Catching Up: 3Q14

The wild and woolly 2014 catching up continues in early July.

Molli Malou hit double digits.

One of the gifts we gave her was a photobook of her first ten years.  It contained at least one picture of her from every month of her life from birth through June 2014.  One of the things that made putting that book together less of an ordeal than it might have been was that I was able to browse through this blog to find the best (or most representative) pictures from each of those 120 months of her life.  Thinking how hard it would be to do the same for Maddie without this blog is one of the reasons I’ve made it such a priority to get it back up to date and in regular production.  So I’m not crazy or obsessed, just really lazy: by doing all this now I make the fall of 2018 a lot easier.

Anyway, for her tenth birthday, Molli Malou requested a dinner menu all of us could get behind: grilled steaks with bernaise sauce and…  well, hell, if the entree is grilled steak with bernaise sauce, who cares?

As usual with birthdays, there was a lot of Skyping.

Moster Metter in Chicago and Morfar in Portugal (or Ukraine?) actually got a chance to talk to eachother across the table in Værløse.  (“Small world” hardly seems to do that justice!)

And as usual, Nana and Pop-Pop pulled through with glittery red-white-and-blue tee shirts for both girls.

You may remember that heading into Christmas of 2013, all Molli Malou wanted was to get her ears pierced.  I really didn’t care when she got them pierced, Trine thought she ought to wait a little longer, but the momentum was gaining among the girls 4.b.  The pressure was keenly felt.  Crossing our fingers, we had asked her to talk to her director (they were still in Evita rehearsals) and see what he said.

He said the orphans of Argentina should not have pierced ears.  So that bought us a little time.

By her birthday in 2014, of course, Evita was just a memory and there was no director for us to use as an excuse.  So we gave her a certificate for pierced ears.

Which didn’t take long to get fulfilled.

I honored the Fourth in the usual way.

The weekend after Molli Malou’s birthday we were going to drive out to Juelsminde to pick up Didi and bring her home.  We had her crate all prepared for her, and in a curious reversal of family history, just as Ollie the cat commandeered the little cardboard “house” we had made to shield Molli Malou from the sun while shuttling her back and forth between our apartment and the hospital, so Maddie commandeered the metal crate we had set up for Didi.

And just for the permanent record, we noticed weeks later that one of the pictures the kennel posted on Facebook at about this time was actually our Didi!  (You can see the red yarn around her neck.)  The picture is a little deceptive because of the angle and distance: she was nowhere near as large as she appears in the photo, as you’ll see in a moment…

This wasn’t like the previous visit, with a bunch of other families in the way.  No, as we pulled up to their house we saw Kaj out in the yard with a little white furball racing around his feet.  It was just him and Didi waiting for us to take her home.

We took turns holding her in the car on the way home.  We stopped at Nyborg, where we gave her her first walk as our dog.  The little rest area in Nyborg — for you Americans, this is the town on Fyn where Storebæltsbro connects — will always have a special place in my part from the memories of the twenty minutes we spent with our little puppy Didi.

(Yes, future Molli Malou, you also had Didi in your lap for some of the ride and we have pictures of that, but none of them came out very well.)

And at last we had Didi home!

It was a sweltering summer — we’d had a warm and early spring that had by this point transformed into an almost oppressively hot summer — and we quickly learned two things about Didi: (1) she hated her crate and would have absolutely nothing to do with it, and (2) she hates heat.  Look at her just dying of heat exhaustion here!

This being Denmark, of course, the nights cooled down adequately even without air conditioning, and here’s Molli Malou taking advantage of the fact that we had not yet agreed on our policy of Didi Is Not Allowed On Furniture of Any Kind Ever.

But even once the Furniture Edict went into effect, Didi found her happy places quickly enough.

I posted the next picture to Facebook along with an acknowledgement that the adorableness factor of our house had crossed a dangerous threshhold.

Ah, the glory days, back when the girls couldn’t wait to walk Didi!  (And the curious cats stalked us on those walks, so curious: who was this new blonde in the house?  God, they hated her.  Emma was merely wary and skittish, but Charlee was beside herself.  She remained out of the house for about three months and didn’t really start spending any time indoors again until the weather drove her inside in December or January.  By February of this year they had reached a kind of detente, and we have an uneasy peace to this day.)

I didn’t mention it yet, but all this time we’d been on vacation: given the expense and labor of adding a puppy to the family, we’d allowed the girls to decide back in February (after we’d talked ourselves into it with Nana over scotches their last night with us): would we have a nice summer vacation in some exciting destination, or would we get a puppy?  If you’re guessing it only took the girls three second to make up their minds, you’re about 2½ seconds off.

In any case, while on vacation and housebound we had to find things to do, and this is when Maddie wrote her first book: “Samara, The Princess in Maddonia.”  Like all Maddie stories, it involved a princess, a witch, and vast superfluities of of violence and lava.

One of the big changes Didi introduced into our lives immediately was that to give her the exercise she needed, we had to make daily trips out into the woods to let her burn off all that crazy puppy energy.  We’ve always been active and athletic as a family, but we hadn’t been a very outdoorsy family until Didi forced it on us.

So here’s a shot of Maddie enjoying the great outdoors — the obstacle course at Hareskov!

Maddie also became enamored with the song “Jeg Kigger På Fugler” by Djämes Braun at this point.  One of her pedagogs taught her a funny dance to it.  “Jeg Kigger På Fugler” literally means “I’m looking at birds,” and more figuratively “I’m birdwatching,” but in its musical rap sense it’s playing heavily on a lot of double entendres you can probably guess and which is visually obvious in the video you can find on YouTube, but Maddie was of course oblivious to the seamier elements of the song.  (At one point the song uses Lewinsky as a verb. ‘Nuff said.)  For weeks she kept singing Jeg kigger på fugler and doing her weird little bridwatch dance.  At all times, in all places.  With full Maddie exuberance.

Here she is in full birdwatch song mode.

Like I said. detente!

Did just kept getting cuter and cuter.

We couldn’t get out of the house much yet on account of Didi, so Trine and I took turns giving the girls different little adventures.  On one such adventure I took Molli Malou into Tivoli and we did the Dæmon together for the very first time.

We spent an uncharacteristic amount of time on the Playstation.  As a family we played a lot of Bocce; one-on-one, the girls played gladiatorial death matches.

I think by now I’ve set the stage sufficiently that not every picture out in the woods or with Didi needs a special description: it was how the first week of our vacation rolled.  (Yes, believe it or not I don’t think much more than a fortnight has elapsed since the top of this post.)

I love the next picture of Maddie because it’s so clear she’s inherited both my hair and my fashion sense.

One of the things you do on a staycation is get around to all those things you’d been putting off until you had a little more time around the house to deal with them.  So apparently I used this time to scan Molli Malou’s first-ever employment contract: her engagement with Det Ny Teater as an actress in Evita.

If I put a cutesy quote on it, don’t you think I could sell a million copies of the picture below as a poster?

Didi loved shoes as a puppy.  Sometimes she chewed on them, which was bad, but only very rarely.  Mostly she just liked to smell them and be around them and nudge them around with her snout.  She even sometimes slept with her snout in them a la Hannibal Lecter.

We brought Didi with us up to Frederik & Kirsten’s summer house for two days and a night, and that’s where Didi made it very clear to us that she was a water dog through and through.  Here she is basking in the cool North Sea waters.

And here is Molli Malou looking just so very cool and cosmopolitan.

And, back home, here is that same cool and cosmopolitan young lady beaming proudly over the animals she has made from candy.

And, at last, here is that same cool and cosmopolitan candy artisan desperately awaiting the arrival of her cousin at Kastrup Airport!

Voila!

Didi went bananas over the flamingo Nana and Pop-Pop had sent her via Sophie-courier.  I share the picture in part to show them how appreciated that gift was by Didi (who still plays with it almost daily), and in part to remind anyone reading this that no one is ever under any obligation to give Didi toys that squeak.

Sophie coped very well with her jetlag and fit seamlessly into our routine, but our routine by now was ready to undergo some changes: it was time to start acclimatizing Didi to being alone in the house once in a while.  But of course it still included plenty of time getting Didi out and about.

We managed a trip to Tivoli.

You can actually spot Molli and Sophie in the picture below:

Sophie was kind enough to help us try to reproduce the annual family Tivoli shot:

For Sophie’s 15th birthday present we had scheduled a Copenhagen Air Experience adventure like the one I’d had for my own birthday.  We let Molli Malou accompany her as a kind of belated birthday add-on.

(The videos were shared on Facebook.  One day I really will get around to posting videos on this blog!)

We also managed to get out to the greatest Chinese restaurant in Værløse!

And plenty of Didi adventures.

And a trip into the city, including a canal tour.

Odd Molly indeed!

Sophie also helped the girls have some fun with their hair.  (I think.  Or maybe they just played around with their own hair while Sophie napped.  I can no longer remember.  Sue me.  But I’m pretty sure that Sophie was behind the sudden interest in hairplay.)

We took a one-hour canoe trip between Farumsø and Furesø.

We also had a trip to Bakken, where Sophie’s mere presence upped Molli Malou’s courage exponentially.  Trine and I took turns hanging out with Didi in Dyrehaven while the others enjoyed Bakken.

(I keep looking at that picture and thinking, that cannot possibly be Didi.)

Sophie’s last evening we had dinner down with Mormor and Jørgen.

And then, very abruptly and suddenly, it was time to say goodbye to Sophie.

Vacation was over: moments after the above pictures were taken I was back at the office.

Family trivia: Sophie wasn’t actually going home, but rather flying off to Vienna (I think) to meet her family.  Except Aunt Deb hadn’t made the flight because her passport was expired.  Which I cannot even mock because, as some of you may remember, two days prior to Trine’s and my move to Denmark back in 2003 I took the really unusual step of mailing my passport to Denmark and damn near missed my own big move.

Summer wasn’t officially over, nor was the third quarter of 2014, but I’m going to cut things off here because it seems like a logical breaking point.  See you in the final installment of the 2014 catch-up cycle!