First Day of School, Summer Wrapup

There are no Lee visit movies yet because although I’ve cobbled some together, MovieMake crashes every time I try to compile the edited material into a single file. I’m still working on it, but life continues apace… Molli Malou’s first day of school was Thursday. Those of you on Facebook already know this, and have seen some of the pictures below, but now it’s time for… the rest of the story! (Rest in peace, Paul Harvey!)

First, for the Americans: the Danish education system is obviously different from the American. It begins with vuggestue, which translates almost literally as “nursery school” but is actually daycare from the age of 6-9 months up until the toddler is shipped off to børnehaven, which does literally translate as “kindergarten” — is in fact the Danish equivalent of the German word we use for “children garden” — until the age of about six, when the children are parceled off to nulte klasse (“zero grade”), the pedagogical if not the linguistic equivalent of our kindergarten. That is what Molli Malou is entering.

Like American kindergarten, the Danish zero grade is generally just a half day (the rest of the day is spent in fritidshjemme, or “free-time home,” where Molli Malou spent all her days in the limbo between graduating børnehaven and beginning zero grade). It involves some classes and homework, but this is very simple stuff: traffic safety, the alphabet, numbers, phys ed. Mainly it seems like the staging area where willful, anarchic 6-year-olds are socialized into little people who can subsequently be trusted to enter first grade with the appropriate skill sets.

In any case, Molli Malou enters zero grade at Søndersø (“Southern Lake” — the name of the lake we usually refer to as “our” lake) school as part of a class of 100, and they will be schooling together for the next ten years. The class is divided into four classrooms — A, B, C, and D — which are therefore referred to as 0A, 0B, oC, and 0D. Molli Malou is part of 0B, along with her neighberhood friends Sofie and Fie, and Emil from around the block (who was also in her børnehaven class).

Because there’s not much about her in this blog, we begin with a cute shot of Maddie from the big day:

And here’s the star of the show, putting on her shoes as we get ready for the walk to her first school day.

Posing in the street in front of the house, the picture that seems to make people thing we’ve timewarped Molli Malou in from the 1930s.

Along the way, we encounter Sofie and her mom, and we continue together.

Now, the first day of school is obviously a big deal for all these kids and all their parents, and the school designed it to accommodate all of us. We began with a little outdoor assembly where the fifth-classers sang a little welcoming song to the newcomers and the superintendent of the school made a welcome speech and described the zero grade program.

Molli Malou was front and center to catch all the action… well, almost front and a little right of center:

See how earnestly she’s listening!

But her attention span remains what it is…

Classroom by classroom (0A, 0B…) the kids are called up one by one to the platform.

Once a whole classroom has been thus summoned, they’re off to the classrooms where they’ll be spending the next year of their lives. In the following picture it actually looks like Molli Malou is thinking about this:

And her desk is ready for her!

Added bonus: who’s sitting beside her, but her old friend Emil — and it’s his birthday!

Here’s a shot of as much of the classroom as I could fit in one frame:

First exercise for our new little student: color in the welcome page of their little activity book!

Once they were all engaged with their activity books we got a little speech from their teachers about how the class would operate, what would be expected of us as parents, and so on, then the parents all gathered in the gym for speeches from the superintendent, the nurse (nicely enough for us, one of the two zero class nurses is Elizabeth — the home-visit nurse who checked in on Maddie), the traffic safety director, and the heads of faculty for zero class. They gave us all the info we needed to feel like we had at least as good an idea of what was going on as our children did.

And that was it! Molli Malou is very excited to be in school and we’re excited for her.

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On Thursday and Friday Trine and I painted the foyer and hallway of the house white. I have before and after pictures, but no inclination to post them. They were gray; now they’re white. You’ll surely notice the difference in pictures to come in the future.

The girls are absolutely in love with the cats, whom we’ve begun introducing to the outdoors. Charlee is a very adventurous and almost reckless creature, and we’re betting she’ll be a fabulous mouser; Emma is certainly no slouch, but she’s not quite as bold as her sister. We’ve decided to breed one of them next summer, and since Emma is the prettier of the two, in terms of coloring, and also the more maternal, she’ll probably be the breeder. They are both exquisitely patient with their tormentors — Maddie merely plays a little too roughly with them, Molli Malou injures their dignity: she’s always bundling them up in cribs, rushing them around in strollers, even taking them to “school” little where she and Sofie are the entire faculty (and the school seems to consist entirely of getting the “students” to stay in their seats). The Nintendo sees a lot less action: Molli Malou’s first choice is always to play with the cats, and only if they’re napping, or cowering under a bed or sofa, does she dig out the Nintendo that so recently occupied the totality of her attention. This morning she came out of bed into the bathroom where I was changing Maddie and said, as her first words to me of the day:

“Daddy, I really love our cats.”

Instead of rushing to us with her open Nintendo saying, “Look, look, the giant shiny fish, I killed him!”, Molli Malou is more inclined to come to us breathlessly describing the most recent feat of one cat or the other. And thanks to Hannah and Sophie, I get these updates in exquisitely colloquial American English: “Charlee was on the table, and I was like, Bad Charlee! Get down! And she did, and then she was like…”

Whatever obstacles may come the way of Charlee & Emma, lack of love will not be one of them.

# # #

That’s a lot of blogging for the past couple of weeks, and although I want to keep working on the movies in stolen moments, there probably won’t be much more for the next few weeks, maybe even a month: I have just 12 work days left at Berlingske before starting the new job at Nordisk/Egmont on September 1, where I have been told to expect the first month or two to involve a lot of travel, and Trine resumes school on September 1. Additionally, we have fallen waaaay behind on yard- and housework and will have to play a lot of catchup in what little summer time is available to us.

It’s been a lovely summer, but autumn is creeping up on us and we’ve all got to gear back up for the new normal!