August and September

Our very busy late summer turned into a very, very busy autumn, as I foretold you.

School started, new jobs started, after-school activities started, and on top of that there were birthdays and visits and events to keep us busy even when we weren’t technically busy.  (Which, as I’ve said, wasn’t often.)  We also had a round of illnesses, a flea market sale, and an abundance of yard- and housework.

Despite the fact that a lot was going on, we weren’t taking a lot of pictures, so there were less pictures taken over the last couple of months than there were during the first two days of our last visit to America.

All that said, let’s get started!

I’ll need to have my boy Sherman set the wayback machine a couple of months — to early August, in fact, for Molli Malou’s first day of second grade

Here she is with Fie outside their classroom — are they or are they not 2B?  That is the question!

There’s always a big assembly around the flagpole outside on the first day of school, and it was charming watching all the girls greeting each other after the summer holiday.

Of course, at the age of 8 (in Fie’s case 9), reminiscences are nowhere near as interesting as dead bugs…

Molli Malou is an early blooming tweener: I am forced to resort to bribery whenever I want to take a picture of her without a pout or a grimace.

…or trickery…

We made such a big deal out of Molli Malou’s first day of school that Maddie sensed she deserved some compensatory action and demanded face paint: “I want to be a tiger, but not a scary tiger, just a happy tiger.”

Welcome to Greg’s “How to Paint a Happy Tiger” make-up course.

1. Begin with a beautiful young–and happy!–model.

2. Paint her a happy shade of yellow.

3. Paint orange over the yellow, leaving out only a broad yellow heart shape circumscribing mouth and cheeks, and just touching the tops of the eyebrows and diving in down to the top of the nose ridge.  Heart-shaped… that’s happy!

4. Paint the eyesockets white, with little flares flying off them as shown.  And a big circus clown white smile around the mouth, leaving out the lower lip and chin.

5.  Paint the nose, lips, and eyebrows black, then add black and white racing stripes and some stipple marks in the whisker area.  And be sure to make the lips curl up, or you won’t have a happy tiger!

6. Roooowwwwwr!

Well, the tiger was fun, and the tiger was happy, but after a few minutes it got scary.  So it was time for a new look!

(It looks badly photoshopped or something, doesn’t it?  Like I superimposed a shot of her head onto her body without getting the proportions right?  And yet…  no tampering, it’s a perfectly ordinary photo.  Weird.)

But you want to know a secret about the lady-bug face?  That wasn’t my handiwork!  We had called in a new make-up trainee:

Ah, the trailing days of summer.  A propos of nothing, Molli Malou approaches me one evening and asks if she can wash the car. 

She works so hard at it than even Maddie can see the appeal!

Look at that shine!

Now, as you all know, Trine had a birthday on September 12. That birthday is heavily, heavily chronicled on the “Forty Years of Trine” page on Facebook — which I intend not only to copy into a print photo book for Trine, but also to copy much of onto these electronic pages to make them part of the ongoing historical narrative.

So all we have to show for it here are some pictures from the birthday party she threw herself the Saturday before her birthday.

First, cousin Trine with little Matteo out in the yard.

The guests were Gert, Vibeke & Jørgen, Klaus & Joanne, David & Bente (with Elizabeth & Marcus), and Trine & Fabricio (with Matteo).  The kids didn’t spend much time at the table: the rest of us managed five or six hours, with some of us making it almost eight.

I was glad to see it wasn’t just the American cousins who “played” together like this…

And speaking of playing: Molli Malou called us over to the keyboard one day and informed us she could play “this song you might know.”

And she tapped out the opening of Für Elise.   We still have no idea where it came from.

We jumped all over that real quick, encouraging her as much as we could, and she spent days happily tapping away at the keyboard (set on low) in her room (with the door shut).

She taught herself — with the help of the iPad as you can see in the picture above — not only more of Beethoven’s little piece, but also Puff the Magic Dragon, a Danish children’s song, and something Pop-Pop was sure he recognized (during a command performance on Skype) to be from Peer Gynt but which I had thought was “one of those pieces called spring or morning or something”: and we were both right!  It was by Grieg, the composer of Peer Gynt, but it was a piece called Morning. 

Anyway, we’ve signed her up for lessons.  More on that later.

Of course, if one sister starts taking off on some new Mad Skillz, the other must keep pace.

Yeah, it was a rainy day in late September, so there was no question of doing this outside, but Maddie insisted on roller-skating and was in no mood to wait for better weather.  So I bundled her up in Molli Malou’s old set and we went up and down the hallway.

Carefully.

…and even then, she spent a lot of time on her bum.

After about half an hour of going up and down the hallway she announced that rollerskating was hard and that she would be better at it when she was a big girl.  But she wasn’t a big girl, just a little girl, but not a baby, but not a big girl.  So she would have to practice a lot.  And then by the time she was a big girl she would be really, really, really good.

Number of times I have been asked to break out the roller skate since then: zero.

Toward the very end of September we made it to the penultimate day of Tivoli’s summer season.

Those are the “Spinning Tops,” which were probably Molli Malou’s favorite ride this summer.  Early in the season she would shut her eyes and scream as much with terror as anything else, but by sheer force of will she taught herself to enjoy it and by the time of this late visit she simply yawned her way through the ride, chatting endlessly about how boring it suddenly seemed.

But I didn’t read too much into that, because as soon as we got off the ride she was begging to get back in line.  Every time.

As Molli Malou and I queued up for the Odin Express roller coaster, we watched Trine and Maddie take a ride on the squid.  I got a lot of pictures, but with Maddie on the inside of the car it was futile trying to get her.  So here’s Trine on the squid ride: Maddie is presumably to her right.

This was also a season of Tivoli Ride Expansion for Maddie, who warmed up to Karavanen (“The Caravan,” which is the kiddie roller coaster) over the course of this summer.  On this day, she made me ride it five consecutive times with her (the line was short), and she rode the entirety of each ride with her arms up in the air, screaming giddily.  Here she is in line…  can you see the anticipation?

Molli Malou, back at the spinning tops — we didn’t make this ride, but we’ll be first on the next one!

And now we conclude September on its very last day with our attendance at “Lille Nørd” live in Værløse.  The name means “Little Nerd” and it’s a show on which a male and female host learn all about one particular animal on each episode.  Molli Malou has been a devoted fan since about the age of 3 or 4; Maddie is just getting into them.

But the next picture shows we may have won them a new convert (no, not the big guy in blue, the little blonde on the left):

Molli Malou enjoyed it but couldn’t get comfortable and thought it was too oriented toward the littler kids.

And here they are: Christian and Katrina, live and on stage in Værløse!  (And blurry!)

Maddie was so excited she leaped up to dance along to their every song!  (Blurrily.)

And since that was last Sunday, that about wraps things up from a photographic point of view.

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I mentioned we had signed Molli Malou up for piano lessons.  When signing her up for them with Birgit, a pianist from Copenhagen conservatory, Birgit said that she also helps teach a choir class on Thursdays up at Værløsekirke (kirke = church). Since the piano lessons weren’t starting until October 8 and Molli Malou was obviously very excited about them, we were asked if she wouldn’t like to maybe sit in on one of these (free) classes so she could meet Birgit and maybe see if she felt like singing as well as playing.

The answer was obvious.  I brought Molli Malou in on a Thursday evening and when we opened the door to a room from which a lot of girlish singing could be heard, the singing stopped and a dozen blonde-haired, blue-eyed girls of about 9 or 10 stared at us, the intrusive newcomers.  I felt awful for Molli Malou: what an uncomfortable entrance!

“This is Molli Malou,” I said, “and I’m her father, Greg.”

Molli Malou! twelve little voices shrieked as one, and they rushed over to greet her, embrace her, touch her, as if she were the best friend any of them had ever had.  I sat in and watched, as Birgit had suggested, and observed that within a few minutes one girl had established a kind of ownership of Molli Malou.  Molli herself was enchanted.  Trine came to spell me after about 20 minutes so I could go pick up Maddie from børnehaven, and by the time Maddie and I got home Trine was calling to say that there’s a Thursday mass with a spaghetti dinner and the choir sings for them (the dinner guests, I assume, not the mass — this appears to be an entirely secular choir that just uses the church as its venue).   Last night Molli Malou threw a fit when I picked her up: why did she have to come home?

So she’ll probably stick with choir for a while.

Maddie, meanwhile, has been making huge strides with her swim lessons, and is finally coming to terms with the fact that her face will sometimes have to go underwater.  She does a mean doggie-paddle!

Both girls are thriving at their institutions.  Molli Malou is reading like mad (last night, in fact, she wanted to read aloud to me instead of vice-versa at bed-time, and she did — in English — until got bored with it and asked me to finish up the story).

Maddie has become so addicted to the iPad that we’ve had to start putting time limits on her usage: she would be perfectly content to spend an entire Saturday sitting on the couch with the iPad in her lap.  It’s a nice way to keep her busy when you need some grown-up time to get something done — I certainly feel less guilty using the iPad as a “babysitter” than I do using the television — but enough is enough.  Mostly she’s watching Angry Orange, Peppa Pig, Mickey’s Clubhouse, and related videos, but she’s also become pretty good at Temple Run, Tiny Wings, and Cut the Rope.

Molli Malou is a little scarier with the iPad… she’s watching music videos that have proved to me I do in fact have an inner prude, and she’s actually able to do searches on things she wants to see.  (Yes, parental controls in place and active.)

Molli Malou has also finally been entrusted with her own telephone.  We have so many old ones lying around it seemed to be about time.  (Even though this is a private website I don’t want to publish her number here, so email me if you want it — but please note her plan only allows her sixty minutes a month or something!)  We didn’t give her Trine’s old Samsung Galaxy, because she already has an iPod Touch, a Nintendo DSi, a computer, and half an iPad… how much tech does an 8-year-old need?

Unfortunately she keeps her phone on silent all the time, so the one time I desparately needed to reach her she had no idea I was calling her repeatedly even though her phone was in her backpack and her backpack was on her shoulders.  So I’m not really sure of the value of her having the phone just yet — but it’s nice to know she can call us if she needs to.

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So there you have it: a couple of very busy but not so photogenic months, and we’re all caught back up!