Apple of Our Eyes

Apart from the Dancing Queen video I posted last weekend, there hasn’t been any real Molliblogging in about two weeks. It’s time to get caught up.

It was about two weeks ago that Molli discovered the strange and mystical powers of knobs and handles—that you could use them to pull things open. The only thing preventing her from free access to every drawer in our apartment is the fact that most of them are too heavy for her to pull open. Which isn’t to say that stops her from trying.

She’s also become a kind of pop-up doll. Wherever she is, from time to time she’ll simply propel herself upward. If there’s nothing to lean on, she just stands there, legs wide apart, arms straining out for balance, then drops herself onto her ass after 5-10 seconds. If there is something to lean on, she’ll hold herself up until she gets bored or too tired to stand any more. This is the kind of thing we see all the time at the sofa table.

Her two walking toys, the “Micki” wagon you saw her using to such ill effect in the video and the baby carriage on loan from Nikolai og Linda, don’t get very much use as walkers. She prefers the stationary play table for that, probably because its lack of wheels lets her go at her own pace. (Either that or she just wants to wreck our floors as fast as possible.) The actual walking toys she uses as lateral supports, as you see in the photo below. This is something we see very often: Molli standing up, one hand on the carriage or wagon handle for stability, and flailing a toy around with her other hand.

(No, she did not lose her left leg, it just didn’t seem to make it into this picture. Maybe she actually was walking here. That’s the problem with trying to catch up, I can’t remember the significance of all the pictures.)

Molli’s been pretty good about sharing her carriage.

I’ve mentioned many times how much Molli loves to pull all the books from the shelves and eat them. That hasn’t changed, but her taste is improving.

In fact, as soon as she began reaching the second shelf of our bookcases, we decided to finally do something about it: total surrender. Everything lower than two feet off the floor belongs to Molli now.

If you’re reading the Almanac you know that we had our annual Kammer family picnic last Sunday. This year we ate at Mormor & Jørgen’s place—dining out on their very familiar terrace. It was a beautiful day.

Molli loved the flowers but was unable to eat all of them.

Here’s everyone at table:

It was at about this time that Molli decided her sut-chain, the wooden beads on a string that allow us to clip her pacifier to whatever she’s wearing, suddenly became her comfort-thing. It had looked like it was going to be a little towel she sleeps with, because she’d started clinging to it coming out of bed and sometimes liked to have it nearby during playtime, but out of nowhere she developed this weird dependence on the sut-chain. Trine, Mormor, and I thought we first observed this new trend early this week, but you can see in this photo she was already toting the thing around last Sunday. (She never cared for it unless she was in her carriage or stroller prior to this.)

(The black onesie was a gift from Lisa when she still lived in New York. She wanted to be sure Molli had something black in her wardrobe, lest she lose all her NY street cred.)

These days Molli will almost never let go of the sut-chain. The only way to get her to set it down is to give her an apple.

I did this for the first time within the last week or so, and she just loved holding the apple and trying to bite it. She entertained herself for a whole half hour one afternoon just holding, looking at, and trying to figure out how to eat an apple—which naturally meant thirty minutes of relative peace for me. I didn’t want to let go of that. So one day I decided to cut a little wedge into the apple to see if she’d actually be able to gum a little bit out of it. I forgot about those new teeth.

She now eats about half a fresh apple every day, completely on her own.

(Trine just came in to me shaking her head and asked if Molli had been chewing the same apple all day. I said she had. “Remember when we used to boil everything that touched the ground?” she reminisced. That’s hard to believe, but it’s true: if her sut hit the ground, blam! Into the boiling water it went. And now we let her chew on an apple for hours at a time, until it’s yellow and brown. When she drops it and it rolls halfway across the floor, we pick it up, dust it off on our pant legs, and hand it right back to her. I assume this is all according to the normal parenting curve?)

No pictures of her eating an apple, but I’ll try to get some this weekend. Instead, I’ll get back to the narrative flow: after the great festive lunch we made our way to Frederiksberg Garden and took the little boat tour.

While passing under a bridge we spotted the weird bird man again:

This is the same guy that we’d encountered talking to the cranes (or herons or whatever) a couple of weeks ago. On our way out of the park later in the afternoon we crossed paths with him yet again. He was walking slowly along a path, talking his weird bird-language, and five or six birds were constantly flying around within his orbit, listening keenly to his every word. Strange.

Anyway, back to the boat.

We’d taken the football and frisbee out of the attic to bring to the park with us. We never got to use them, but I couldn’t help seeing how Molli would react to a football the next morning. Not only did she have a brilliant natural grip…

She had the attitude to match!

The next shot was taken this morning, and was originally intended to show Molli’s dependence on the sut-chain. But that’s already been explained, so the picture has no purpose. Damned if I’m going to wipe it off the server just for that, though.

And the very last shot of the bunch was just taken an hour or so ago. It captures Molli’s skeptical half-smile very well.

(In the last two shots you may have noticed a dark smudge on her left nostril… she cut it on a fall, nothing serious.)