1000 Faces & Two Left Feet

(You should probably start downloading the Skate video (13MB, wmv) now, so you can browse the rest of the blog while it downloads.)

Molli Malou is in her make-up period. She enjoys have her face painted so much that we’ve finally had to advance from the cheap paint-crayons to more expensive face paints.

The fancy new paint set includes a lot of pretty samples of what can be done to a face, but Molli Malou has her own ideas about color.

She also doesn’t like to have the paint removed all it once. She likes the “scary face” of smeared makeup and milks it: these pcitures aren’t examples of me catching her at the wrong moment: they are actual faces she is making deliberately.

Keep an eye on that second one: a little photoshopping and it just might be this year’s Halloween card!

Now and then Molli Malou will pull out a board game and challenge her mother or me, or both of us, or the cat or a doll or an imaginary companion, to a match of Candyland or The Princess Jewelry Game. She’s getting better and better at counting off spaces and knowing when she’s kicking some butt.

For the ladybug face we stuck with traditional colors.

She made her own pigface mask at school.

And we’ve actually managed to persuade her into some pants a couple of times over the past two weeks. The first time was the result of necessity: all her skirts and dresses were filthy (or inappropriate). Everyone — even her teachers at Børnehaven — went out of their way to tell her how cute she was in pants, and it helped.

That night she jumped right back into her white princess ballerina skirt, with all the flouncy lace and taffeta she loves, but now that she knows she’s cute in pants she’s willing to wear them more often.

She not only needs to check herself out at intermediate steps suring makeup removal: now she has to see herself and pose for the camera during the intermediate steps of putting it on.

That was the foundation for this “blue lion cat”:

‘ This past Sunday, Molli Malou went into Frederiksberg Garden to meet John and Liam and play some ball. The weather was souring on us: the wind was rough and it was starting to rain. We stopped by the Sut tree so Molli Malou could show Liam her sut dangling from its boughs, but the kommune had done their winter trimming and Molli Malous little farewell bag was gone. I didn’t have my camera handy, but John did and he immortalized the moment: Molli Malou is staring at the empty space where her sut used to be. (Click on the picture to download the full size photo.)

We decided to retreat somewhere indoors until the weather cleared and/or Molli Malou cheered back up, but the latter happened within just a few moments and eventually we found ourselves in the shrubbery maze outside Café Josty. Molli Malou and Liam ran giggling ahead of us into the maze and we honestly did lose track of them a couple of times, but they were shrewd enough to stand still and call out to us until we could find them. The sun came out, meanwhile, and spent a happy twenty minutes in the middle of the maze, John and I tossing a football around while the kids ate bananas.

By the time we found our way out of the maze and went our separate ways, it was a bright sunny day. Trine had called and we’d decided to try and go swimming after lunch. It was beginning to feel like a perfect active day.

Molli Malou dug her heels in as we walked by the ice rink at the entrance to the garden and asked what the people were doing. I gave her a quick idea of what skating was. Explanations wouldn’t do: I had to lift her up and plop her down on the ice, where she slid around happily in her little rubber boots.

Then she paused. Her reaction was hard to read. Was she bored, or awed?

I told her it was time to go home.

Her lips curled down and her eyes watered up.

I told her we could come back another day.

A single tear broke through the surface tension of one eye and ran down her reddening cheek.

I told her we could come back after lunch, but that it would mean no swimming.

She hopped into my arms and began chatting excitedly about how much fun that would be.

“But I want the things on my feet,” she said.

“Skates?”

“Yes, daddy, I want skates.”

“We don’t have skates. The rental place is closed. The stores are closed.”

Another storm threatened, and this time there was nothing to do but let it rage. I will change little plans to accommodate Molli Malou — swimming, skating, bowling, whatever. But I will not be bullied into hunting down a pair of skates on a Sunday afternoon by a screaming or crying fit. We got home, hurried through lunch, and then the three of us returned to the rink.

The rental office was open and they had one pair of skates left in Molli Malou’s size!

We rented them for an hour and shook our heads, wondering if she’d either hate skating so much that she’d want to quit immediately or like it so much that she’d go nuts and burn out after ten or twenty minutes.

She didn’t hate it, that’s for sure.

In fact she kind of liked it.

That’s an understatement.

The longest she stood without support was about twelve seconds. She couldn’t do more than stand still if one of us didn’t have at least one of her hands.

Her preference was to have one of us on each arm, then we would run around the rink while Molli Malou “skated” between us.

As we rounded the rink at one point I heard a voice call, “Trine! Trine!”, and I said to Trine, “Isn’t it funny how in the states whenever anyone yelled Trine I knew they were talking to you, but here it seems like half the girls your age are named Trine.”

We came around the rink again and this time Trine also heard the call — it was Kirsten, and she had brought Julius for a skate! Molli Malou’s first boyfriend!

Don’t be too impressed by Julius: he has double blades on — training skates, I guess.

In the end Molli Malou was on the ice for the full hour and then some. We had to literally drag her kicking and screaming off the ice. (The kicking was especially fun thanks to the sharp blades on her feet.) It was all she talked about for days and we plan to get back to the rink as soon as possible.

I should also mention that Monday evening we joined the throngs of thousands gathered at Raadhusplads to greet the Men’s National Handball Team in recognition of their European Championship (won Sunday night against Croatia).

We miscoordinated the camera, so all we had were our phones.

When we thought the event was over I wandered off to get my bike while Trine and Molli Malou hung out just a little longer to squeeze a final few moments out of the event, and I had just crossed the street when a cop started hustling me and my fellow pedestrians hurriedly down a sidestreet. Then ka-blam! Fireworks exploding directly over our heads for about ten minutes.

If you can watch these little phone videos, here’s a little one of those fireworks.

And by now surely the skating video has downloaded and you can watch it! (The beginning segment was actually shot within seconds of her getting onto the ice in skates for the first time in her life.)