Danish “Summer”

It’s been the last couple of weeks of August, which ought to have meant a couple of sweltering weeks of cloudless summer to end the season. Unfortunately we still live in Denmark, so it’s been cold, rainy, and overcast.

The Lees’ birthday gift arrived a few days after we got back from Italy, and Molli Malou was thrilled. She loves her Snow White dress and wears it regularly.

She’s also very excited about her new sleeping gown.

The nightgown makes her look a lot more grown up. With new maturity we enter a more creative phase in her craftsmanship. Here is “Alphabet Soup.”

She and Liam are interacting more directly. On one recent visit to Tivoli, they greeted one another by alternately embracing, whooping in delight, shrieking, jumping up and down, and laughing uproariously.

The performance lasted about five minutes, and probably would have lasted longer if Molli Malou hadn’t paused to yank a plant out of its pot.

She remains profoundly curious about everything. After shuttling Oliver back down from Morfar’s house when we got back from Italy, the “kitty carrier” remained in our kitchen for a few days because we were too lazy to haul it up to the attic storage space right away. One evening Molli Malou was suddenly nowhere to be found. . . but the carrier was suddenly strangely placed in the middle of the living room.

A few Saturdays ago — the 18th, I guess — we took Molli Malou to Frederiksberg Garden for the most solemn event of her little life: it was time to surrender her sutter (pacifiers) to the Promise Tree. There was a flea market in the parking lot outside the park, though, so we had to park some distance away. Since it was a Saturday, there was the usual crowd of wedding parties in front of the Town Hall, and one happy couple was apparently planning on leaving their civil ceremony in style. Molli Malou was enraptured by their car. (We all were, but I love these shots of her.)

I think the next one deserves to be an album cover. Maybe if the Stray Cats hook up with the Rugrats to make a comeback album?

So here we are on our way to the tree. In case you don’t remember about the tree, here’s a link to a Moron’s Almanac blog I wrote about it.

Molli Malou’s suts are wrapped in a plastic bag, tied off with ribbon, along with a note I helped her write to the tree: “Dear Tree, Please take care of my suts. I am a big girl and don’t need them anymore. Thank you.” (Words to that effect, anyway.)

Such a solemn march. Molli Malou has rarely looked or been so serious.

At last we were upon the tree, whose boughs are now sagging with the weight of the thousands of suts. . .

We let Molli Malou choose her branch.

And I secured the pouch per her specifications.

And there it hung. . . a baggie of goodies that even a few days earlier we couldn’t get through a day without.

Do you see the wistfulness?

The next words out of her mouth were, “I want a present now!” Yes, we’d promised her a gift as a bribe. We went to Fætter BR and bought her a toy store, complete with UPC reader, conveyor belt, and microphone for price checks. It’s her favorite thing in the world now and apparently she’s even playing store a lot at kindergarten.

“Price check on milk!” she roars into her microphone.

“Milk’s a dollar forty nine a gallon,” I roar back.

“Milks a golla-bore-a-nimun gallon!” she broadcasts in response. (She’s not real good with big numbers and wouldn’t know a dollar if it bit her in the bum.)

She still wakes up desperate for her sut some mornings, but she’s easily distracted with a cup of juice. She doesn’t even think of it when she goes to bed at night.

There’s a store beneath my workplace that sells design furnishings often at a big discount. I spotted a cool design lamp that I thought would look nice in our living room, and when I told Trine about it she thought it sounded nice. When I told her it was 85% off the usual price, plus an additional 10% final clearance off even that reduced price, she told me to buy it immediately. So the next day I did.

You have to put this thing together yourself, so they thoughtfully include a model. Here’s the successfully assembled model in the palm of my hand.

And we were looking at the model, and then at the size of the pieces in the box, and we became curious as to just how big the lamp was going to be.

“How big was it in the display?” Trine asked.

“Big,” I said.

“Too big?”

“Just big. It’ll look good.”

Here’s how it came together.

And the winner is: too big.

But because of its clever modular assembly, we were able to “rebuild” it as two smaller lamps, so we not only got a cool design lamp for the living room, but a nice replacement for the rice-paper sphere in our bedroom.

Fotunately the electrician that inevitably had to come and fix the circuit I’d shorted out with my amateur electrician antics only charged 500 crowns (about $90) per hour for the couple of hours it took, so we still managed to get our new lamps at a slight discount.

Sigh.

Molli Malou is completely computer enabled now. It was as we thought: the v-tech video game system we got her for her birthday somehow actived the necessary synapses to get her to finally grasp the concept of a computer mouse, and she now plays happily for hours on oline.dk. She also likes an Elmo alphabet site whose exact address escapes me.

But she is a curious little girl and has managed to somehow modifyTrine’s computer’s system settings in some very interesting ways.

Last Saturday we decided to make homemade pizzas. Here she is watching Trine make the dough early in the afternoon.

Molli Malou felt the knead to joing in.

It was a lovely bonding moment for mother and daughter.

And later that day, I got my own chance to bond with the making of Molli Malous own pizza. (Liam and his parents had come to join in the pizza-making fun, but Molli Malou and Liam were a little prickly with each other, and I never did get a good shot of them together.)

The next morning we took the train up to Bakken, our first visit there this summer. There was a charity race for kids and Molli Malou was up for the run of her little life. Before the race, the kids raced around the Bakken mainstage at John’s goading, playing with their balloons and shrieking with excitement, absolutely clueless to the fact that we are about to make them all run a full kilometer at full tilt.

But soon enough Pierrot shouted “Go!” and the kids were off! See Molli Malou run!

She hauled ass for about two-thirds of the distance and we were very proud of her. Then she demanded to ride my shoulders the rest of the way. I didn’t run, and in fact pulled a Rosie Ruiz by cutting a corner to catch up to John and Liam, who had obviously cheated to have gotten so far ahead of us in the first place. I set Molli Malou down about twenty yards short of the finish line, and she bolted across it and was awed to receive a medal for her efforts, from Pierrot himself!

She and Liam compared medals almost immediately.

She was rewarded for her efforts with an afternoon of rides. Mormor and Jørgen were up at the park as well, and we took turns loading Molli Malou into one kiddie ride after another. She had a blast.

She is dressing and undressing herself with alarming ease, and enjoys changing clothes frequently at home. We’re hoping she’s not as quick to doff her duds at kindergarten—no complaints from the pedagogues so far, so maybe we’re okay there for the time being.

She has mastered the art of the somersault and likes to dance around the apartment singing, “Shake Your Booty.” When she concludes her dance she expects applause, and will tell you to clap if you aren’t already clapping.

She asks why of virtually everything, but is relatively easy to please. Pretty much whatever you say in response to a why question, she’ll not sagely and say, “okay.”

Trine tells me that Molli Malou has become very assertive in kindergarten. We had worried she was developing into a blushing violet whose only initiative was to follow other children’s leads—something that struck as odd given her parents’ more—er—particular personalities. Not to worry, grandparents: you stand avenged. Like her parents before her, Molli Malou apparently knows all and is not afraid to inform others of the wrongness of their ways. (She is particularly keen on enforcing rules. If you tell her not to do something, it is taken as understood that no one else of any age ought to do it either, and that Molli Malou is a kind of universal deputy in charge of ensuring the rule remains unbroken.)

She is learning her ABCs by sight, now, and only seems to have problems recognizing Es and Ss. Some Learn-by-Phonics flash cards I got at Walgreen’s last April are helping enormously, but she also has some logical lapses in how spelling works. Told that “G” is not only for Goat (as on the flashcard), for example, but also Greg, she will sometimes react to a G by proclaiming, “G is for Daddy!” With the same reasoning she has determined that “T” can be for Mor.

I’m especially sad to report that she seems to like rap. Not just old rap, like her old man sometimes plays for her (although she sure enjoys Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This”), but modern awful gangsta rap. When we heard it on the radio in the car before I used to say, “Ew, Molli Malou, stinky music!” Which worked, to the extent that she calls rap “stinky music,” except that she asks to hear it.

“Play that stinky music, white boy!”

On that rap note I’ll call it a wrap.