Creeping through September

It’s been a very, very busy month to this point. Maddie is thundering along in her development, getting more and more curious, expressive, mobile, and human by the hour. Her hair is coming in at last, as I think the pictures below illustrate. Molli Malou is becoming more secure in her own little life, gathering more friends in the neighborhood and getting more enjoyment out of børnehaven.

Click on this first image to start opening or saving the movie (50MB, wmv format) of Maddie’s recent progression from inertia to creeper to scooter to sometime-crawler:

(The girl actually does wear clothes most of the time, but she’s had a bit of a struggle crawling in her clothes because our floors don’t give her any traction.)

We’re asking more of Molli Malou by way of housecleaning, and though doesn’t quite have the enthusiasm her cousins showed at her age, she’s getting to be a good sport… and I think she likes doing “grown up” things when her sister is watching.

Maddie gets traction out in the yard, so Trine tries to get her out there whenever the weather allows it. I often come home from work to scenes like this:

She’s also getting better at sitting up, even if it’s a work in progress. (Trine’s not actually holding her up in most of these pictures, even though it looks like she is.)

We planted 6-8 tomato seeds this spring and have been harvesting them all summer. One day alone in early September we took in over ten pounds!

Some pictures, as usual, have no particular purpose I can recall other than the radiance of their subjects.

In early September we made our last Tivoli trip of the year.

It was a special day because from noon to one p.m. they handed out tulip bulbs and let you plant them in the center tulip bed. I’ve now been in Denmark long enough that I’m no longer surprised by things like people being willing to stand in a line to plant a tulip.

Maddie came along, of course, but she wasn’t old enough to plant a tulip.

Here’s the spot where Molli Malou planted hers. Very helpful, don’t you think?

Before you mock me, though, I also held my phone right over the spot where she planted it and recorded the exact location on my GPS thing. We may not find the EXACT tulip, but at least we’ll be able to find the right area.

Molli Malou enjoys the new kiddie ferris wheel so much the joy just oozes out of her.

The weird thing about this day in Tivoli was that horrific-looking storms were roaring over Sjælland without dropping a single raindrop on us. (We were sure we were doomed but I could actually access the weather radar on my phone and see there was no precipitation headed toward us, doomsday clouds be damned.) I thought these clouds looked especially dramatic over the train station, as seen from the ferris wheel. But in the shrunk-down version they lose some of their menace:

Looking down on the planes Molli Malou has always loved so much:

And looking down on Trine and Maddie from about the top of the ferris wheel (they’re the ones to the left of the bush in center: Trine is sitting on the bench and feeding Maddie in the pram).

Molli Malou insisted we get a shot of the two of us together, and I’m glad she did, even if it’s not exactly flattering.

We had to wait about twenty minutes for an airplane ride, and Molli Malou was aghast. (Though she was happy enough to ride it, as you can see.)

What do you think of the no-bangs look?

We’d all grown so used to visiting Tivoli on the odd Tuesday or Wednesday that the crushing crowds and long lines of a Sunday afternoon were too much for us. After the airplane Molli Malou announced the lines were too long and she didn’t want to wait in any more of them, so Jørgen offered to treat her to an ice cream while Mormor had a moment with Maddie.

…until Trine took back over.

See, it’s crowded:

…and then the dogs came. It was dog day at Tivoli, or something: the one day a year dogs are allowed in the park. At one point they all marched through in a parade, a very long parade, with all the dogs grouped by breed.

We have fallen in love with white shepherds and that’s probably the breed we’re eventually going to go with. (I don’t think they all have the big Gremlin ears of the sample below, though.) They’re supposed to be great with kids, they don’t shed much, they’re fairly bright, and like most shepherds their instincts are to herd rather than attack or defend.

Trine painted Molli Malou and Mille’s faces one afternoon.

You’ll get more of this in the video, but it’s the first time Maddie ever pulled herself up to a full standing position on her own.

We’ve started removing everything but books from the bottom shelves, but there are already signs the next level of shelves will have to be cleared out very soon, too.

This is just a shot looking down on Molli Malou’s play table. Innocuous looking toys until you start wondering what a 9-month old might do with them.

The rest of the pics are yard stuff, really more for Trine and me as a record of what we’ve been doing and when then anything exciting for others.

We had a horticulturist come and look over the yard to give us some advice and guidance. She was worth her fee and gave us a lot of great ideas, while also providing us with some good information about our existing plants.

This ungainly thing, for example, can apparently be cut down to about a foot off the ground, or even less, and will then grow no higher than the top of the shrubs next year: I’d been hacking it down to the shrub-top level every spring, which is why all the growth had been occurring above the hedge line.

Crew-cut time!

I also trimmed the hell out of the big evergreen hedge separating the yard from the carport.

Before:

After:

It was sort of a bad haircut… it’s all sparse and spindly now:

We also got the emotional permission we needed to rip out anything we didn’t like and just grass it over this fall. So we were finally able to clear out the southwest corner of the yard with a clean conscience: the square of dirt you see below had been a huge tangle of shrubs and flowers. By grassing it over, there’ll be a nice little square of yard, almost a private nook, defined by the wall of the garage, the hedge, and the apple tree. So we can get a new bench and have a nice little spot to chill out in the shade next summer.

I get to hack down huge trees and shrubs… poor Trine has to go after the little annoying weeds.

Doesn’t it look cleaner and opener already?

We’ll be clearing and grassing over around this area, too.

She also gave us ideas for the “jungle” in front of the office, the evening terrace outside the pool, and the long line of hedges and berry bushes along the eastern edge of the property. This past weekend we spoke to our neighbor to the east and we’re going to get together for coffee this weekend to figure out what we can do preserve our privacy without such monstrous thick vegetation as we have now, so heavy that we get virtually no light at all from the eastern side of the house.

That’s all for now… our busy season is finally drawing to a close and there should be much more time for more frequent updates in the months ahead, especially once my next leave starts at the end of next week. (Two of those three weeks we’ll have Nana visiting.)

NO, WAIT! I was cleaning up my email right after I posted this and remembered I wanted to post pictures Vibeke had sent me of Trine’s birthday dinner. No time for further commentary, just a whole slew of pictures.