our attention.

As anyone reading this blog knows, things only got worse from there.  Maddie’s neck and shoulders on one side swelled up.  She couldn’t move her neck.  She was in such pain she was actually crying from sheer discomfort half the time she was awake — and she could only sleep when so exhausted that her body demanded it of her; most often, she just lay in bed whimpering.  It was anguishing to watch her suffer.

Our week turned into a hell of anxiety and terror as her local doctor and emergency doctors and hospital staff could find nothing obviously wrong with her.  The things they were testing for got scarier and scarier.  I can’t even bring myself to write down some of the horrors they were testing her for.  With just a couple of days remaining before our scheduled trip to Lalandia we realized it was absurd to think we could actually take such a trip, so we tried to cancel.

Lalandia was having none of it.

“My daughter is seriously ill,” I told them over the phone.  “We can get a note from her doctors, from the hospital, what do you need?  We don’t even need our money back, just defer our reservation or something.”

“If you didn’t buy the trip insurance there’s just nothing we can do,” they told me.  We tried selling the reservation but had no takers.

The day we were supposed to go to Lalandia for our lovely fall vacation, Trine and I spent the morning with Maddie at Hillerød Hospital getting an ultrasound of Maddie’s lymph gland.  (I originally wrote that this was an MRI.  I wasn’t confused, I was just tired and writing too fast.  “Hospital machiney thing that lets you look inside parts of the body without obvious windows,” is obviously what I was going for.  Updated 2 June 2015.)  We were all scared, but Trine and I did what we could to put on a good show for Maddie, who was a trooper through all of this.  (A tired, pain-wracked trooper, but a trooper nonetheless.)  That made it all the more horrifying for Trine and me: Maddie was stiff from the pain in her neck and listless and glassy-eyed from the fatigue.  She was getting worse by the hour at this point.  Whatever we were telling you all at the time, you have no idea what terrors we withheld from you.

The technician made oohs and aahs looking at the imagery on the screen, which Trine and I could not decipher.

“There’s a lot of bubbling in the lymph gland,” the technician explained.  “Look at that!”

“What does that mean?” we asked.

“It could mean different things,” he said.  “But there’s definitely something going on there.”

The doctors took her blood and did a throat swab.  They said they would have some results in an hour.  We should go for a walk or something and come back then.

We wandered around and had a lousy brunch in the hospital cafeteria.  Maddie had hardly eaten in days; it was a huge victory just to get her to sip a little water and nibble at…. something.  When we got back to the doctors, they were as puzzled as ever.

“We just spent a lot of time arguing about the blood test,” one of the doctors told us.  “We don’t agree on whether or not it’s an infection.”  That was hardly a surprise: they’d tested her for infections at the very first (local) doctor’s visit and there had been none.

“All we could agree on,” this doctor continued, “is that it’s definitely not not an infection.  But we don’t know whether the infection is the cause or a symptom.  We think we should try some antibiotics, see what happens, and go from there.  We’ll give her some right now, and give you a prescription for more.  Hopefully they will help.  Meanwhile some of the other blood work and culture results will come back in a few hours and we’ll call you to let you know whether you need to come back and whether she needs to be admitted.”

We drove home morosely.  Fortunately, Maddie fell asleep during the 20-minute ride home: we carried her to bed and tucked her in.  She was about three days behind in sleep by now, so it was glorious just to see her resting.  We were in wagon-circling mode.  Trine also needed some sleep.  While she and Maddie napped (Molli was still at school), I went and picked up the meds at the pharmacy and did a little shopping.

Just as I got home, my phone rang.  It was the main doctor.  She was breathless.

“Oh my goodness,” she said (more or less; she was speaking Danish), — and I assure you, my heart stopped right there.  “The results from her tests show infection numbers through the roof.  It is clearly an infection, my only concern is I didn’t give you a strong enough prescription for antibiotics….”

My heart resumed beating.  I breathed.  It wasn’t a clean bill of health, but it was the best news we’d had.  I asked what we should do: she said we should give the antibiotics 24 hours.

“Then what?” I asked.

“If she’s not better, then bring her back and we’ll admit her for more testing.”

“But how do we know?  What does ‘better’ mean?”

“You’ll know.”

I told her about Lalandia and how we were paying for a cottage down there anyway.  I said if we were just waiting for the antibiotics to “work,” maybe we could do that just as easily in Rødby as we could at home?

“Of course,” she said.  “The only difference is a longer drive if you need to bring her back.  But the antibiotics are going to help, it’s just a question of how much.  So I would say, go to Lalandia, you can let her rest and recover there as well as you could at home, and if you have to bring her back tomorrow, it’s just a longer drive.”

I gave Trine the good news.  When Maddie woke up, feeling a little better, we asked her if we should stay home or go to Lalandia.  “Lalandia! Lalandia!” she exclaimed.  She was still woozy, but the punctuation marks were audible.  It was the most life she’d shown in days.  So even though it was by now 3 or 4 in the afternoon, I called Lalandia, said we’d be taking our cottage after all, we loaded the car, and by 5pm or so we were all four on our way to Rødby.

Maddie was sleepy and woozy the first half of the ride, but after that first 100 kilometers she started asking, “are we there yet?” often enough to become irritable.  Delightfully irritable!  By the time we hit Lolland she was bragging that she could move her neck form left to right.  She demonstrated for us.

“Meh,” we thought.  The movements were still slow and cautious.  She was just juked up on Lalandia adrenaline.  We weren’t taking the bait.

But as the day went on — as afternoon became evening and turned into night — Maddie gave no sign of backsliding and every sign of improvement.  Slow and gradual improvement, but keep in mind: just eating a meal was improvement.  Walking was an improvement.  We chalked a lot of it up to sheer excitement, but were still starting to get a little optimistic.  She even ate too much ice cream at the awful buffet restaurant where we took our dinner.

The next morning Trine and I woke up astonished at not having been awakened at all during the night by moans of pain.  In our downstairs bedroom, Trine and I could just hear Molli and Maddie talking and giggling up in the loft above.

Her recovery was so obvious from that point forward there’s no point in going any further with the story.  Our Lalandia  vacation was spectacular not because Lalandia was itself spectacular, but because Maddie was Maddie again — her happy, crazy, weird normal self — and nothing (nothing!) could have made us happier.

Because of all that, I think, Lalandia became a kind of magical place in our minds.  So when Santa gave us that New Year’s trip to Lalandia, we were thrilled.  Lalandia is for us a kind of sanctified holy place: sure, it’s just a big family trap — imagine Chuck E. Cheese writ really, really large, but with the Danish obsession for good design and cozy atmosphere — but it’s also the place where Maddie went from terrifyingly ill to ebulliently healthy in what seemed like the blink of an eye.

(But not really.  Really we are just grateful for modern medicine giving us the incredible gift of antibiotics.  And a little annoyed that a girl with all the symptoms of infection was tested only for infection in her blood, when lymph infections notoriously take forever to show up in the bloodstream.  But somehow a little of that appreciation for science and medicine has rubbed off on Lalandia for us.)

NOW perhaps you all understand why Lalandia was such an exciting and happy destination for us on the first day of 2015!

Upon arrival we found we had been assigned the cottage directly next to the cottage we’d had in the fall… but when we entered we found it had not yet been cleaned.  The staff were very kind about it and reassigned us a fresh and nicely cleaned cottage, but I think we were all a little disappointed not to be staying in almost the exact same cabin we had been during the Efterårsferie Miracle Cure.

Lalandia has its own movie theatres showing children’s features almost around the clock (as long as children can reasonably be expected to be awake, in any case).  They’re actually quite nice theatres, and although there is a fee for new releases, they also show a lot of old classics for free.

As soon as we got home from our 2-night stay at Lalandia, we took Didi out for a glorious romp.  The winter sun was low and playful.

January’s a tough month. A lot more indoor time than usual, and nothing chafes like proximity.  Check out the Danglish sign Maddie posted on her door:

“KEEP OUT!” It says in English (obviously).  Then, in Danish: “Especially Molli.”

On one of our Didi romps in Hareskov we bumped into an older couple that told us there were trolls etched into some of the trees in Hareskov.  We’d never noticed before, but once you do notice, it’s impossible to overlook them!

There was some unpleasantness in France at about this time, and my old friend Stephane Collado sent me a fantastic gift after we talked about the issue via Facebook:

Meanwhile, Molli and Maddie were working busily on their gifts to Pop-Pop for his birthday!

… and I was being profoundly serious at my serious job with my serious colleagues at our serious workplace.

It was also time for Jørgen’s 80th birthday, celebrated at one of the fine old watering holes on Pile Allé.

…And as if all the birthdays weren’t enough, it was also finally time for Super Bowl 49!

The game took place, as always, in the middle of the night our time, which is how I got this weird shot: I took a photo of the reflection of Trine in the glass door of our living room, through which the terrace is still visible.  It’s a funky picture because it’s actually hard to tell what’s on which side of the glass.

It was a fantastic game — hands-down the best Super Bowl I’ve ever watched — and best of all, it ended correctly.

Shortly after the Super Bowl, winter resumed.

We had known for quite a while that Maddie was going to be participating in the 0th grade production of Zebra-Ze-Ze, the same show Molli Malou had done in second grade.  In Molli’s case, her teachers and pedagogs had let us know long in advance that Molli Malou was being assigned a big solo: she would have to practice it a lot at home.  It had been a very big deal.

We didn’t hear anything like that in Maddie’s case.  In fact, when we very gingerly asked her about two weeks before the show, “Are there any times when it’s just you singing, or is it always with a group?” — she seemed shocked we would even ask such a question:

“It’s all with the whole nulte class!”

It was only the night before the production that we got a mixed signal from Maddie, whom Trine overheard singing one of the solo songs and asked why and was able to finally elicit the information that Maddie did indeed have a solo, possibly, although it was still hard to tell.

It was only during the production itself that we saw she did have a solo.  Not only that, but her mic wasn’t working and as all the parents and teachers wondered whether someone should rush up and help that poor girl out, Maddie just walked over to the other microphone on stage and resumed singing.  It reminded of the time I saw Ella Fitzgerald literally fall into the orchestra pit of the Hollywood Bowl in the middle of Mack the Knife — and scat her way through the break as musicians helped her back up onto the stage before resuming the song to a standing ovation.  Because yes, my six-year-old daughter and Ella Fitzgerald are just that much alike, and the gym of Søndersøskolen is almost exactly like the Hollywood Bowl, and the horror of a seventy-year-old national treasure falling off a stage is identical to the terror of a six-year-old’s mic going dead.  Yes, it’s the perfect analogy.

Anyway: she did a great job.  She also had a duet later in the show, so although she had more featured appearances than Molli Malou had, none of her teachers or pedagogs had ever breathed a word of it to us.  Such, I assume, is the life of all second children…

Fastelavn!

With the onset of darkness we had stopped taking Didi to the woods for her evening romps: it was simply too creepy having her in the dark forest, growling suspiciously at random sounds coming from deep within the darkness.  Instead, we took her exclusively to “den gammel golfbane,” which means “the old golf course,” but turns out merely to be a broad moor that at some point in the 1970s had almost become a golf course.

Didi’s best friend there is Laura, a golden retriever of about three years’ age.  By February they had become virtually indistinguishable from one another.

And they’re not even the only look-alike goldens frequenting the old golf course:

Friday nights are still our Disney Sjov nights, but Saturday nights in winter aren’t much different: sure it’s dark and cold and awful outside, but if we light a fire and get cozy and make some popcorn and hot cocoa, it can be lovely anyway.  (Although mor and daddy reserve the right to opt for scotch instead of cocoa.)

For some reason Trine bought the girls a little archery set at the toy store one February day.  We actually had a lot of fun with the impossible-to-aim, weirdly-firing bow.

…and of course Molli Malou had to take it to extremes:

After the girls went to bed that particular evening I said to Trine that it was a shame we never got to play with those kinds of silly toys as adults… and within minutes we had finally agreed upon the theme for my 50th birthday party.

Molli Malou’s big Christmas present this year was a new bike, but unlike Maddie she is now of an age where buying any big-ticket item without her express participation and approval is… unwise.

So here she is in mid-February, shortly after receiving her, uh, Christmas present.

Mid-February was not a great time in Denmark:

On February 16 a conference on free speech in Copenhagen was attacked by an Islamist who got away and then made a second attack at a local synagogue (killing a director at the conference and a security guard at the synagogue) before finally being shot dead himself in a firefight with law enforcement.  Of course the people discussing free speech were really asking for it, just as anyone practicing the Jewish faith is asking for it, so it’s natural that many people laid flowers at the spot where the poor young Islamist lost his life… which became a weird story in its own right when a group of hooded young men came and removed them.

This was about a month after Charlie Hebdo and about two months before Gatlin, Texas.  I mention all this firstly because it really was the biggest news story of the winter in Denmark, but also because it will be interesting to see, years from now, whether we will look back at this period as the beginning of the metastasis or the last gasp of a desperate movement.

Laura never shows up in Hareskov, but there is no shortage of goldens there, either:

AS SEEN ON FACEBOOK: One weekend afternoon Maddie had spent far, far too much time on her iPad and I had no choice but to get her out of the house by hook or by crook.  I talked her into a long bike ride that could include a stop at the candy shop, and as we pedaled by her old kindergarten she excitedly asked if we could play on the playground.

“Sure,” I said.

And, as reported on Facebook, she eagerly hopped off her bike and ran into the playground declaring: “This is going to be so epic!”


And it was.

(I just loved how reflective and nostalgic she was, wandering around a playground she hadn’t played in on a daily basis since way the hell back in… whoa: 2014!)

We had a lovely American steak dinner with Steve & Elisabeth: Maddie and Becca got to catch back up on things.

Maddie’s reading and writing had by now reached the point where, at moments of strong emotion, she would sometimes furiously pen an instant epistle to make her thoughts explicitly known:

The big text in the middle says, “Mom, I would very much like to go home with Astrid next Thurs.”  The small print on the top says, “But I wish I could today.     Maddie.”  And the small print on the bottom says, “but we have also agreed on it next Thurs.”  There are very few spelling or grammatical errors.

Now we’re into March.

The beginning of March was difficult for us because Trine and I were both fighting off a horrible flu even as we were both in busy cycles at work and nevertheless had to prepare for my 50th birthday party: we had invited about 30 guests for a party including a sit down dinner.

We also had our friend Lisa coming up for the weekend with her Polish girlfriend Marta.

I took this shot of the house Friday evening after we’d gotten it about as clean as we could in anticipation of the forthcoming activities.  I like the picture because it makes the living area look so lovely — normally, of course, there is dog hair everywhere, dog and children’s toys are scattered all over, and — well, you know, it’s the home of a normal family with children, a dog, and two cats.  So it’s nice to have it looking so adult.

Lisa and Marta had some navigational and traffic problems and didn’t arrive at the house until very late Friday night: but at last I had the very first picture ever of Lisa and Molli Malou (sort of: there are pictures of Lisa and Trine together in New York during our 2004 visit while Molli was riding shotgun in Trine).

The pictures are little jumbled here — just a little — because I have not only my own but also those from Lisa and Marta.  So I’m going to describe the weekend very briefly and then just let the pictures fly, noting only (where necessary) whom you may be seeing in particular pictures.

As with all Danish parties, we began with a velkomstdrikke, or “welcome drink,” which was a cocktail I invented on the spot: one bottle of champagne, about two deciliters of vodka, a couple of liters of “red juice” (kids’ fruit cocktail, basically), and enough seltzer to give it a little more fizz.  Plus sliced strawberries.

Once all the guests had arrived, I announced the way the evening would work: there would be a sit-down dinner, but after the meal had been consumed we would abandon Danish tradition for adult parties (which would have us seated for hours and hours) and instead embrace international children’s party tradition: kids’ toys and games had been set out throughout the house.  Besides clearing some of the tables after dinner to make room for dancing and playing, each guest would receive poker chips worth 425 morons and was encouraged to gamble at games of chance and skill, or truth-or-dare, or whatever, all night, and at some time late in the evening the guest with the most morons would be declared the winner.  There would also be several quizzes about my life — and, as the evening’s apotheosis, a pinata filled with candy and booze.

(In the goodie bag containing their chips, each guest also got a lollipop.)

The toys and games were about fifty-bucks worth of childrens’ toys from Toys R Us: several archery sets, some Nerf-like-projectile shooting toy guns with targets, a plastic bowling set, decks of cards, dice, a plastic fishing set, and so on.

So, we begin as the guests arrive: here you see, from left, Morten, Lone, Kirsten, Steve, and Elisabeth.

(Didi, by the way, was being hosted by friends for the night, and the girls were being hosted by Mormor: Marta’s dog Lapa was not being hosted by anyone and was a little disappointed at being kept out of the house or locked in a room all night.)

Nicolai, Gitte, and Jesper.

Mads and Linda W.  (There were two Lindas in attendance: Mads’s wife, below, and Linda Bertram — Nicolai’s wife, a blonde.)

Me, barking out orders.

Our guests took to the gaming theme very readily and were gambling as soon as the rules of the night had been explained.

I really hoped to keep all my speechifying to a minimum, and kept assuring everyone this next speech or quiz would only take a moment.  That’s why you see me speaking and Trine taking a laughing look at the clock here.

The quizzes about my life were designed to be challenging but also humorous.  Our guests took them very seriously and weighed their answers carefully.

Here are Steve, Mads, and Kirsten:

Nicolai, Christian, Marie, Uffe, and Linda B.:

Elisabeth, Lone, Linda W., Søren, and Frederik:

Joachim, Jesper, Gitte, Bibi, sten, and (I think) Malene?

I have to say, I really enjoyed my role as emcee.  Maybe a little too much: the next morning I found I had lost my voice entirely.

Now we flash quickly back to how things looked just before the guests arrived:

…and then leapfrog back to late in the evening:

And now to the next day, Sunday, my actual birthday.  The house is clean, the girls and Didi are home, and it’s a little birthday dinner with just the family, Lisa, and Marta.

At this point in the photo shoot Maddie squealed, “Wait, wait, I have an idea!” and went running out of the room.

She came back a moment later and handed each of us one of the plastic trophies we’d never gotten around to handing out the night before.

“Best family prize!” she announced.

On behalf of ourselves, we gratefully accepted the award.

And Molli Malou let me play a little William Tell with her!

Thus ended the birthday weekend.  I’m a fifty-year-old man.  Incredible.

And ordinary life resumed.

In the course of all the festivities, however, the flu Trine and I had been fighting off the weeks before my birthday hit me with a vengeance (over-exhaustion and too much alcohol just may have been the opening it had been waiting for).

I was so sick I had no business getting out of bed, much less work — much less flying on business to London.  But I had to.

(“Not with all that congestion!” Trine warned me.  “Not with all that congestion!” warned the colleague I was flying with.  I laughed off their petty concerns.)

Alas, I had waved off their concern to my lasting regret: I visited the doctor the next day (“you flew with that ear?!”).  Apparently I’d had a bad ear infection to begin with and the air travel blew it up into a category 4 Earrricane.  I couldn’t hear out of it.  It hurt.  The muck and gunk in my ear, the doctor said, were mixed with blood.  It was a week before I felt human again, and almost two weeks before I could hear out of that ear.

Good times!

But there has been too much about me, my birthday, my ear.  Let’s get back on track.

Here is a view that we encounter regularly: it’s how Maddie likes to play with the iPad.

But wait!  Flashbacks to the birthday weekend: a nice shot of me and Trine:

And a good shot of Lisa:

And me again, not shutting up:

I was really flat on my back for a few days after that London trip, and Maddie wrote me a get-well card:

(I love how she tried to get the perspective of a scroll.)

Hey, girls, what do you look like in March 2015?

Easter is upon us!

Except Molli Malou is spending Easter weekend at a handball tournament on the other side of the country.

Great grandma was surely smiling down on her travels:

Trine and I attended an Easter lunch with Sten and Malene, Frederik and Kirsten, and their kids.

We took Maddie and Didi for a long walk in the part of Hareskov we rarely visit because leashes are required: Didi was in heat now, so had to be leashed anyway.

Maddie wanted to write a book about the walk, so at regular intervals she stopped to record what had just happened.  Why would someone waste their time trying to record every little thing?

But this part of the forest is just stunning in its beauty.  It reminded me of Idaho for some reason.

We had to celebrate Easter on Monday, because Molli Malou didn’t get home from Holstebro until quite late on Sunday.

And of course Tivoli opened in early April and we managed to get our first visit in:

With Didi in heat, as I mentioned, we had to walk her on her leash all the time.  Although that made for some walks that were less enjoyable for her, it gave us a chance to take her places we normally avoided because dogs have to be leashed there: for example, down by Søndersø, the lake at the bottom of our hill.

(Not pictured here: the way she leaps and lunges for the water as soon as she’s near enough to hear it lapping the shore.)  At about this time I posted a video on Facebook of her reacting in terror to a little mooring buoy bobbing a few meters off-shore one afternoon.

Looking at the following photo, you probably don’t see much:

The (very) blurred figure there in the upper right is a guy on a bike.  I had noticed him stopped there when Didi and I were wrapping up a particularly late evening walk.  It was, frankly, suspicious that this hooded guy had chosen to stop, just prior to our appearance, in a spot where for the past several years bikes of all sizes and styles have been abandoned by a bicycle thief.  I was pretty sure I’d finally busted the thief.  He just stood there on the bike toying with his cell phone — or pretending to.  I don’t know.  I snuck around the back of the house to take the above picture, but didn’t realize quite how awful it was.  Then I leashed Didi again and walked back out onto the corner as if I had forgotten to perform some additional corner training of some kind.  A neighbor walked by, out of the property in the background of this photo, and said goodnight to me, ignoring the guy on the bike, so the biker obviously had no connection to the house he was stopped in front of.  Also he never looked at Didi or me — not once — which was completely unnatural at that time of night.  I know I had the bicycle thief but had no idea what to do!  Finally he rode off — again, without even glancing at the big man and his dog playing noisily all of twenty feet away from him at ten or ten-thirty at night (see how dark it is, and we’re into April).  I include the photo only because our whole family has long wondered about those mysteriously appearing abandoned bicycles, and if the truth ever is revealed I’ll be sure to let it be known here.

One lovely but insanely windy day Maddie’s class took a bicycle tour and picnic to Værløse airfield (flyvestation, not lufthavn).  From what I understand it stopped being a military airfield many years ago; as long as we’ve lived here it’s been a big fenced off area that only in the last couple of years has been opened as a recreational area.  No one’s done anything to it: it’s still just an old abandoned airfield, but now it’s a wide open space where you can recreate without trespassing on government property.

Alongside the airfield are a lot of rural touches: there is, for example, a sheep farm, and for some reason we were free to wander around its property and even pet the sheltered sheep and lambs.

…Which was cute, but not as interesting as the spot for our sitdown picnic lunch: the courtyard of an abandoned building on the airfield itself.

Here is one of those areas where I think Denmark is a notch up on America: there was no yellow police tape around the abandoned building.  It wasn’t sealed shut.  There weren’t even signs warning that anything we did was at our own risk: it was obvious that anything we did was at our own risk.  It was just the perfect playground for a bunch of 6- and 7-year olds!

Here’s Maddie outside the swimhall before one of her classes:

And here are some pictures proving that spring was beginning to declare itself:

(Actually, in the picture below, the main feature is Maddie’s missing front tooth.)

I realize we eat differently here, but Maddie’s lunch requests are sometimes peculiar by American and Danish standards:

The ostemad (cheese sandwich) on the bottom is not so peculiar, although normally you’d use a white bread for an ostemad.  But who on earth asks for buttered Danish rye with whole cornichons?  (If you Google “cornichon sandwich on rye” enclosed in quotations like that (to enforce a literal search) you will get only one hit, and it’s not really a hit because the writer is describing a “turkey-cheese-cornichon sandwich on rye with mustard” sandwich, which actually sounds kind of appealing.  So Maddie’s sandwich is a Google-whack.)

Molli Malou’s first season of handball wrapped up with a big dinner and awards ceremony, and she was practically walking on air when she got home: she had been awarded “Fighter of the Year” award, the only award handed out besides MVP.  She is absolutely consumed by handball now, and although this new season (2015/2016) will surely be harder, since she is now among the younger ones on the squad rather than the elder (each team is made up of two years’ worth of kids and they switch every season so that Molli Malou will be playing on 2003-2004 teams in seasons beginning in odd years and 2004-2005 in evens), — although it will surely be more challenging, she has shown no diminishment in her enthusiasm.  The sports-hall is now her home away from home, and she and her friend and classmate Louise are actually volunteering as coach’s assistants for Maddie’s team.  Because, yeah, her enthusiasm was infectious enough to get Maddie into the sport.

The same day Molli was crowned Fighter of the Year, Maddie lost her second front tooth.

(She has a hint of lisp now.  It’s adorable.)

And finally, here are some pictures from a Didi romp in the woods on April 26.  Less than three weeks ago.

I now declare the Molli & Maddie blog officially caught up!

But before I save and publish, I want to get a few things down for the permanent record:

I learned recently that Molli Malou and Maddie both have nicknames at school.  Molli is “Mollen” and Maddie is “Matsen.”  I realize that they have actual lives outside of Trine’s and my control, and I realize that’s only going to accellerate, but the fact that their friends had been calling them anything other than their actual names astonished me.  Mollen and Matsen.  Okay.

Maddie’s ear is still being monitored closely and she still has her “nose balloon” that she has to blow several times a day to work on the pressure building up in her ears.  The last doctor’s visit, just last week, apparently showed some minor improvement in her hearing in the one ear, so once again surgery has been postponed.

The sauna room is still an empty space with neither finished walls, floor, nor ceiling.  It’s just exposed cement, wiring, plumbking, and structural framing.  We’re still waiting final settlement from the recovery company, but we’re also hoping to refinance the house at the end of the summer and take on some additional debt to make a whole bunch of improvements to the house (mainly getting all our windows replaced and converting the pool into a couple of bedrooms).  The new bathroom project can then be folded into the larger project, and maybe we end up by saving some money by getting a volume discount.

Also: Didi turned one on Monday!