“The Famous Molli Malou!”

Believe it or not, those were the words of the consular officer when we shoved all our paperwork under the bullet-proof glass of the bomb-proof consular offices of the deeply entrenched U.S. embassy on Dag Hammerskjoldsvej:

“The famous Molli Malou! Is this the girl I read about in the New York Times?”

“It surely is!”

And so we filed forms DS-240 (Consular Report of a Birth Abroad), DS-11 (Request for New or Replacement Passport), and DS-110 (Request for Social Security Number), along with our own passports, birth certificates, marriage certificate, my own certification of divorce, Molli’s birth certificate and naming certificate (along with two photocopies of each of the foregoing documents), and a self-addressed, stamped envelope with 51.50 crowns worth of postage. We topped it all off with an 857-crown processing fee.

Net result: Molli should be Americanized within 10 days to three weeks.

Meanwhile, back at home, unbeknownst to us at the time, Molli’s Danish passport had arrived in the mail. So she’s fully Danomated, also.

On top of it all, but a propos of nothing, at 3:30 this afternoon it began to snow although there wasn’t a single cloud overhead. (There were clouds in every direction, but none overhead.) It snowed Hollywood-style bb-sized pellets for about twenty minutes before petering out. The sun was setting, and where there were clouds they were the color of old bruises. I don’t know why I mention that. Maybe just to etch the day into my memory just a little more deeply.

It’s illegal to photograph the embassy, and my camera was embargoed at the security screening, but I had managed to snap at least one shot as we approached, and before I was within the control radius of anyone in a uniform:

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen one of those so gallantly streaming!

The next picture has nothing to do with any of the previous stuff. It’s a picture with a purpose. The purpose is to share (1) Molli’s bald spot, and (2) Molli’s flying ears (flyvende ører)

The poor girl’s ears are just getting bigger and bigger. My own childhood traumas are rushing back to me vicariously. It doesn’t help that Trine says the people up at work call Molli “mini-Greg.” The one wish I could ever have for a daughter would be that she not look like me. Hopefully she’ll grow out of it. Trine’s been told that infants tend to look more like their fathers when they’re first born as a sort of evolutionary paternity policy. It sounds kind of half-baked, but I’m latching onto it for Molli’s sake.

God forbid I leave you with that clunker of a photo, though. Flying ears or no, she’s still a doll…

Also, Lisa mentioned in either an email or a post or a comment or something—Christ, maybe even a postcard—that she think’s it’s cute how Molli so often looks like she has a mohawk in these photos. And it’s true. I’d often noticed how the hair on the top of her head seemed to be emphasized in our pictures, but I’ve seen her too much in the real world to see the pictures as they’d appear to someone who hasn’t seen Molli in person, or hasn’t seen her much. Suffice to say, Molli’s hair is pretty uniform all around her head except for that bald spot in back. (Is there a special name for infants’ bald spots? “The sleep spot,” maybe?)

Anyway, we ought to have her passport, SSN card, and whatever kind of an American “birth certificate” they give you within a month. That’s the main thing.