Dec, Jan, Feb…

Christmas Eve. Christmas. New Year’s Eve. Snow days. Fastelavn. School play. Trine’s Graduation. These are events that have come and gone in the past 2½ months, and astonishingly enough it has indeed been 2½ months since the blog was last updated with serious photographic bloggishness.

It is now a spring-like Saturday evening. All three girls are tucked in their beds and snoozing away, but I have poured myself a liberal scotch and am giving myself some alone time with the computer to get us caught back up.

Without any further ado, then — we have no time for ado! — let’s set the wayback machine to late December and pick up where we left off.

This year Molli Malou picked out the tree — the biggest we’ve ever had, over two meters tall and damn near as wide — and was the ornamentalist-in-chief.

I loved how she and Maddie kept running to the box of “special” ornaments, fighting over them, and each declaring that they had found the best ornament of all.

They did a wonderful job.

And once the tree was decorated, we hung the stockings upon the chimney (with care).

Meanwhile, in the thick of the Christmas season Maddie was sent home with Nisse Lise (“Lisa the Elf”), who had to spend a night with us and have her activities chronicled in a paper that Maddie then contributed to the børnehaven book about Nisse Lise’s adventures.  Good thing we had nissengrød for dinner that night!  (Er… I mean risengrød.  I mean… porridge.  It’s elves’ favorite dish.)

You recall Molli Malou wanted to be a veterinarian for a while, and then switched to wanting to be a “people doctor.”  Well, at some point this winter she changed to the more noble calling of “fashion designer.”  Here she is modeling a dress she made out of an old duvet cover.  (She just asked to borrow a scissors one night, then disappeared into her room and came out twenty minutes later wearing her new dress.  No worries about the duvet cover — it was torn and we had been about to throw it out the week before, but Molli has always liked playing with fabric so I’d given it to her.)

The only sad note in the story is that after modeling her dress proudly for us she went down the hall to look at herself and suddenly began wailing.  I rushed to see what was wrong, and the whole thing had fallen apart and was gathered around her ankles.  “Everything I make falls apart!” she shouted.  “I can’t make anything!”

I realized then that instead of safety pins or needle and thread, Molli Malou had stitched her Værløse original together using adhesive tape.

I introduced her to the concept of safety pins, and not long afterward she was able to pose as you see her in the pictures above.

There was snow on the ground for a couple of hours one morning a few days before Christmas Eve.

Here’s Molli Malou lighting the last advent candle.

And here are the girls making konfekt — sugary confections of chocolate and marzipan.

Hey, Maddie, wear this hat and let Daddy take a picture.

Christmas Eve came at last.  We realized this year we have actually established some traditions.  There is, for example, the playing of the video communiques from Santa, who miraculously knows everything about the girls and even shows pictures from their year in his video.

Christmas (Eve) Dinner is hardly our own tradition: we do the whole Danish shebang.

And when it’s time to whip up some heavy cream for the risalamand (sp?), the girls are asking to lick the blender attachments as soon as they see Mor taking the cream out of the fridge.

But silly me… I’m chronicling Christmas as if it has anything to do with anything other than children opening presents.

Another tradition we have is that after all the presents under the tree have been unwrapped, we manage to find a clue from Santa that kicks off a whole treasure hunt.

The end of the treasure hunt invariably produces a DVD, and when we play it we see actual Santa coming into our actual house while the girls are asleep on Little Chrsitmas Eve and hiding their presents.  Molli Malou was suspicious this year that Santa was really Daddy, but the DVD Santa left cleared that right up: as Santa came out of the chimney, there was Daddy sleeping on the living room couch.  And later in the video you could see Santa looking in on Gert and Trine.  So who else could have been wandering around our house in the middle of the night?  Doubts dispersed!

Christmas morning, and Maddie woke up saying “Want to ride my new bike!”

Later in the day we had to try out Molli Malou’s new clay-sculpting kit.

And the girls danced on through the holidays…

Gert’s last day of the season with us was December 27, so the night before he made us a dinner of the fanciest and most spectacular smørrebrød I’ve ever had.

This New Year’s Eve we wanted to impress our new American neighbors, so we spent a little more money than usual on an insane assortment of pyrotechnics and I spent a good chunk of December 31st building a launching pad.  I was pretty proud of it, and it’s now in the garage awaiting deployment next year.  (I did use nails, but the duct tape was to make sure the nails held up against the force of the rockets.)

Molli, Maddie, Lillian, Frank, and Gabriel were given some silly string to shoot off in the New Year.

And hey, wow, it’s finally 2012.

And it’s like Molli Malou has subliminally picked up on the global financial situation: her first act of 2012 (the morning of the 1st) is to build her own house.  And occupy it.

As occupiers, of course, the girls had to be Anonymous.

I should mention that Molli Malou’s dress was actually hand made by Maria… some fashion design inspiration for our budding fashion designer!

Not every picture has to be explained.

Look!  Molli Malou laid an egg!

Ha ha… no she didn’t.  She just couldn’t wait to build the first snowman of 2012.

Such pretty girls!

And now we’ve reached the biggest milestone of the season: after six years, Trine finally receives her diploma and becomes a licensed physical therapist!  (The camera ran out of batteries, so most of the pictures from the event are on our phones.)

Now we fast forward to Fastelavn.  Once again, it’s a cold rainy day and we have to put up with it to whack the cat from the barrel at Værløse bymidten.

I love this next shot.

I’ve already posted Molli’s entire performance in the first-grade play, but here are some still shots.

The following photo is actually a detail from a larger picture that I almost deleted, until I zoomed in and saw how proudly Molli was looking at me.  (That’s Sofie to her immediate left.  Well, our left, her right.)

This was the biggest snow of the winter.  I write that in early March, when of course there could come more snow, but I’m hopeful winter is more or less over.  We had two weeks of bitter Arctic cold and one major snowfall…  I’ll take it.

The first schoolday after Fastelavn, all the kids are encouraged to wear costumes to school.

Do yo not adore them both?  Molli Malou won five prizes at her school for her costume, including “most original costume.”  Which I think is uncool, since it’s a store-bought bridal dress and a store-bought set of angel wings, but who am I to argue?

That’s it for pictures, and since it’s now past midnight that’s pretty much it for me as well.

Molli Malou lost another tooth a couple of weeks ago.  Trine has already found a job and starts Monday (technically she began employment Thursday, March 1, but her first day at “the office” is Monday).  Both girls have had a weekend with some kind of crazy barfing bug, and all three girls are coughing like mad with some kind of bug right now.  Other anecdotes and developmental markers have of course taken place, some of them already documented in text form previously, but I think it’s fair to say we’re caught up now.

I hope you’ve enjoyed catching up, and I apologize for the horrible delay!  I assure you there will be more updates before another 2½ months go by!