At Long Last Summer

It’s only the last week or so we’ve had summery weather in Denmark this year.

Time to build Henrietta a summerhouse! (Molli Malou never actually claimed this was going to be a summer house, but her adamance on its being built and the general timing suggest no other likely motive.)

Maddie always wants to help.

Maddie is getting very good at demonstrating what she wants even when she can’t articulate it. Since she can never articulate a desire for anything but milk, that’s a pretty necessary skill.

Yes, she will stand in the cart and rock it violently and shriek until someone comes along to push her around in it. She’s outgrown the thing, so it went into the garage last night with some other outgrown toys, so she’ll have no further opportunities to tumble off the thing and smash her head on the floor.

She’s very possessive of her little lawn chair, which has therefore found its way inside. (And no matter how many times we take it outside, it inevitably shows up inside again with hours.)

One day while I was cooking and Trine was doing something with Molli Malou, Maddie was playing happily in the garden. Finally she came in excitedly, as if to tell me some great tale of adventure.

“Phhbbblt bah bah, glummm glumm thhwffflll!” she said, and I noticed a lot of dirt on her hands and face. Then she turned around.

Not poop — dirt. Maddie, did you come in here just to tell me you’re playing in dirt?

I interpret that as a “Hell yeah!” And off she wanders back to what I thought had been some innocuous shovel play…

She loves her swing but is quite particular about how she should be swung.

She becomes weirdly insistent that the parent pushing her sit beside her and swing in the tire swing, but then gets pissy and angry when her own swinging subsides. So the parent has to get out of the tire swing and push her, then she gets angry that the parent has left the tire swing, and on it goes.

So sometimes when she waddles out to her swing and starts waving it around and shouting “ging gang! ging gang!” we just let her shout.

Remember those horrible weeds drowning the south garden?

It’s been a horrible amount of work and I still have to “repluck” whatever’s grown back up from week to week, but soon we’ll have it prepped and covered with some fresh roll grass.

Now some state-of-the-garden pics for our own purposes (it’s actually very helpful to have these shots and look back at the previous year’s growth to get an idea of what to expect when… everything is growing about a month behind this year, thanks to that horrible May).

I got the weed out from under this bush, too…

But they’re eating up the eastern garden.

This year we’re going for herbs outside the kitchen instead of in ceramic pots on the back terrace.

Here’s how the yard looks in late June this year…

I’m so proud of how “clean” it is under those rhododendrons now. Rhododendra? Whatever.

The sandbox is as popular as we’d hoped it would be, and the half-kilo of sand trudged into the living room every evening is a small price to pay.

By early this week the evenings were so warm we were able to resume our sometime-habit of bike rides after dinner. This was not just our first after-dinner bicycling of the season: it was our first as a family of four (last summer one of us would stay home with Maddie while the other took Molli Malou out).

We let Molli Malou choose our route, and she didn’t hesitate: Around the lake!

What we didn’t know was that it’s apparently Iberian Killer Slug migration season. The dirt path around the whole northern part of the lake was covered with slugs crossing. Seriously, there should have been “slugs crossing” signs. It was hard not to run them over — and there were squished slugs enough to suggest not everyone was biking to avoid them.

A swan at one of the swimming holes was guarding her little cygnets, not in frame…

Midsommer’s Eve / Sankt Hans Aften was once again nearly derailed by flat tires: instead of a pram, this year it was Molli Malou’s bike, which went flat on her not far from home. She and Trine were biking to the celebration at Furesø while I stayed home with Maddie. They had to call us and we had to drive out and meet them and drive Molli Malou and her bike to a gas station for air.

Molli Malou was very upset about the interruption and cried in the car, “This was supposed to be a FUN day! This is not very FUN!”

But once she had the air in her tires, everything was fine.

They didn’t stay long — not even long enough to watch the witch burn — but Molli Malou did get her balloon and an ice cream.

(Trine swears Molli Malou was smiling when she took the picture.)

As posted previously, Molli Malou discovered her first loose tooth last night. Here she is trying to show it off for the camera.

And Maddie seemed to want her picture taken too. No loose teeth there, but what the hell.

So… big week ahead! One week from today Molli Malou will turn six! We’re having a big princess party and inviting all the little princesses from her fritidshjemme. She’s going to be a very happy little girl and is going to get almost everything she wants for her birthday. I want to do another one of those one-month-at-a-time posts, but may not have time. Plus there’s still video from the last couple of weeks I want to post.

Meanwhile, our grownup lives are in a final feverish pitch: Trine is finally done with this semester from hell on Thursday. Then we have the busy birthday weekend, and then it’s July. July in Denmark is a slow and quiet time, and we’re all looking forward to that.

# # #

The preceding was prepared on Friday, and the entire weekend came and went without opportunity to finish it. I could have posted it as it stood, but I wanted to record some thoughts on where the girls stand now. So, sh!… don’t tell anyone… I’m finishing this up on stolen moments at work…

Maddie is coming along with language. She understands more and more and has just recently begun “answering” questions she grasps (more food? more milk? ging-gang?) by nodding or shaking her head. (She shaking for “no” is old stuff, the nodding for “yes” is new.) Daddy is being applied to me with a little more exclusivity now, but she still blurts “Daddy” as often as not when asked who Trine is.

She is in her little monkey phase, and it only takes her a moment of our inattention for her to disappear down the hallway and into Molli Malou’s room, where she scrambles up into the elevated bed and begins jumping around as if her entire purpose on earth were to cast herself headlong to the floor.

She loves dancing and has some pretty fancy moves.

When we’re outside and she hears voices calling to one another from a distance, she jerks her head toward them and shouts nonsense back in reply. If it’s coming from next door she’ll go toddling across the lawn at breakneck speed and try to walk through the (admittedly now sparse) garden onto their property.

She is extremely fond of slides. At Nicolai & Linda’s party on Saturday she made a beeline to the slide coming out of the treehouse in their backyard. It was wavy plastic slide, about two meters off the ground at the top. Maddie kept trying to climb up the slide, which was dangerous, so I started holding her and helping her slide down the last couple of feet of the slide. As time went on, I started experimenting by starting her higher and higher up the slide. She did not resist at all. I also experimented with letting her slide almost entirely unheld, but this experiment was abruptly ended in tears when I didn’t quite catch her right at the bottom and she tumbled off uncomfortably onto the ground. It didn’t dampen her enthusiasm for the slide, though. Realistically we think I lifted her up to the two-meter top and helped her slowed down about 100-150 times. (She weighs about 25 pounds now. Guess who isn’t worried about upper body workouts this week?)

At the same party, Molli Malou was being a little shy — she was alone in a gulf of kids either well older than her or much younger — so Sofie lent her her Nintendo DS. Molli Malou sat more or less the entire party playing with it very happily, very quietly. We were pleased to see just how much she liked it.

Maddie has only shown irrational fear to two things: the lawnmower (maybe not so irrational) and Molli Malou’s toy vacuum cleaner. It scares holy hell out of her and there’s no way to condition her to accept it. She shrieks and runs and hides and cowers until she knows it’s gone. This is acutely weird because the REAL vacuum cleaner doesn’t intimidate her at all. Like her sister before her, she likes to climb on it when we’re using it and giggles when you vacuum her tummy or bum or hair.

Her newest words are bird (bud!) and sky (‘ky!), but she doesn’t distinguish between ceiling and sky.

Molli Malou burst out in tears the other evening and said, “Daddy, you know what Frederik said? He said that there were words that were bad and if I said them he would tell his Far and his Far would come with a knife and cut my head off!”

“What words, hon?”

“Piger. And kysser. And læbestift.” (Girls, kisses, lipstick.)

I gave this some thought and gave her a prepared speech to deliver to this little Frederik. Here is what I told her to say: “I can say those words whenever I want, they’re not bad words at all, and you and your daddy can’t do anything about it.”

Molli Malou nodded sagely but still looked a little spooked.

“And you could say to all the other kids, ‘Hey, everybody — Frederik is scared of words! He’s afraid of girls, and lipstick, and kisses, and he’s so scared he needs his Daddy to save him from words!'”

That brightened her right up and made her laugh. She’ll never use the words, but maybe she’ll use the confidence they help give her…