Blossoming Flowers

The bad news that due to a bum knee I’m unable to do much with the gorgeous weather that seems to have settled over us this past week. The good news is, that gives me time to get caught up on the blog.

Not that we’re very far behind. The last update already brought us into April. The weather was finally starting to turn, and the days were getting longer. By now we’ve reached the point where Disneysjov Friday evenings aren’t huddled in a darkened living room with a roaring fire, but enjoyed in the full light of day.

We made our first trip to Bakken, which was covered a little on Facebook.

We had a hunch Maddie would enjoy the elephant ride, which was the first one she’d ever taken (last year). Here she is pining to get in, first in line. (The sign says: “Kindly wait for an employee.”)

She looked a little apprehensive or anxious at first:

But that didn’t last long:

In fact, when the ride ended and I went to remove her from her flying elephant, she began screaming, grabbed the steering wheel with all her might, and hunched herself over it so I couldn’t get to her fingers to pry them off. It was embarassing with all the other parents in line with their kids waiting for their turn to have to spend three minutes peeling Maddie out of the elephant against her will — but only until I saw the faces of the parents as we finally left, and I could see the smiles of indulgent understanding.

Molli Malou was cautiously adventurous. She knew she wanted to ride the kiddie roller coaster, but she wanted to build up to it. So she tried some other rides first to acquire the necessary courage.

I’m not sure she enjoyed this one even half as much as her mother did:

I took both girls up in a flying and rotating basket that stupefied them into nervous smiles once we achieved our cruising altitude of twenty feet.

And I got to join Molli Malou on the swan… I think we have this exact same shot of Nana and Hannah:

At last it was time for the roller coaster. Would Molli Malou stand up to the challenge?

Mission accomplished!

And I happened to take a bad shot of Molli Malou as she bounded giddily toward me after the ride, but just before deleting it I realized it was a great documentary shot of her gap-tooth smile. (Half of it, anyway.)

…and of course every trip to Bakken ends with ice-cream.

The day after Bakken, Gert and Yasmine departed for Portugal, which meant it was time to begin the game of musical bedrooms. First, what had been the office and then Yasmine’s room was transformed into Molli Malou’s.

That meant Molli Malou’s former room could be transformed into Maddie’s.

Our own master bedroom — the gigantic suite we called “the apartment” — was by now our bedroom, our office, and home to the queen-size guest bed. It was a little cramped.

…and would have to stay like that for a week because I’d run out of time to move things around. Meanwhile, getting ready for bed one night, Maddie has her Taxi Driver moment–

You lookin’ at me?

Huh? You lookin’ at me?!

I don’t see anyone else here, so you must be pickin’ my nose…

Ah, life is easy in the retrospect of photographs. Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, a weekend of back-breaking work is behind me and I have lovely pictures of our new bedroom… the former gym. (The gym equipment is now in the giant room, which will henceforward also be our office and spillover guest room. What used to be Maddie’s room will be the single guest room, but is for now just the place where we stashed all the furniture we didn’t know where else to put.)

Molli Malou settled quickly into her new room.

The last work day before Easter break, the entire family came in to work with me to have breakfast in Nordisk Film’s cantina. (I would have loved to show them off to my colleagues, but I was one of about seven people in the entire company who hadn’t taken the day off.)

One of the great pop-culture icons of Danish cinema is “The Olsen Gang” (Olsen banden), a group of comically inept criminals from a series of movies mostly in the 1970s. (An animated adventure of theirs came out last Christmas.) To fans of the movie, one of the great objects is this safe… which Trine, Molli Malou, and Maddie were allowed to try and crack.

It won’t seem like a big deal to Americans, but you have to imagine having pictures of yourselves behind the wheel of the General Lee, for example, to get a sense of the significance. (And silliness.)

Then I took them on a little tour of the lot.

And when I got home that night, it was time to start preparing for Easter!

We woke up to such fantastic weather, and with forecasts for so much more of the same, that we decided it was time to finally stain the deck. So the first thing we did on the first morning of the first day of our Easter vacation was: shopping trip to Silvan!

But it was pretty urgent… the deck was two years behind and badly in need of some help:

A couple of days later:

So enough about the deck. Back to the girls, and the weather.

On Easter morning the girls had to contain their excitement: Daddy laid down the law that there would be no looking for eggs or any other Easter activities until Mor was awake. (Maddie woke up early from habit and Molli Malou woke early from excitement.) To try and appease them a little I let them open the Easter presents from Nana and Pop-Pop.

(I’m assuming their excitement and the fact that they both wanted to wear their new outfits immediately tells the story by itself.)

Unfortunately, the Easter Bunny had not been very cunning: he had just plopped two big plastic eggs full of candy in a spot where Molli Malou was able to find them before she’d even been told of the possibility of their existence.

The next hour while we awaited Trine was a special kind of hell. “Can we have our eggs yet?” “Not until Mor’s awake.” “Can we wake her now?” “No.” (Repeat every four to five minutes with increasing urgency.)

At last, however, the hunt was on!

We had Easter lunch at Vibeke & Jørgen’s.

…where Molli Malou became so bored after the meal, while the grown-ups sat around talking, that I finally just handed her the camera and said something sweetly paternal, like, “For god’s sake, will you shut up if I let you play with the camera?!”

The worst thing about parenting by grumpiness is that it’s so effective it could much too easily become habit forming. She took the camera with glee and was happy the rest of the afternoon.

And now as soon as Maddie gets up from her nap we’re taking the girls in for the first trip of the year to Tivoli, which opened for the season last Thursday.