Go-Gå Girl

She’s been walking more and more, and today she just went over the top. I came in from the kitchen into the dining room with my coffee and breakfast this morning and Trine stopped me in my tracks.

“Look, look!” she said.

Molli was standing in the living room, holding onto the television stand for support.

“Gå til mor, skat,” Trine urged Molli with a big smile. (“Walk to mommy, honey.”)

Molli smiled back at us, but seemed to be waiting for something more.

“En, to, tre!” Trine urged. And sure enough—one, two, three!—Molli came stepping toward us. She made it three or four steps before she dropped onto her bum. It was exciting, but it wasn’t all that unusual. What was unusual was that Molli looked up at us and said what sounded like, “gå! gå! gå!” (Gå is the verb for walk and go.) Or maybe it was just “go! go! go!” Hard to tell.

Anyway, we did Molli walking tricks for the next half hour or so. At that point Trine and I were sitting on the couch watching the news. I was finishing my coffee. Trine had just gotten out of the shower. Molli was trying to kiss the television or something, standing in front of it and pressing her face against it as she sometimes does.

Trine and I were just talking to one another about something we’d seen in the news, I think, when suddenly Trine seized my arm and pointed. I glanced over where she was pointing. Molli had taken three steps away from the television and was standing in the middle of the living room floor, smiling at us. Even giggling. We smiled back but were still holding our breath—it’s rare to see Molli go more than 3-4 steps at a time and we wanted to see if she could go a little further.

She took another two steps, teetering a little, and squealed with pride. We squealed right back at her.

She took another step, then another, and now she was veering a little away from us, and another step, and another, and by the time she finally plopped herself down she’d covered most of the width of the living room. Only about 6-8 feet, but she’d easily taken 10-12 steps and it was unquestionably her true maiden voyage as a walker. The little 3-4 step sequences she’d been doing all weekend suddenly seemed ridiculous in comparison. Had we called that walking?

She made little walking trips all day. Never so many as that big maiden voyage, but often making as many as 6-8 steps. More importantly, she now makes 3-4 step journeys so frequently we don’t even clap and cheer wildly when she does them.

Her first words can also now be chronicled. There are two words she says, and one word she recognizes and kind of says.

The first word, we must now concede, is apparently mad, pronounced by Molli as something like “mel” (which is how the Danish word sounds to me, even though I know it’s not quite how the soft d is pronounced). If she’s hungry, Molli says m-m-m-mad. She’s been doing it for a long time, months, but we weren’t sure it was a word or what. (Or if it was maybe mor, or mom, or some other thing.)

Now we can also add gå, or go, which she clearly associates with the act of walking. (Which is why “gå” is more appropriate than the English “go.”) This word has only popped up in the last week or so, but it’s only today that it became absolutely clear to both of us that Molli knew what the word meant.

The third word is tak, or “thanks.” Molli doesn’t understand all the weird usages of the word, obviously, but if you hold out your hand and say “tak,” slowly and clearly, she’ll hand you whatever she’s playing with. She will frequently then stretch out her own little fingers and say “ta’.” And you had damn well better return the favor!

She’s also starting to make the classic international “uh-oh” sound, but her usages can be kind of weird. Sometimes it’s exactly right: she goes to pet the cat, the cat runs away, and Molli goes, “uh-oh!” Or she tries to pull herself up on a chair, it tips a little, she falls down on her bum—”uh-oh!” But sometimes it makes no sense it all: she picks up a piece of paper, say, or picks up a Cheerio off the floor, and says “uh-oh!” with great relish, a big smile on her face.

She still laughs at her own sneezes but is already better at blowing her nose than I ever was.

She’s also begun entertaining herself in ways that are entertaining to us, for us, if that makes sense. For example, she was amusing herself with her little blue plastic bucket at one point this morning when she noticed we were watching her. Then she began putting it on her head as if it were a hat, letting the handle swing down over her face like a too-short chinstrap, and making funny faces at us to see what kind of reaction she’d get. (You can imagine.) Or this evening, with Trine lying on the divan in the living room, Molli wandered over to the foot of the thing, squatted down so Trine couldn’t see her, then sprang up suddenly and laughed uproariously at Trine’s feigned surprise. Naturally this only improved with repetition. Eventually she added a variation in which she’d pull the cover over her head, then pop up, then pull the cover off her head.

Also, in the past two days I’ve found she loves stick pretzels and can be bribed out of almost anything with one. The easiest way to get her to walk, I’ve found, is to hold out a pretzel just a little beyond her reach, then sort of tease her along with it. (Unfortunately this is also how one trains a dog, and it feels kind of demeaning to Molli, so I’ve had to stop myself from doing it.)

I think that’s a pretty good textual catch up on where she’s at in the 53rd week of her life… hopefully that compensates for the text Blogger stole yesterday.