Darker Days

When last we left off, the mood on Hybenvej was festive.  Didi was presumably pregnant, and we’d held a party to celebrate Trine’s birthday and Moster Mette’s return to Denmark under blue skies and a warm Indian summer sun.

As October deepened and darkened, and segued into a still deeper and darker November, things got, well, deeper and darker.

Things began to take a literally destructive turn with the demolition of the house next door.  It was deliberate, and carefully executed, but there is still something unnerving about having the house next door to your own razed to the ground.

Here’s a shot from the street the day after the Great Tear Down — that’s our house on the right (at top):

The chimneys were among the last things standing of Peter and Lotte’s familiar house.  (They themselves have not moved very far away — just down the street from us on the corner of Hybenvej and Søndergårdsvej.)

Here’s how the view was out our kitchen — good thing we had that new kitchen door made of glass so we could enjoy the pastoral view!

Since I was up on the roof to clean the gutters the following weekend, I had the opportunity to get a more comprehensive angle of the continuing destruction:

I was also pleased to see from my rooftop vantage point how well we’d trimmed the walnut trees this spring — they had been well above the roofline of our southern neighbor’s house: we want them to grow out, not up, to give us more privacy.  Mission accomplished.

While on the roof, however, I noticed something either weird or ominous or terrifying, depending on your inclination: strange scratch patterns that seem too regular to have made by some animal sharpening its claws, and too random to have been made by any person:

Any theories?  Because I’m stumped.

And a little creeped out.  Too much of a Blair Witch vibe for my liking (although I really hated that stupid movie).

Meanwhile, work on our new bathroom was about to begin.  We therefore declared what was left of the old showers a graffiti-allowed zone.

Maddie began with a drawing of Didi that became a picture of Didi taking a poo, that became a picture of Didi thinking of food while taking a poo, that became a picture of Maddie thinking about Didi thinking about food while taking a poo.

Me, I just labeled a couple of towel hooks and drew a shmoo.  (Maddie is on her tip-toes writing “I’m tall enough to write this.”)

Halloween fell on a Wednesday this year, but there were plenty of Halloween parties for Maddie the weekend before.  She tried a couple of different looks for her “girl who is in a hospital when the Zombie Apocalypse happens and tries to escape but gets bitten by a zombie and turns into one” makeup.

The dark and creepy look:

The zombie-with-a-side-gig-as-a-mime look:

Unfortunately, she’s the main scoring threat for her team, so locking her up in the box reduces their offensive firepower.  That’s probably why she’s only doing one half of each game as a goalie.

We bought pumpkins way ahead of time this year, but our schedules didn’t allow for carving until the day before Halloween.  Maddie had definite ideas about how she wanted her pumpkin to be (a witch flying past the moon on her broomstick), and Molli was more ambivalent: she wasn’t sure she’d have time to carve it, she said, but she really wanted to gut her own pumpkin.  (In the event she didn’t have time for that.)

And so Halloween came.

Maddie was so excited she spent the hours before dinner working out a Halloween checklist to follow:

She never checked anything off on her list, but a compulsion to make checklists regardless of whether they get used is certainly something I understand.  As a neutral observer, I can assure you that she could have checked off every item on the list.

The previous weekend, and several evenings that week, Trine worked on construction of Didi’s birthing box.

Meanwhile, work had at last begun on the new bathroom.  (The “full house” of the previous post was now further expanded to include the 1-3 contractors wandering around the house all day on weekdays.)  In the course of the period represented by this blog post — that is, early October through mid-November — I’ve probably taken several hundred pictures of the progress.  Nana and Pop-pop have been the principle victims of this habit, which is really just a continuation of the photo documentation I began last spring when we first started tearing the old sauna space apart.  I’m going to limit myself in this post to the following few pictures from the first day or two of the project.  Then next month I’ll limit myself to a handful of pictures from the end of the project.  It’ll be more dramatic that way, right?

That weekend, Trine finished off the birthing box for Didi.

Did took to it immediately.

The girls (including Moster Mette) and Morfar all went up for brunch with Mormor that Sunday.  I was unable to attend, but got photos from Morfar and Trine.

They’re all variations on the shots you see below, none of them much better or worse than any others, so I just randomly chose these two.  Apologies to the photographers if they think I chose… poorly.

As the days darkened and the temperature dropped, things found a way to get even gloomier: heavy fog settled upon the land, so even what little daylight we had found us walking around in a kind of half-light.  I took this shot at work one afternoon when it seemed to me the horizon between sea and sky had dissolved into a murky gray ambiguity — although the picture seems to make the horizon look quite clear.  (Which begs the question: why include it, Greg?)

Morten’s Aften falls around this time each year, with its traditional meal of duck.  We had duck at work in honor of the holiday, and it was quite fresh.

How fresh?

This fresh:

(Not really.  It turns out one of the kitchen staff is a hunter, and he had had a good weekend.  With some prodding from the head chef he’d brought in some of the ducks he’d bagged as a display.  The ducks we ate surely came from the store.)

That Thursday I was called upon to come in and get video of one of Molli’s handball games because the usual videographer couldn’t make it.  As it turned out, his wife did make it, and she relieved me of the responsibility of making a game video, so at Trine’s prompting I recorded the entire game focused entirely on Molli.

She played a pretty good game in what turned out to be a massive blowout — it was the highest scoring game I’d ever seen, with a final score something like 29-21 (and it wasn’t even as close as that makes it sound).  Molli took a couple of nasty spills during the game, but she’s a trouper and played through the pain.

I have no pictures of the game, because I was on video mode the whole time, but I did get a nice shot of Sven Erik (their coach) giving them a good talk after the game.

Unfortunately, Molli revealed to us afterwards that she’d really hurt a couple of fingers on one of those falls.

It hurt a lot, she said, but she was sure she’d be fine in time for the big game Sunday.

And this is where the dark and gloom and twilit days and creepiness caught up with us for real.

Molli’s pain got worse as the night wore on, but she took some analgesics and fought through it.

Her hand hurt worse the next morning, but not bad enough to keep her out of school.

For long.

At about 10:15 in the morning she called me at work, in tears because it hurt so bad.  She was at the nurse’s office and they needed parental permission to give her analgesics.  Would I send her the permission?  Of course, I said, and I did immediately.

She simultaneously texted me the photo below and called me a few minutes later to say that the nurse had given her the analgesics, but the nurse had also said she needed to go to an emergency room.

Next thing you know, Trine’s left work and scooped both girls up to Hillerød Hospital (Maddie had an appointment with the ear doctor up there anywhere, so Trine figured she could kill two birds with one stone).

By the time I got there via public transportation, Trine had taken Maddie to her ear appointment (clean bill of health, and she’s been released from hospital monitoring of her ear for the first time in her life!), and she and Molli were in consultation with the docs in the ER.

I met Maddie in the waiting room; she was playing games on an iPad and we played through a few challenges together.  Trine and Molli came out not long afterwards: there was an infection, they’d said, so they gave her some antibiotics, and a prescription for more, but the sprain itself wasn’t serious and would heal itself give some time and rest.

So we had a little family shopping time in Hillerød and even allowed ourselves to grab a very early dinner.  We were all in good spirits.

I’d like to purge the rest of that weekend from my memory.  Everyone reading this blog knows more or less what we went through over the next 72 hours.

Here’s a lovely shot of Molli from Saturday afternoon.  (That’s her BFF Selma seated at the foot of her hospital bed.)

And here’s her room on Monday:

(Funny, her spirit animal had always been the ladybug, but we have to factor the dolphin in now, too.  Unless that it’s a porpoise.  Either way.)

And just because it was so sweet, and because I digitized it in case I couldn’t deliver it personally (which I was in fact able to do), here’s Nana and Pop-pop’s card to Molli:

And her’s Maddie on Saturday night.  By this time she was the only one in the family who really had no idea at all what was going on, and so this picture of her normal happy bedtime comfort, and the picture below it of our cozy normal living room,   provided great relief to Trine, who spent every single second of Molli’s hospital stay by her side.

I was already eternally grateful to Hillerød Hospital for saving Maddie’s life with antibiotics six years ago.  That gratitude is now doubled, because no picture I’ve taken in the last five years makes me as happy to post as this one:

That’s Molli standing in the door of her own room right after arriving home from the worst weekend of her life.  And one of the worst of mine.

There are pictures of her hand–and wrist–and forearm–and upper arm–as the infection spread inexorably from the joint of two fingers on her right hand upward.  They include photos with the pen-marks made by the doctors who annotated the progress of the infection with their ballpoint pens.  They are an obscenity, and I’ve made sure none of them are on any of my devices or saved in any of our archives.  No one should have to see them, and no one needs to remember them.  So poof!  They’re gone.

Naturally this wonderful homecoming turned out to be the same day I had to make like three dozen oatmeal cookies for Maddie’s class.

You know what’s great about oatmeal cookies?  They’re easy to make, all the ingredients are readily available (and cheap) all over Denmark, and yet hardly anyone in Denmark has ever had one before.  So they’re always awed and amazed by them — with very little money or effort expended.  Good trick, so keep it in mind if you ever move to Denmark.

Molli’s return was wonderful, but it wasn’t easy:

Aw, but enough about that.  We’re done with that.  Let’s move on.

As a note for the permanent record, let me give us a reference point for next year when we ask ourselves, “how early do we put up the Christmas lights?  The answer is embedded in this photo:

The EXIF date is November 16, but I took it a day or two after Trine had set them up.  So we’ll just say: November 15.  That is when you may put Christmas lights up.

Just two more items before we get to the school pictures: First, some Didi maternity shots.  Here she is about two weeks before her due date.  (Two weeks before Molli and Maddie’s due dates, they were five and six weeks old, respectively.)

Hardly looks pregnant at all, does she?  Probably because that bitch is only carrying a single puppy.

Second item: Maddie’s birthday wish list (ønskeliste) for her birthday and Christmas, just because it’s adorable.  Also everyone please note: although Molli Malou will only allow herself to be called Molli, Maddie is becoming increasingly adamant about being called Maddie Marie:

And now to the school pictures.

First, Maddie’s 4th grade class pic.  (Only because I had to “scan it” for reasons I cannot yet declare publicly; I have not yet scanned Molli’s.)

For some reason, the photographers returned the previous two years of class photos with this years.  So you will now see their 2016, 2017, and 2018 school photos.  To jog all our ageing memories, that means these are Maddie’s 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade photos, along with Molli’s 6th, 7th, and 8th grade portraits.

So here they are.

Maddie 2016:

Maddie 2017:

Maddie 2018:

Molli 2016:

Molli 2017:

Molli 2018:

If you’d like the printable fullsize versions, click here for Maddie’s 2018 photo, and click here for Molli’s.

And that’s a wrap!

See you in December, when the bathroom is done!