Halloween Etc.

Oops… I was just reviewing the blog from work to see what I ought to post for Maddie’s birthday this weekend, when I realized a blog I had prepared last weekend never got posted.

So here it is… dated today, but actually written last Saturday night.

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We celebrated Thanksgiving with Steve, Elisabeth, Becca, and Sebastian at their home up in Espegæde this evening — this being a Saturday and therefore two full days after the actual American holiday.

We got home late and the girls were carried to their beds as soon as we got home.  (Maddie had fallen asleep up at the house; Molli had fallen asleep within moments of sitting in the car.)  Trine went to bed shortly thereafter.  I had a surprising amount of energy left and thought that with my three roommates asleep it would be a good opportunity to get caught up on all the pictures I’ve been promising.

And have been saddened to see that we’re just not taking many pictures any more.

In any case, what follows is the best of what we have from October and November.  (There’s actually only one photo from the entire month of November.  One!  And to think I used to post every week and have dozens of pictures to share…!)

So we pick up in October, when Molli Malou wanted to make a special card for her Danish teacher (I forget why).  She got it into her head that she would make a pop-up book for a card, and she figured out how to do so entirely on her own.

The text on the page says, “Dear Helle, I think you are the sweetest Danish teacher.”

In the above photo, you can see that Helle has written “today we have Danish” on the smartboard.  Helle herself — the “sweetest Danish teacher” — is saying, “Now you’ve all got to shut up!”

A few days later — maybe a week or two later — it was pumpkin-carving night.

The following morning, Molli Malou informed me she wanted to bake some cookies.  This is a new thing, her love of baking.  With minimal parental oversight, and under the scrutiny of her little sister, she can actually make her own cookies!

I just like the next photo but have no recollection of the context.

The Friday before Halloween, which fell on a Tuesday or Wednesday this year, Joe and Beth had a Halloween party.  The girls were very excited: Molli Malou wanted to be a vampire and Maddie wanted to be a bunny.

Joe had just been back in the states and had loaded up on Halloween stuff at Costco.  It was great to see how well all the Danish kids metabolized the essentially American holiday.

Not just a bunny…. a pirate bunny!

A few days later it was Halloween proper.  Molli Malou stuck with her vampire costume; Maddie decided she felt more princessy than pirate-bunny-y:

The trick or treating was much more successful than it had been last year.  No doors were slammed in the kids’ faces, and more people had candy than they had before.  Halloween seems to have passed the tipping point in Denmark: there were tons of kids trick-or-treating our neighborhood.

Our penultimate photo is something most of you have seen on Facebook and everyone “here” has already had described to them in the preceding blog post: Molli Malou’s celebrated “Sorry to say it, but unfortunately I don’t like my food” note.  It generated more “likes” than anything I ever posted on Facebook.

Great Uncle Klaus had his 80th birthday in October.  Among his friends at the celebration (which Trine attended while I stayed home with the girls, since it was a weekday afternoon) was one of Denmark’s most popular editorial cartoonists (frequently featured in Berlingske), who drew the following caricature of Trine:

And there we are!