The expression “breaking in,” in its sense of making something new and untested ready for regular deployment by means of hard usage has always been a little abstract to me, whatever the context. I know what it means, but I’ve never given it much thought. How precise can a concept be if we can use it with horses, baseball gloves, tools, and even human relations?
For now let’s just say the first month of 2016 was instructive with respect to that little colloquialism.
We actually begin this foray into January on the very last day of 2015. Hareskov looked very different than it had on the same date one year earlier: instead of a fairytale wonderland of snow and ice, it was dry and tidy and cold. That much said, there’s no reason to include these next two pictures from December 31, except that I love the sheer verticality of this part of the forest:
Morfar had by now departed, but Moster Mette was still with us and Mormor and Jørgen joined us for our annual New Year’s Eve fondue. It was very festive.
The whole family gathered once again for the Queen’s speech just before dinner.
Her Majesty was a little off her game this year: I’ve always enjoyed her speeches, and she was the first Dane I was ever able to understand fluently. (“The Queen’s Danish” is clear, succinct, and perfectly articulated.) This year, however, she garbled some of her phrasings, got tangled up in a few long sentences, and at one point even seemed to lose track of which card to read from. Possibly this was because of emotional duress arising from her announcement that her husband, Prince Gemal (prince consort) Henrik, would be retiring from public life. This was actual a big news bombshell, and Her Majesty has never before, at least in my time here, used the platform of her New Year’s Eve speech to deliver news: more often she uses it to gently exhort Denmark and Danes to be better, to try harder. (This year was not devoid of that, as she did touch on the migration issue.)
(“GOD BLESS DENMARK” are always the last words of her speech, in much the same way American presidents used to end all speeches with “God bless America.”)
In any case, the halting delivery and news about the Prince Gemal got me reflecting that although the girls will have grown up watching the Queen’s Speech every New Year’s Eve, at some point in the relatively near future it’s going to become the King’s Speech, and that will seem strange to me. I will become the cranky old man forever comparing the King to his mother and finding him wanting. More than any piece of paper, I suppose that will make me a Danish citizen. (And for the record, I actually like the Crown Prince very much and would take him over his British equivalent any day of the week, any week of the year. But Margrethe is going to be a tough act to follow.)
I only mention all of that because future Molli Malou and Maddie may find it interesting.
In all likelihood they will have very erratic memories of the royal speeches, and will instead remember their New Year’s Eves as a time of great family fondues and silliness.
As seen on Facebook: TRUE: the sterno was running out in one of the warmers, so I blew it out and added some more sterno. Several people brought it to my attention that some had spilled and I ought not to light it up again before drying up the spill. I couldn’t see any serious spillage so ignored them all and lit it anyway, at which point the entire area burst into flame. General panic ensued, but I grabbed a dishtowel and put it out pretty quickly. Not quickly enough to save the tablecloth, but quickly enough that there was no serious damage and dinner could resume.
NOT TRUE: I said on Facebook that “the girls would always remember the New Year’s when Daddy nearly burned the house down.” I thought it was true when I wrote it, but later learned the girls had been in one of their rooms during the episode and had no idea what had happened. (I had thought they were helping in the kitchen.)
The real trick of New Year’s Eve is keeping the little girls awake from the end of dinner until midnight. Maddie didn’t make it last year, you may recall, and Molli had to wake her and roll her out in a doll carriage to let her see the fireworks. Unless that was two years ago? Either way: Maddie has been a challenge.
Trine had therefore lined up some fun and games to keep things moving. Here we are keeping the girls amused for about six minutes with a set of “face cards.”
It’s also a tradition that the girls are allowed one bout of Silly String Mortal Kombat, which takes care of another ten or fifteen minutes.
And we buy ourselves a little time with sparklers.
…and a dozen powerful bottle rockets that produced a little more smoke than I’d expected…
And in a pinch, there’s always the Playstation to keep little minds occupied and alert.
And finally, at about 11:40, the countdown begins with “The 90th Birthday Party.” Same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?
(Same procedure as every year, James.)
And when the sketch ends at about 11:57, we cut directly to the live view of Rådhuspladset:
And then we jump into the New Year, blow our horns, and join the rest of Denmark in firing off an armory of powerful explosives. We’re a little stingy about it and don’t spend much more than a hundred bucks every year: most of our neighbors clearly spend several times as much. Writing this made me curious, so I just Googled it and learned that Danes spent about 300 million kroner, or about 50 million dollars, on fireworks for New Year’s Eve this year. The national average for families with children is 258 kroner, or about 35 bucks, so I guess it’s just our bad luck to live in an extravagant neighborhood.
We were more than pleased to have made the note about which fireworks were best in 2014; we set off three “Metallic” batteries and were very happy with the results.
Even nicer? We could all sleep in: we are now at last past the age of children waking us up weekends and holidays and ungodly hours. In fact, I stumbled wearily out in the kitchen to find Molli Malou frying up her own breakfast!
So. Now it’s officially January 2016. And it’s time to break in the New Year, as the headline and first few paragraphs of this post foreshadowed.
The first thing to break in the New Year was our dryer.
That’s the dryer on the left. Our old reliable Miele. It had been making godawful noises for months, but now it added a new twist: it no longer dried clothes. Any setting, any amount of time, and the clothing you took out was no dryer than it was when you put it in. We did everything we could to try and bring it back to life, but it had simply lost the will to live.
But January is a bleak month, financially, so we decided to hang dry our clothes for a while.
The weather was still holding at cold and dry, so in the few hours of sunlight each day we tried to get Didi some kind of exercise: one day while walking Didi down by the lake I was surprised to pass Molli Malou and one of her handball friends going in the other direction. They said they were going to run around the lake. I was impressed.
But I wasn’t surprised to see them arrive back at the house just a little after Didi and I returned: it turned out to have been a little colder than they’d thought.
Scenes from every day life: the Maddie disaster area.
I don’t know why, but for some reason I hadn’t anticipated the handball net becoming a permanent feature of our lawn. Did I expect to turn invisible when not in use? Did I think we could just fold it up and stuff it in a drawer somewhere? Obviously it was going to be permanent: I’m just surprised at how surprising I found that to be.
Scenes from every day life: the signs that sometimes pop up on Maddie’s door are something every younger sibling can probable relate to.
(Flipping the languages: “Maddies værelse. Molli may not come in. P.S. Molli gør mig ked af det.)
But all is not sadness: she is stylin’ thanks to her presents from the Lees!
Hang-drying all our clothes got old pretty fast. We decided to buy a new dryer. Of course, the washer wasn’t in much better shape: it still worked, but it was also close to 20 years old and probably didn’t have much life left in it. We persuaded ourselves that the smart play would be to replace them both at the same time since we’d probably get a better deal. And indeed, we did.
The delivery man was also the installer, and I watched with interest as he got the old units out and the new ones in and ran a little test cycle of the washer. The whole thing only took a couple of hours.
After he left, I finally ran a full load of wash. It seemed to work brilliantly, until the very end of the cycle, when Molli Malou walked into the bathroom to find it covered in a giant puddle.
Look what our genius installer had done:
That big gray pipe in the middle is the wastewater pipe. As you can see, the gray hose on the left goes into it (and as you cannot see, it comes from the washer). As you may or may not be able to see clearly, there’s a little stubby branch on the bottom of the wastewater pipe. That is where the hose from the dryer is supposed to be inserted, to take away the condensation so you don’t always have to empty the dryer’s condensation container. The installer hadn’t done that: he said it was our own responsibility to do that. Fair enough: but he took the old dryer’s hose out without plugging the hole in the wastewater pipe where it used to drain. Meaning when the water was being pumped out of the washer, it was splashing out of the hole.
It took a 75-kroner piece of plastic and about five minutes of work to install the dryer hose correctly, and there’ve been no problems since.
Meanwhile, life was back into the usual routine. Homework hygge every weeknight!
Weekend romps with Didi in Hareskov! (Yes, we finally got a little snow.)
Pro parenting tip: remind your cartwheeling children that cartwheeling with oily hands is not only dangerous, it’s also problematic for wooden floors.
“Uneasy peace:”
Molli Malou asked if we would be willing to pay her to make Maddie’s lunch every day; we didn’t heistate to say yes! She earns 4 kroner per meal, and it is worth every øre. She even puts little notes into Maddie’s lunches, and sometimes quality control surveys:
In red, from Molli Malou: “Hi MADDIE! Are you okay? Answer Yes / No . Deliver to me when you are home.” In black, from Maddie, first the checked off “No” and then: “I didn’t like my meal. Sorry. Sandwich is bad.”
They talked it out that evening and lunches have been improving ever since.
One bitterly cold, rapidly darkening evening Didi and I were entirely alone out on the moors known as the Old Golf Course. There was something so ghostly about the almost-empty trains rushing by every ten minutes…
Trine’s computer was the next thing to break in the New Year: like the dryer, it had been deteriorating for months, but suddenly it lost the ability to connect to the internet. Wifi, wires — nothing seemed to work reliably. Bad network card, probably, but an old Dell with Windows Vista isn’t worth paying anything to repair. So she got a new Lenovo Yoga 3 all-in-one: a superthin laptop with a touch screen that functions as a tablet.
…meaning she no longer needed her old piece of crap Dell. Who could possibly want such an old and debilitated computer?
Wait, wait — can it run Minecraft version 1.9? Can it?!
It can!
But even a seven-year-old can get frustrated with Windows Vista:
Good dog!
Molli Malou can sometimes be very helpful showing Maddie how to do things like search on Google and YouTube.
The football season ended for me on a sour note. Brady provided all the heroics needed, but Belichick’s uncharacteristically bad decisions made them insufficient. Moral: when you’re down by eight and it’s not your last drive of the game, you kick a field goal every time. Every time. Then your whole season doesn’t end up hinging on a two-point conversion after the touchdown Brady’s about to score here:
Unexpected surprise of the month: our old friend Rich Cotovsky is shutting down his theatre (Angel Island, right around the corner from the old igLoo) after his current production of Mamet’s American Buffalo. Without his knowing it, some of the other theatre members and friends had a big opening night surprise for him: they persuaded the city to name that stretch of Sheridan “Honorary Richard Cotovsky Way.” I’m just so happy for Rich, who deserves this honor so much that I have to include it.
Now we’re coming up on the end of the month, but there was one more thing to break in the New Year: our dishwasher.
Every time we started it up, it blew its circuit. The dishwasher was also 20 years old. It had also been making awful noises, but for years rather than mere months.
It too had to be replaced, and has been.
(If you’re playing a dead pool in 2016, be sure to include our refrigerator…)
I’ve gone back and forth on including the following series of pictures, and have only at last persuaded myself to include them because although Molli would be angry if she knew I was sharing them with anyone right now, I am confident future Molli will find the series as sweet and touching as I do.
What happened was this: both girls had been excited to wish Pop-Pop a happy birthday. It fell on a Friday, and we had all agreed on Thursday night that we would do a post for Pop-Pop like we had for Mormor back in November: it would be the new thing the girls do for relatives’ birthdays. But we lost track of Thursday evening and so we agreed over breakfast on Friday that we would take the picture as soon as both girls were dressed and groomed for the day.
The morning went pear-shaped on us and suddenly it was 7:30. Molli was out on her bike rushing off to school when I realized we’d forgotten the photo: we called her back in in time, but she was anxious about being late. Maddie was under no such anxiety and was being very leisurely about it all. This frustrated Molli Malou. I tried to soothe her nerves and failed ridiculously: I said, “so you’re a little later than you like to be… just think how much pleasure it will give Pop-Pop!”
At that the poor sensitive thing burst into tears: I had been trying to get her to put being a little late into perspective, instead I had whacked her over the head (from her perspective) with the biggest guilt trip of all time: stop worrying about your little petty concerns, you’re depriving your grandfather of happiness! Honestly, that’s how she seemed to interpret it.
She is such a trooper she sucked it all up and tried her best to hide her tears and emotions from the camera. I think her struggle was heroic, and from the best of all possible motives, and I think it’s beautiful to watch her master herself like this. I hope future Molli Malou will forgive me for sharing these pictures. Just watch yourself conquer those emotions, Molli: it’s inspiring!
(And if it’s really awful of me to have done this, someone tell me so I can delete them before she ever knows I’ve posted them!)
(So we decided that we are not going to have this be our new birthday thing after all.)
Molli Malou can do more than conquer emotions. She also likes to cook our dinners once a week: one night in January she made some fantastic pierogies for us:
Maddie has become a big fan of “DIY” videos on YouTube. She watched one that instructed her how you could soak non-toxic colored pencils in warm water for a few minutes, then use them as a kind of face paint or make-up.
My eternal gratitude to Aunt Deb for sharing this photo of Sophie with us, where it can now live forever! (I’m sure the sweatshirt has probably already found its way to some dark resting place in Sophie’s closet or bureau, never to see the light of day again.) This compensates for the Yankees cap that someone mysteriously “left behind” at our house, where it spent a few horrible weeks as Maddie’s favorite headwear…
I only just noticed the tree by the old swimming hole has finally tipped all the way over into the water. It changes the swimming hole dramatically. I’m a little sad: we have so many wonderful memories of that spot as it was. Some of my favorite pictures of the girls, and the girls with their cousins, and even Didi, were taken there. But I’m sure there’ll be great new memories as it is.
Another DIY project: grease up a cereal bowl with a little oil, fill it with a single layer of those plastic beads you usually iron into fun shapes (in Danish they’re called perler, which means pearls) and bake it for 10 minutes at about 350 degrees… and you end up with a cool little bowl for storing odd little items on your desk. The photo below is not distorted: that’s just how the little beads melted. And indeed, it made a lovely and colorful bowl for Maddie’s desk.
The DIY phase is really inspiring Maddie. I woke up this morning (Super Sunday, February 7) to find she was fully dressed and wide awake, sitting at the dining room table playing on her iPad. She informed me she had already made and eaten her own breakfast. Fast forward to later in the day: Molli is off at handball and Trine’s there to cheer her on. I’m doing a bunch of stuff in the basement on my computer (mostly prepping this blog post) while Maddie is playing with makeup in her room.
Around 12:30 I go up and ask what she’d like for lunch. She states very matter-of-factly that she has already eaten, thank you. She had one slice of toast bread with jelly, one slice of toast bread with cream cheese, some cucumber, and a glass of milk. There are no crumbs anywhere. There is no evidence of anyone having made anything in the kitchen. I am tempted not to believe her, but I know her too well to think she would skip a meal just to trick me. And tonight she informed all of us over dinner by announcing that she was going to set her alarm for 6:30 so she could wake up, get dressed, make her own breakfast, brush her teeth and hair, take her vitamin, and pack her snowsuit and boots in a bag so she could wear shoes and a nice jacket to school.
We are clearly turning a corner, and if it’s DIY videos I have to thank for it, then I thank them with all my heart.
But let’s not forget that Maddie is still a little girl: here is a note she left for the tooth fairy on the occassion of one of the eighty-four teeth she lost in the past few weeks and months (sorry it loaded sideways):
“Dear Tooth Fairy… ” [yes, she already has her father’s elliptical habits!] “It may well be that the tooth has lot of blood in it, but it actually bled when Molli pulled my tooth out. Greetings, Maddie.”
Which reminds me: that’s Molli’s thing. I mentioned before how she’s so hardcore she just pulls her own loose teeth right out of her mouth. Well, Maddie thinks that’s cool but doesn’t quite have the physical courage of her big sister (and in fairness neither did Molli at age 7), so she lets Molli pull her teeth out now. They both seem to enjoy it, but I’m a little concerned at how much Molli likes it. I may start going to bed with a protective mouthpiece.
As seen on Facebook: I won’t be attending, but it’s certainly worth noting in this, our permanent record: the 30th reunion for igLoo is taking place February 12 in Chicago. Hard to believe it’s been thirty years.
A lot of great old photos and memories have been popping up on the special Facebook group for the reunion, and I may share some of them here in the next post just to have them in the permanent record.
It’s about half past ten on the evening of Super Sunday, just about two hours from kickoff. Feels strange to be going to bed without any concern for the game, but that’s what I’m going to do now.
Great blog. I enjoy my birthday wishes even more now. AML Dad, Pop-pop