America 2013

Never mind the usual rambling intro: let’s jump right into things.

No, wait: one disclaimer: I will not be able to justice to how wonderful this trip was — not just for me, but for the girls.  Especially for the girls.  They both grew in ways we are still grappling with: it’s like they both blossomed into something more than the amazing people they already were.  Maddie’s whole way of communicating and expressing herself changed radically in the course of those 19 days, and she seems to have turned the corner from pre-schooler to littler girl.  She read her first book and has been reading and writing like mad more and more each day.  Molli Malou advanced in terms of her maturity in ways that are as astonishing to behold as they are hard to describe.  I thank the whole family for facilitating those developments.  And Trine and I both got to relax in ways we haven’t in a long, long time.  So let’s just acknowledge all that up front and then muddle through what’s essentially a half-assed travelogue, accepting it for what it’s worth….

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Trine and I woke up at about 4:45 on the morning of June 29, after having been up until past midnight packing.  We picked up at the girls at Mormor’s by 5:30 and roughly 14 hours later Pop-Pop and Nana were picking us up at JFK.

En route from Denmark to Iceland, we remembered what a nightmare it had been trying to get through U.S. Passport control back in 2008, when Molli Malou had been Maddie’s age and Maddie had been a mere fetus.  We remembered the idiotic American official who’d insisted Molli’s passport was invalid until signed, oblivious to the obvious illiteracy of the 4½-year-old girl before him.  And so we’d had her “sign” her passport, right there in front of the official, as the queue lengthened (and giggled) behind us: it had taken her so long to spell out her name that even the official was eventually ready to wave us on.  “No, no,” we insisted, “you’re right, it’s not valid until she signs it.”

Well, yeah, that had been fun, but since we’d already been there and done that we made sure to have Maddie sign her own U.S. passport before we got to Iceland.

(Weird how sloppily she wrote her name: her handwriting is normally pretty neat.)

Eventually, as I said, we made it to the airport, through passport control and customs, and out to the tank Pop-Pop and Nana had rented to pick us up.  Behold the face of jetlag shellshock:

The World’s Fair towers are such a phenomenon in pop culture lately that I had to snap a picture as we drove by (added bonus: the Empire State Building popping up in the lower left).

By the time we reached Deep River it was all we could do to stay awake until … well, until we couldn’t any more.  And then it was Sunday morning, June 30, the 50th anniversary of this fabulous couple!

What a great brunch at the Water’s Edge!  All that American brunchy goodness…  I think I ate more at that meal than I had in the previous three or four days (I was still on my must-look-awesome-for-reunion diet).

Back at the house after the brunch, we all enjoyed reliving the fifty years of Nana and Pop-Pop’s marriage through the video Deb had produced.

There was also a song, a speech, and of course there were cards and presents.

Even shopping at the outlet stores is an adventure when the cousins are united:

…and back at the house, the kids wasted no time in establishing an independent territory:

Next thing you know, it’s the third of July…  Molli Malou’s birthday!

How old are you, sweetie?

Sigh.  Everyone’s a comedian.  (Where’d she get those genes?)  Seriously, Molli.  Come on.

Nine, right!

And here in America, what’s the usual theme for a Molli Malou birthday…?

(I love this next shot of Gene and Sophie even though it disrupts the narrative flow.)

So: let the wild rumpus begin!

Uh… Molli?  Let the wild rumpus begin, dammit!

Better.

While Molli Malou celebrated her ninth birthday with her dear Old Granddad (among others), a Wild Turkey skittered by in the back yard.  Johnny Walker never dropped by to pay his regards, however; nor did his brothers Black and Red.  (Apologies to those who aren’t James Thorougood fans.)

Birthday celebrations behind us, the Lees dashed back up north to prepare for the next day’s holiday and vacation life continued in Deep River.

Besides the wild turkey, 32 Lobb Lane was also visited by Mr. Bunny, apparently Winnie’s mortal enemy.

Molli Malou tried valiantly for pictures of Mr. Bunny on her own camera or iPod, and maybe she got some: I haven’t yet tapped into her pictures.  We’ll see.

We hit the road after breakfast on the following morning and were up in Chelmsford not long before the Fourth of July and housewarming party was slated to begin.  Somehow Maddie found time to transform herself.  Hmm… looks like a bug bit under her left eye, there…

Before the party even started everything had already gone to the dogs.

With help from Sophie, Molli Malou quickly became a Fourth of July hipster.  (To Uncle Gene’s apparent astonishment: I didn’t notice him in this picture until just now!)

And at last the guests began arriving and the party began.

And what’s a 4th of July party without a 4th of July Rhino?

Aunt Deb brilliantly gets all the corn shucked in record time by making it a contest!

…followed later by a watermelon-eating contest of less practical purpose.

…and a pie-eating contest so reminiscent of a particular scene from Stand by Me that for safety reasons I cleared the area before the event began (but was pleased to learn that Sophie won).

That evening we meandered over to the nearby lake for the illegal firework show!

After the fireworks we all went home and were soon in bed.

Did you notice the bandaid on Maddie’s face in the picture of her eating watermelon?  Remember the red blotch under her eye in a picture even further back?

The bandaid was there because she’d obviously been bitten there by a mosquito and kept complaining about it and we didn’t know what else to do.  Bandaids often make her feel better even when they serve no practical purpose.

After putting Molli Malou and Maddie to bed that night, Trine and I had a nightcap before turning in ourselves.  Trine was sharing a bed with Molli Malou, I was sharing the air mattress with Maddie. 

I was quickly cursing the arrangement because Maddie kept tossing and turning and whining in her sleep, making it impossible for me to get comfortable, much less try to sleep.  Finally I begged Trine to switch places with a whine of my own, and the act of our switching woke poor Maddie, who finally articulated her problem: her eye hurt.  We turned on the light to take a look, and the poor girl’s eye was so swollen she could only open it after several minutes of effort.  We freaked out (and I felt about as awful and selfish and negligent as I’ve ever felt as a parent), and immediately realized we had reached that inevitable point of our American vacation where we have to go to an emergency room.

Yes, the streak is unbroken: since moving to Denmark in 2003, we as a family have not had one single visit back to the states without at least one emergency room visit.

So Aunt Deb drove us out to the hospital in the middle of the night.

Here’s a shot of Maddie in the ER.

(She always smiles for the camera, and when the doctor came in with a penlight to look in her eye a few moments later, she mistook it for a camera and gave him the same smile to his very obvious surprise.)

Diagnosis: bug bite.  (Duh.)  Treatment: benadryl and time.  Outlook: it’ll get worse, then better.  Nothing to worry about.

The benadryl gave Maddie a good night’s sleep.

And then it was Friday the 5th of July.  And Molli Malou apparently borrowed a cousin’s curling iron.

We got to watch Hannah back the car out of the garage.  I actually took a picture of her learner’s permit and was going to post it for visual scrapbooking purposes, but although this is a private, walled-off, search-engine-hidden site, it’s still the web, and I didn’t think I should make identity theft so easy.

So!  This is the part of the vacation where Trine and I whooshed up to the North Shore for a weekend with my old friends (and for my 30th high school reunion) while the girls remained with their cousins (and aunt and uncle).  Since there aren’t many pictures from our weekend, I’ll start with those, then we’ll flashback to Deb’s pictures of the goings-on in our absence.

As usual, we began with a lunch at Beverly’s Anchor restaurant, where I had steamers for an appetizer and a whole lobster for supper.  Washed down with a lot of Budweiser.  Heaven.

Given the weather, we spent the rest of the afternoon and evening sitting out in back of Adam & Mary’s house, drinking beer, talking, and periodically taking dunks in the river for relief from the heat.  The next morning after breakfasting in we did very little until lunch (at Howling Wolf in Salem, some of the best Mexican food I’ve had in a long, long time), after which we swung by Tidecrest for pictures because Mike MacIver had said, “Tidecrest’s been destroyed, it’s awful, it’s all gone, it’s just wood now.”  We assumed he meant there’d been horrible storm damage and the house had been reduced to a pile of lumber.  When I say “we,” I mean me, Trine, Adam, and Mary.  All of us.

But that wasn’t what he meant.

Then we went back to Adam & Mary’s to relax and prepare for the reunion (at which Eric Cressey would greet me by asking if I’d seen Tidecrest and knew it was listing for $4.5 million).

I include the next picture for the permanent record so the girls can someday see how hot their mother was at 40 (literally, in this case, as well as figuratively: it was about 100 F).  The milky dewdrops are sun lotion beading because she’d just sprayed herself with Mary’s patented ad-hoc “cool-down sprayer” — a garden hose rigged up like a shower.

No reunion pictures, but for the historical record I should mention it was the first time in 30 years I’d seen Chris Shea, Bill Gillis, Eric Cressey, Susan Eldridge, Jeff Ford, Jeff Thaxter, Shelley Tregor, and many, many others (and some I’d seen maybe 25 years ago, but none more recently than that).   We left a little early to catch Mike’s gig at Hungry Betty’s in Marblehead, at the Village Plaza, but by the time we got there they’d stopped for the evening.  So we went back to Adam and Mary’s and drank more beer.

And the next morning we left.  Here are Adam and Mary and Grace, by the way.

Since I wasn’t present at any of the many, many fabulous activities which the Lees brought the girls to during our absenve, I’m just going to present the pictures I’ve been able to steal off Aunt Deb’s Facebook timeline to include them in the permanent record without comment.

(Yeah, I downloaded them in the wrong order and didn’t bother correcting them chronologically here.  Sue me.)

So, in light of the above, not surprising what would greet Trine and me on our return from the North Shore:

(Notice the eye getting better?)

I have no idea what Maddie is trying to communicate to Hannah here, but even though it’s a blurry shot I think it captures nicely Maddie’s little-girl imperiousness and Hannah’s loving and benign patience with it.

The following shots come from the rainy day when Aly Metzger and her three daughters visited Aunt Deb.  (Note of clarification to future Molli Malu and Maddie: Aunt Deb’s friendship with Alysoun Metzger and my own friendship with Chris Metzger have absolutely nothing to do with each other.  They are independent friendships.  Our families were never neighbors or anything.  We just randomly both formed close friendships with these two people who happened to be brother and sister.)

Some day they’re going to call her Air Nagan.  Seriously… is this not the king of all puddle jumps?

The weird thing isn’t that Maddie borrowed a costume from one of her cousins.  Nor is it weird that she would wear it with underwear alone.  Nor is it even bizarre she should pose like this for a photograph:

The weird thing is what she thought the costume was: the Tooth Fairy.

Really.  She was very insistent about it.  The Tooth Fairy.  As if it should have been obvious.

OK, next stop: Canobie Lake, New Hampshire!

I’m not sure, but in the next picture Maddie may be saying “talk to the hand.”

It’s an expression she mislearned when I tried using it with her the night before at one point (jokingly, jokingly).

“Talk to the hand,” I’d said, holding my hand up in the familiar stop gesture.

Maddie turned to my hand and addressed it directly.

“Hello, hand,” she said earnestly.

We all howled, which must have triggered her store-and-reuse mechanism.

In the next two pictures, which are zoomed-in crops of bigger pictures, Sophie and I are in the right-most seats of the coaster.

And here we go!  (Not really.  That’s actually a different car in the picture below, but it’s where Sophie and I are headed in the pictures above.  You can just pretend it’s us.)

Just noticing now: Maddie does seem to do a lot of pointing with Hannah, doesn’t she?

Maddie wanted to go on the gondola and loved it.

Sophie and Molli Malou went on the “Boston Tea Party” — the flume ride.  Here they are on their way up.

Here they are on their way down.

Here’s the money shot.

And here they are coming out of the splash.

Meanwhile, Hannah and Maddie bonded in drier ways.

…while Molli Malou seemed to be rethinking the whole flume concept.

My next ride with Maddie was on the Canobie Express!

…which brought us straight to lunch, after which we all went over to the big pavilion in the Wild Wild West for a magic show, where Hannah got to volunteer.

Both Trine and Molli Malou love the concept of wild roller coasters but find them as practically intimidating as they do theoretically enticing.  So although it took some work to get them on the Corkscrew together, this shot of them taken moments after their having ridden it together brings great warmth to my heart.

And yes, it’s a legitimately intimidating roller coaster:

Meanwhile, after a disaster at the water park Sophie helped Maddie screw her courage back to its sticking place with a Canobie bouncy ride.

The conversation in the photo below probably went something like this:

SOPHIE: I know what I want to do next.  Let’s go on that ride.

MOLLI: You’re on your own, cuz.

What ride is Sophie alluding to?  The one Maddie is looking at.

This one:

(Which Sophie did.  Twice, I think.  Alone.)

Meanwhile, Hannah takes Maddie on a more sedate ride…

…although “sedate” probably has to be understood from my own perspective, since I’m not sure Maddie saw it that way.

Maddie’s last ride of the day was the Boston Driver’s Training Program.

And that was that!  Back to Chelmsford!

…with an evening visit from Mike MacIver and his girlfriend of several years, Leslie.

The Tedster is always so ambivalent around me…

And look!  We finally have a picture of me and Trine together!  That’s the second one of the trip!  Wow!

I’m going to copy and paste Deb’s own Facebook explanation of the following picture beneath it.

Big excitement in the Lee house when the CO alarm went off in Hannah’s room at 5:00 a.m. Windows were opened and firemen came by later this morning to make sure all was well (it is). Firemen were kind enough to pose with Danish nieces. . Hope the rest of the day is much more boring! […] I also want to add how proud I was of Hannah for how well she handled the situation. When the alarm went off she promptly carried her four year old cousin downstairs to safety before calmly waking us up to tell us what was going on (yes, all four grown ups slept through the alarm, yea us!)

Later that day, it is now safe to say openly, we brought the girls to a photo studio at the Pheasant Something mall to get a professional portrait done for Nana and Pop-Pop for their anniversary.

Not everyone enjoyed all the primping and preparing…

But for your viewing enjoyment, here are all 25 pictures taken (and edited) during that session.  (I believe everyone in the immediate family now has full-size digital copies of these photos, but if anyone else would like one or more of them, just holler!)

Waiting for the hard copies of the photos was rough on all of us.

…and that angst was later expressed through interpretive dance.

And now we’re already on our last night together with the Lees.

(We couldn’t make s’mores on an open flame, so we used the microwave to melt the marshmallows.  See my Facebook feed for a thrilling video on how that went.)

Ambivalent?  It’s like he’d play dead whenever I wanted to play!

HISTORIC NOTE: This is the first Pop Tart of Maddie’s life.

Oh no… it’s time to go.  Do we have enough pictures of the four cousins together?  Never!  Quick, take a thousand!

But as usual, the best version of my half-assed pictures is the one taken by Aunt Deb:

A teary goodbye…

And I include that picture because I have one just like it — somewhere — from about 2000 or 2001.  I wanted to post it here but am having a hard time finding it.

And I don’t want anyone feeling sad in that photo to feel bad about my having posted it: it’s part of a set, and I think the set is worth preserving because of the love it demonstrates so clearly.

That much said, the following two pictures — taken about 5 minutes after our departure — complete the set.

But let’s not dwell on sadness!  We’re on our way back to Deep River, and there are lobsters to be eaten!

And there is golf to be played!  In pajamas!

And there are s’mores to be consumed!

And Cake Pops to be made!

And photos to be staged!

And once again Linda Kaufman was kind enough to treat us to a dinner, this time at her home.

…and Maddie made this!  (Daddy helped a little with the mouth, but that was all.)

Swim trip!

Walk!

Maddie putting her thank-you note in Linda’s mailbox!

The hottest game of mingolf ever played in the history of the world!  (Seriously, what was it, 120 Fahrenheit out there?  We couldn’t even finish the game!)

And how much time did we spend playing Wii on this visit?  Bowling in particular… Molli Malou “The Spare Queen” and Maddie “The Killer” showed truly mad skillz!

We had hoped to make a visit to New York again on this trip, but decided it would be too much.  Fortunately Chris Metzger chose to visit us with his fiancée Beng.

Look at this bike.

I bought that bike at Navy Pier in Chicago the fall of 1997, not long after Trine and I first got together.  (I bought it from a tourist place that rented bikes to tourists all summer, then sold the bikes at a steep discount each fall.)  I brought it east with me in 1998 and rode it around East Haddam quite a bit, especially after getting back into shape in 2000.  But when we moved to Denmark, it was left behind in Nana and Pop-Pop’s garage.

In the course of this vacation, I must have ridden that bike close to 100 miles, riding 8-12 miles nearly every day we were in Deep River and 17 miles on my best day.  It was good as new.  It was a joy to ride.  I am grateful to Nana and Pop-Pop for holding onto it all these years, and hope they can hold onto it a few more!  (But of course they are welcome to sell it if they want to.)

I am also grateful to that bike because given how much I ate and drank, it’s probably the only reason I didn’t gain 10 pounds instead of the 2-3 I seem to have acquired.  (All weight gain occured after the reunion, so it’s okay.)

Speaking of food and weight: our last night in Deep River, Trine and I sprang for lobster rolls.  We bought about 1.5 pounds of lobster meat and made a lobster salad of our own that was fantastic.  Happily, Maddie and Molli didn’t find it to their liking, so the rest of us got tons of it.  Mm.

Time got away from us suddenly, and next thing you know: quick goodbyes were said to Nana and we were on the road.  It was very abrupt and a little sad.

But Pop-Pop not only got us through some hellish traffic on I-95 in the Bronx… he actually beat the Van Wyck!

And then it was time for another very quick goodbye…

…and then after a brief and unpleasant McDonald’s dinner at JFK we boarded our plane and flew to Iceland.  We had taken off at a little after 14:00 and the flight was a little over 5 hours long, and Iceland is four hours ahead of US Eastern time, so it was about 23:30 by the time we arrived on the tarmac in Reykjavik.

And it was like high noon outside.

We could see the sky darken a little as we ate a quick and not especially delicious meal at the airport, but by the time we boarded our Denmark flight, took off, and got back above the clouds, it was total daylight again.

So we made a whole night disappear.  Seriously.  No darkness at all for us from the time we woke up on June 18 to the time we went to bed on June 19.

…But the girls finally overcame their insomnia about an hour outside of Copenhagen:

Mormor met us at the airport, and these pictures from the Metro ride back tell the whole story:

…and you want a testament to the recuperative power of youth?  Here’s Maddie just about six or seven hours after the previous picture of her:

That’s it.

Now it’s after midnight on Saturday night.  Molli Malou left this afternoon for a week with friend Sofie at her family’s summer house.  Maddie woke up and went to bed today at relatively normal times.  So did Trine.  I woke up early on purpose to force myself completely back onto Central European Time, and have deliberately stayed up late to stay on it.  Now it’s my turn to go to bed.

Good night!