Catching Up: 1Q14

I promised to get things caught back up, and it begins right now. (I also said all the images appear to have been fixed, but it turns out there are still some pictures missing from 2013 posts. Those are going to have to be dug up one by one — if I ever have time to get around to it.)

We’re going to start in early 2014.

It was a very exciting winter for the whole family. Molli Malou went from sporadic rehearsals to two a week and then three a week before things got really crazy leading up to the previews and premiere. Trine and I took turns getting her to and from rehearsals, and it felt bizarre for two theatre veterans to have no theatre in our own lives but to find ourselves hanging out wearily outside the dressing room late at night waiting for our nine-year-old daughter to get out of rehearsal.

Molli Malou loved the experience — she never complained about having to go to rehearsal, she never griped about being tired in the morning even when she was getting home from rehearsal hours after most of her classmates had gone to bed.

Finally January 23 rolled around: the night of the big premiere! I actually did manage to post a blog around the event, so I’ll post the pictures from that day without much comment — you can always navigate to January 2014 to see the original post.

Her photo in the program:

Poor Maddie (who had just turned five in December) didn’t get to attend the preview, but the she was a one-woman show of her own.

One of the things that made that winter even more trying than usual was the fact that the house was still being resuscitated from the water and mold damage that had been discovered in October 2013.

Progress was slow — god, was it slow — and it’s worth remembering that in addition to keeping crazy hours to accommodate Molli’s rehearsal schedule, our domestic life was in tatters.

The protective plastic had come down from the hallway, so that egress was possible without the constant unzipping and rezipping of “doors”…

…but the central rooms of the house were unlivable. The picture below shows what Molli and Maddie’s rooms looked like in January: the wall between their rooms had been torn down — along with most everything else.

It was tough navigating day-to-day life with the recovery team: there were contractors of every stripe coming in and out of the house all day every day, thousands of questions to answer, and a lot of our “free” time was spent straightening out communication between them, since every answer we gave managed to find itself communicated incorrectly to at least one of the contractor teams.

Since the girls’ rooms weren’t habitable, and since Gert had been staying with us most of December, and since we knew Nana and Pop-Pop would be spending some time with us in February, Trine and I had made a little nest for ourselves in the basement (more igloo than nest for the 2½ weeks it took to get the heat working down there!), in order that our visitors could have our room and Maddie could have the guest room. Molli made it through the entire rehearsal process for Evita sleeping on a foam mattress on the floor of the big room. We tried to make it a little cozy for her.

(The emphasis was clearly on tried.)

Once the show was up and running, our schedule became a little more regular. Things didn’t even seem that out of control when Nana and Pop-Pop came to visit during winter vacation week.

We made a trip to the Transportation Museum up in Hillerød and learned a valuable lesson: the large halls of the museum are unheated. We spent as much time as possible in the little areas warmed up by space heaters.

And of course, Nana and Pop-Pop got to see Molli Malou on stage.

(The picture below is genuinely awful, but it was the best of a bad bunch.)

During the walk around the lake that’s chronicled in the pictures above, there was from time to time a bizarre sound of tinkling glass, or shattering glass, or tiny grinding gears submerged in viscuous liquid, or — well, it’s almost impossible to describe the sound because I’d never heard it before and now, a year later, I can only remember the strangeness of it: it was the sound of millions of little bits of ice, from the rapidly thawing waters of Søndersø, jostling against one another along the shore with the undulations of the waters. It was enchanting, mesmerizing, otherworldly. And I do have video of it, so if you’d like to hear it just give a holler.

In any case, you can see the source of that bewitching sound here:

Once winter vacation ended, Nana and Pop-Pop headed back home and work resumed on the house.

Maddie was of course Rapunzel for Fastelavn — Rapunzel was still the reigning princess, not yet ousted by the upstarts Elsa & Anna. She took a few whacks at the barrel in Værløse bymidten.