Early Summer

Here we are again! We’re just three days from our biennial trip to America, so I want to get everything caught up in order to relax about this for a while — so the next post will obviously be the many fabulous pictures of our fantastic voyage to America!

(I’m simultaneously uploading all our 2013 photos and videos to date onto our NAS so that they’ll be available for sharing while we’re in the states.  And backed up to the cloud in case our house is robbed while we’re gone.)

But it’s late, and really I just want this off my to-do list, so let’s get rolling.

First: the first half of June brought us a welcome respite from the uncharacteristically (even for Denmark) frigid month of May.  How better to celebrate than by toasting marshmallows over an open fire?  Neighborhood girls Fie and Mille joined the fun.

It’s stupid, I know, but I’ve found I like having random pictures of the yard included in this blog so that as time goes by we have a reference for how the yard looked at various points in time.  Here, for example, we see how the Snow Cloud tree is still not fulfilling its mission of blocking the neighbors’ second-floor patio as late as June 2013.

Here, too.

Sommerfest at Maddie’s børnehaven!  The evening kicks off with a choral arrangement.

Maddie is just so into it!  And that’s Harald from down the way to her right (our left).

First order of business once the party kicks off: face-painting.  Like her sister, this amazing ball of kinetic motion is nothing but patience and submission when  she believes she’s being pampered with make-up.

…but she’s a little more skeptical.

Molli Malou always has to have her birthday parties either before or after the summer break.  This year we opted for before.  Trine and I worked overtime to get the house set up right for a disco-themed party for 13 second-grade girls.

And the payoff was worth it!

Yes, the above shot was more or less the one you saw on Facebook (if you saw it on Facebook), but what I meant to explain there and never did is that we let the girls put together their own DIY lagekager.  That is, each girl got three pancake-sized layers of sponge cake and was then given the opportunity to “dress” it with condiments of their choosing: strawberry sauce, strawberries, bananas, chocolate, sprinkles, et cetera.  To make the single-serving-size circles of cake, however, we had to punch them out of larger cakes; unfortunately, we forgot to put candles in Molli Malou’s self-made cake, so we took the punched-out remnants, stuck candles in them, and voila!

The following evening Molli Malou rushed out of the house with Fie, grabbing one of the party-supply boxes as she fled.  An hour or two later she returned to — well, no, she didn’t return.  A weird robot stopped by the house, said “beep” and “doot,” and rushed off, never to be heard from again.

This past Saturday we celebrated Molli Malou’s birthday yet again.  Here’s a shot of a weary-looking Molli Malou eyeing the scones that served as appetizers for her Danish family birthday dinner.

She livened up quickly, though!

As did Maddie!

In the picture above, the white package with the red bow is Molli Malou’s big present for the year (maybe the decade): a brand new laptop computer.  Once she opened that, she spent the rest of the evening playing Minecraft on it.  Eventually she’ll be doing homework on it, we hope, but for now it’s just a great source of Minecraft and Netflix enjoyment.

Maybe we should have got her a damn pony after all.

Sankt Hans Aften fell on a Monday this year.  We were very busy, but wanted to take the girls to a witch-burning anyway.  In the event, we ran out of time and panicked: they were full of anticipation, what could we do?

We built our own witch!

And put it in our own outdoor fireplace!

And we burned her ruthlessly!  (No pics of that, sorry: only video, and as you all know by now, video is something that merely gets promised for the future.)

Now we’re caught up on pictures.

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I was also going to make some notes for the permanent record — Molli Malou’s difficult experience with but great results on her first standardized tests, Maddie’s ear status and forays into writing, and so on, but then I’d have to stay up longer.  Instead I think I’ll just wrap this up, post it, check it off my list, and see you all here again on the other side of our vacation!