A Testing Month, But Summery

It’s important to get the June blog out of the way because on Sunday we’re flying off to France for 12 days in Carnas with Stéphane and his family (his wife Sovichea, their 17-year-old daughter Zoé, and their 13-year-old son (for the moment; he turns 14 on the 16th) Vivien.  Stéphane’s mother-in-law will also be there, I believe, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing his parents or little brother.  (I still picture Maxim as being about ten, even though I last saw him when he was about 25.)  We have another 10 days or so of vacation after we get back, and we’re all looking forward to the whole three-week bonanza.

Once I hit “publish” on this thing, we’re in full bore “prepare for vacation” mode until the plane takes off at its ungodly hour Sunday morning.

This June began with Molli Malou’s birthday party for classmates:

It was a swim hall birthday party, and it was for the whole class instead of just the girls.  Trine, Vibeke, and I chaperoned, and Maddie was invited along, of course, so with a few cancellations from classmates there were about 22 of us in all.

Believe it or not, that’s the only photo from the birthday.  The whole thing was held from beginning to end in the swim hall, and photos aren’t allowed.  So it’s the very first birthday of any kind without a single photographic memory.

Future Molli Malou: I’m sorry.  But the swim hall was your idea, so live with it.

The summery weather of late May continued into late June, so we made our way to Bymidtens “open at night” celebration a few nights after the big birthday bash.

Molli Malou found some sixth-grade friends and left us to be with them very quickly: Trine and I hung out with Maddie while Molli Malou cruised the strip with her friends like a little pack of mallrats.

The highlight of the evening was, for Maddie, her “Love” tattoo.

The “Peace Boat” pulled alongside our office one day in early June.  Their goal is to end poverty in 2015, so either this is a shipload of bitterly disappointed people or it’s actually the “Peace and Time-Travel Boat.”

The last few weeks of 5th grade involved no academics at all (Molli proudly told us one Sunday evening, “school is so great now; I don’t have to think any more”).  Instead, 5.b joined with 5.d to produce a theatrical presentation involving pirates, mermaids, and cannibals.  The acoustics weren’t very good and the kids’ articulation was muddy, so although I probably wouldn’t have understood more than 40% of it in English, I only understood 20% of what was actually said and sung in Danish.

Fortunately it wasn’t too hard a plot to follow: there was once a great pirate who sired two children just before dying (along with his wife).  The kids were handed off to separate people and ended up leading entirely different lives.  The boy grew up into a great boy pirate.  The girl grew up into a great girl pirate.  Each one had inherited half of a treasure map from their father.  They seek the treasure — the girl pirates and the boy pirates, separately — but the boy pirate leader and girl pirate leader kind of feel a strange bond.  Also there are mermaids, and there’s some kind of angry, trident-waving Sea King, and there are some wild cannibals on the island.  There’s a big fight, but in the end the pirates find their treasure and their leaders realize they are brother and sister and, hey: that’s the real treasure, isn’t it?

(Charlotte, on the left, is Molli Malou’s teacher.)

It was a fun production, but fell a little short of Evita.  The pictures don’t play very well at this reduced size, but don’t worry — they don’t play very well in full-size, either.

The weather was so nice we were eating outdoors very often.

I took the shot below at close to 23:00 one evening.  That’s the best part of June.

Molli’s class had a Sunday outing to a climbing park (“Go Monkey”), where they got to do some repelling, zip lines, and that kind of stuff.  The class had a blast.  We weren’t there, but some of the photos were shared.

After falling out of love with reading, Maddie has been rekindling the spark:

“Hi family, I’m reading Teddy.  DO NOT disturb!”  The Teddy books are a series of little chapter books about a horse named Teddy.  I don’t know what the “nej” and “no” circle and X are supposed to mean: Maddie just seems to like giving us the illusion of choice.

A hell of a storm rolled in one evening, a summer storm, and its precursing clouds were spectacular.

Last day of first grade!

The last day of first grade was also the day of the PensionDanmark sommerfest.  It was pleasant but kind of dull, alas, but the food was fantastic.  The mention of “grilled lobsters” had me very excited, but they turned out to be the infamous “jomfruhummer,” or “maiden lobsters,” which are these Nordic pygmy lobsters whose tails are okay, but are otherwise mostly inedible.  And small.

A view from our quay not long before I left the party:

The very next afternoon Trine drove the girls up to join Mormor at a summerhouse in Rørvig (up at the top of Sjælland).  Here they are driving off.

Trine spent Saturday night up there with her mom and the girls — Jørgen, too, had been left behind, so they had a three-generation, girls-only night to themselves.

I spent my Saturday night home alone doing what any manly man would do when freed of the shackles of feminine control: I binge-watched Downton Abbey and made bagels.

I enjoyed some time with Didi on Sunday, first walking out in the summery goodness…

…and then just hanging in the back yard.

And at this point, I now realize, the wheels have once again fallen off the chronology bus.  We’re going to be jumping around a lot through the rest of the pictures.

Here are the girls enjoying themselves in Rørvig (or thereabouts).  (Most of the summerhouse pictures are thanks to Vibeke, who texted them to Trine and me over the course of the week; a few were actually sent directly to me by Molli Malou.)

Lovely breakfasts al fresco at the summer house!

Met some old colleagues — actually, the former CEOs of the last two companies I worked for, which I only just realized now — for a light dinner and a couple of beers one evening at a place called Warpigs in Kødbyen (“City of Meat” — the meatpacking district).  The three of us, healthy eaters all, shared this one tray: ribs, pulled pork, cheddar pork rinds, one bag of spicy beef jerky, one bag of sweet.  And some pickles.  They’re also a brewery, so it was the very best of all possible worlds.

(Our visitability index just gained a few points, didn’t it?)

Trine got certified as a functional knee specialist!

Pictures from the summering girls:

They had some rainy days, too:

And even the dry days were sometimes not very warm:

Molli Malou sent the following picture to me via SMS.  She even admitted it was just to taunt me.

Crab fishin’!

Meanwhile, summer greetings from Onkel Michael and Lisa.

Sometimes naval ships pull up opposite our offices.  One afternoon I got to see the Defense Minister give a press conference inaugurating a new naval helicopter.

And of course, the biggest event of June was my taking of the indfødsretsprøve (naturalization test).  I liked my chances the minute I saw my test number…

…but I disliked my chances after I took the test.  It was brutally hard.  I had prepared maniacally and had expected to ace it, but was suddenly terrified I would actually fail.

The good news was that its difficulty became a huge theme in Denmark that week, to the extent that the ministers and parliament were talking about offering a free second-try for anyone who’d failed it.

Meanwhile, Maddie makes green goop.

The girls spent an afternoon in early June selling off a lot of old stuff at a flea market in Frederiksberg with Mormor and Jørgen.

We had our annual neighborhood meeting and street party that evening: pretty much all our neighbors are in that tent, in the middle of Hybenvej, drinking too much wine.

Maddie has finally managed the art of blowing bubbles, but never when a camera’s at hand.

Another naval or maritime event at Langelinie: the crown princess came to launch a new ship:

Did you see that “one-pot spaghetti” recipe on Facebook?  Maddie and I made it one busy night and we loved it!

Another hare-raising morning walk with Didi (see the little dark pixel waaaay at the end of Gyvelvej?):

On further approach, with max zoom, you can see what had caught Didi’s attention from 100 meters away:

(This morning, by the way, we nearly walked straight into the hare, who was sitting at the very bottom of Hybenvej.  It took all my strength to restain Didi while the idiot bunny hopped straight up the middle of the street toward our house, before finally bolding into the yard of the house across the street from us.)

And then one lovely mid-June day, the mail brought me this:

(“CONGRATULATIONS CONGRATULATIONS You have passed the naturalization test with 33 correctly answered questions.”)  Anything less than 32 was failure, so this was not my finest moment.

And my prize: the last piece of paper I needed to have in order to apply for citizenship, which I did that very night.

You’ll notice the certificate doesn’t mention how many questions I answered correctly, so from now on we’ll all just say I aced the damn thing, okay?

My boss was nice enough to take me and my colleagues for an ice-cream to celebrate.

Summer fun in the yard:

…and in the woods:

This is Maddie trying to demonstrate how excited she is about her forthcoming pony ride at the Bymidten “open late” night one on one of the first nights of June.

And back to the woods with Didi:

And skipping either backward or forward in time to Maddie’s first sleepover with a friend from school staying at our house (Maddie has slept over at Harald’s in the past — twice, I think — and we’ve had numerous relatives and friends of the family spend the night, sometimes including kids about her age tossed in her room with her, but this was a milestone event for her anyway; her friend is Josephine).

What they’re doing is feeding the dog.

Once in a while I like to take a bunch of pictures of the house or the yard or both, just because it’s always fun to look back years later and see what the ever-changing house and yard looked like at such-and-such a point in time.

Here’s a shot of Maddie, and Molli’s entire class, enjoying a barbecue at the Larsens’ the day of Molli’s class “Go Monkey” trip described earlier (Maddie is bottom left, Molli is three girls to her left):

This gazebo, named Gnisten (“the Spark”), is right on the edge of what really shouldn’t be called the Old Golf Course.  (I don’t know if it’s still called a gazebo when it’s got a fire pit in the middle, and a sort of chimney in the roof, but if it’s not a gazebo I don’t know what it is.)  On one of our walks it was so hot Didi actually rushed under it for shade.  And I followed.  And we sat there for about ten minutes.

The B&W photo makes it look almost autumnal, but it was hot.

June also saw Great Britain vote to leave the EU, which will probably not be the calamity many are assuring us it will be, but will almost certainly be some other kind of calamity altogether.  Time will tell.

That’s it for June.  Be sure to tune in later this month for a special vacation edition of The Molli & Maddie Blog!

Author: This Moron

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