Hannah!

It’s the evening of July 12 as I write this, and Hannah has only arrived back in Chelmsford a few hours ago.  There are 158 pictures below, so let’s get going.

(It’s the evening of July 14 and the morning of the 15th as I edit and publish this, and Hannah has already published 38 photos from the trip on Facebook — I’ve been scooped!)

Hannah arrived the afternoon of June 29, which was also Molli Malou’s last day of first grade.  I picked her up at the airport in the middle of a doomsday thunderstorm that she had just flown through and we no sooner got home than we headed out to pick up Molli Malou and Maddie at their institutions.

For some reason I didn’t bring the camera along, but as soon as we got back to the house I was all over it:

In a lot of ways that first picture is perfectly emblematic of Hannah’s and Maddie’s relationship for the whole two weeks: little Maddie almost literally smothering Hannah with love, and Hannah not minding it all too terribly much.

Hannah toughed it out without a nap, playing with her cousins until she finally crashed.

While Hannah slept off her jetlag that night, I happened to mention that Hannah knew how to play a bass.

Maddie and Molli Malou decided they should learn a musical instrument while Hannah slept and then surprise her with their mad skillz when she woke up.

Hannah got up at a surprisingly normal hour, considering how sleep-deprived and jetlagged she’d been, and we all passed a very mellow Saturday together letting Hannah restore her senses.

Sunday morning we decided it would be fun to go to the zoo.  For some reason Molli Malou resisted the idea, until I went to the zoo website and saw that a giraffe had just recently given birth.  They had a video of the birth on the website.

(I have quite a few pictures of the collective reactions to that video, and have chosen only to include the one where neither of my own daughters appear to be on the brink of vomiting.)

So we were off to the zoo!

You may have read stories about that tiger… one of three at the Copenhagen zoo who would make news just a week later… but that story has not been discussed, nor will it be, in this house.

I have chosen not to include any pictures related to the “Love Is In the Air” / “Let’s Do It” vibe the animals were all exhibiting that day — there wasn’t a sentimental flea exhibit so I can’t speak for them, but I assure you that sea-lions do it, butterflies do it, and even Iberian parrots do it.

Quite noisily, dramatically, and flagrantly in the case of the sea lions.

But I got video of that…

Molli Malou was aghast at the sight and sound of the sea-lions in flagrante.

“Oh my god, Daddy, look!”

I was terrified — what horrendous question was I about to be confronted with?

“Daddy, look — they’re playing trains!”

I hadn’t seen that one coming.  I was hugely relieved for a moment — then horrified.

“You don’t play trains at school, do you?”

“No!”

“All right, then.”

Anyway, back to the zoo:

Here’s the giraffe whose birth had made our visit tolerable to Molli Malou:

You can barely make it out, but there’s a reason Hannah is posing here:

Let’s zoom in on that locker behind and to the right of Hannah:

When we got home, we broke out the Kuub game.

On Monday we made our first trip into Copenhagen.  Our primary target was the little mermaid.

Molli Malou refused to pose with the mermaid because — and Hannah will have to back me up on this — she was appalled that Ariel had forgotten to wear her seashells when posing for the statue!  (She also thought it looked like Ariel had feet instead of a tail.)  We begged and pleaded, but she would brook no compromise and simply hopped around on the rocks while we took our mermaid pictures.

In fairness to Molli Malou, it does look like Ariel is more leggy than taily, doesn’t it?

Our visit with Ariel over, we walked back up Langelinie.

It was on this walk that I got my first lesson in the impossibility of getting the
three of them to pose for a photograph without at least one of them looking bizarre, bored, or angry.  The following three shots are
the best from a series of about 25 photographs taken within a 30-second period.

Sometimes it was just easier to photograph them when they weren’t looking!

We kept walking along the same trajectory, which eventually brought us to the royal residence of Amelienborg.  We could see a crowd had gathered, but we had no idea why.

We found out quickly enough!

It was the changing of the guard, and the spot we had chosen turned out to be right where the departing guards would march through on their way out.  You’ll see that in the video.

From Amelienborg we went straight to Marmorkirken, the Marble Church.

And then back along Kastellet to Langelinie.

Hannah read her cousins their goodnight stories almost every night.

She was such a popular reader that the girls often insisted on “sharing” reading time with her.

Once the little girls went to bed Monday night, Hannah helped Trine and me prepare the house for Molli Malou’s real birthday.

And Molli Malou was so excited the morning of the big day that — well, that the first thing she did was wake Hannah up: “Hannah?!  Are you awake?  It’s my birthday!”

Of course, in the real world it was just another Tuesday, so Trine had already left for work.  She had left Molli Malou a sweet note, and Molli Malou loved it.

(I forgot to mention that waking Hannah was the second thing Molli Malou did upon waking.  The very first thing she did was spring up, bounce across her bed, snatch a notebook off the wardrobe at its foot, and hand it to me saying, “Daddy, in case I get tired tonight, you have to remember and show this to Mor.”  And “this” turned out to be a note that read — in almost flawless Danish — “Mor, I am sad you can’t come to my 8th birthday.  Loving hug, Molli.”  I explained to Molli Malou that although Mor was in fact already on her way to work, of course she would be joining us at Tivoli later — and she was overjoyed.  The poor thing had misunderstood us and thought her own mother was going to miss her birthday celebration!)

Maddie was lucky enough to have some presents waiting for her as well!

To celebrate her birthday, we went to Tivoli that afternoon for a few hours of amusement rides and then a rib dinner.

On the morning of the 4th, Hannah helped Maddie with a special hairstyle.  (Shh, don’t tell, but those are Hannah’s rubber bands for her braces that she used to make those four pigtails!)

It was the first real summer day we’d experienced since Hannah’s arrival, so we made it a beach day!

To mark the holiday — which Danes insist on ignoring — we had a barbecue dinner of burgers and dogs and chips and corn on the cob and watermelon.  We ate outside and played Fiedler conducting the 1812 Overture: it was our little Danish Esplanade.  And for our fireworks, Hannah and Molli exploded two whole boxes of those little snap things that go POP! when you toss them on the ground. 

The weather turned back into the usual Danish summer blahs the next day.  Hannah and Molli Malou did the big puzzle the Lees had given Molli for her birthday.

And we made a trip to the olde fishin’ hole.

(Consulting notes: really?  That was our big activity for a whole day?  Wandering three hundred meters down to the lake for a twenty minute fishing expedition?  Really and truly?  Ah yes!  Now I remember!  We kept making and adjusting and canceling plans because the weather was so spastic: we would get torrential rains and start trying to figure out something indoorsy to do, then the rain would clear and the sun would shine and we’d start trying to figure out something outdoorsy, and then it would change again, and then it was time for lunch, and then, and then… and so it went.)

The next day was less meteorologically ambiguous: it was cool, and it was pouring.  So we went to the Experimentarium.

And the day after that — a Saturday — at Hannah’s request we made the miserable journey to the California-sized hellhole known as Sweden.  In the rain.

What a Dane thinks of Sweden:

Since we’d gone to Helsingborg on Hannah’s last visit, and since Malmö is possibly the most boring city on the European continent, we decided to take a shot on Lund, a town dating back over 1000 years.  Its centerpiece is a pretty magnificent cathedral.

We were all surprised to see the Dannebrog in one of the naves.

Fortunately, our surprise was not unanticipated: they had a sign explaining its presence (or, given its peculiar grammar, maybe I should say “explaining it’s presence”).

(If you don’t recall the legend of the Dannebrog, refresh your memories here.)

Apart from the cathedral, Lund was, like most Swedish towns, rainy and boring.

(Hee hee…  I kid because I love.  It was a fun trip that we all enjoyed.  But it was rainy.  And it was Sweden.)

Our big adventure on that Sunday was a bike ride out to the strawberry farm further out in Værløse.  This is the same strawberry farm where the world’s best restaurant — Noma — gets all its strawberries, so you know these are some quality goods.  But it was really all about the bike ride.  (Except for the part that was all about the berries.)

The day got surprisingly warm — and for only the second time this year I was asked to set up the sprinkler in order that it might be jumped through.  Or cartwheeled through.

The rains came back on Monday, with a vengeance.  We couldn’t make our mind up what to do, so finally for want of anything else to entertain us we decided to hit the local mall (Ballerup Centret).  It’s only a 10 minute drive, but Maddie managed to conk out on the way.  She’d been so cranky all day we agreed I should just sit with her in the car for 20 minutes — to make it a real nap — while Hannah and Molli Malou went into the mall without us.  It was Molli Malou’s first trip into a mall unaccompanied by a legal adult.

We got smoothies.

Great vacation pics, right?  “Here’s Maddie asleep in her car seat.  Here are the three cousins having a smoothie in a mall.”  Sorry!

But wait… it wasn’t all malls and smoothies!

The preceding series was just additional evidence of the previously postulated hypothesis that three cousins cannot be coerced into simultaneous, relaxed smiles — with open eyes — when being photographed.

There were some fun photos to be had on the train trip home, however…

And believe it or not, the next day was Hannah’s last in Denmark!  The weather was awful, with a forecast for continued dreadfulness, so we decided to spend it indoors (mostly) by visiting Frederiksborg Slot up in Hillerød.

I couldn’t get the girls to pose together, and in fact gave up entirely on my own daughters.  While Hannah posed very nicely for some photos, Molli Malou and Maddie went to war against each other in the background.

I’ve posted this one on the blog before (when Nana made her visit), but it’s worth reposting here in order to prepare you for a picture to follow.

Eventually Molli Malou and Maddie tired of the tour.  There was only one floor left to explore, but they had had enough.  Hannah wanted to press on and complete the whole tour.  So we agreed that I would take Molli and Maddie down to the basement, where all the kiddie activities were located, and that Hannah would finish the tour on her own and meet us down there.

I ended up taking Molli and Maddie down a winding stone staircase I wasn’t supposed to have used.  It led absolutely nowhere.  So we were down in the bowels of this 700-year-old stone turret when suddenly the noon bells began chiming so loudly that we realized the turret we were in must have been the clocktower itself.  And in a freaky coincidence, a huge bolt of lightning struck at that exact moment and the thunder exploded all around us.  It was like something out of a horror movie.  And once I calmed Molli and Maddie down, I comforted myself with the thought, “Well, Hannah’s probably up on the top floor around a million other tourists, not stuck in some weird ancient gothic turret like us — she must be fine.”

Only later would I learn that Hannah was at the top of the tower, utterly alone!

Ah, memories.

Back to our photos:

Why I rest at night without fear of burglars (that’s right, in the kiddie activity center they let kids try to reproduce the pose of their medieval king in the portrait above):

Hmm… maybe I should post that on Facebook as a caption competition?  Here are some starters:

“I said more ice cream, Daddy.”

“Turn it back to Blue’s Clues nice and easy and there won’t be any trouble.”

“Are you sure there aren’t any gummy bears left?”

It was pissing rain by the time we left the castle.  Since it would be Hannah’s last lunch in Denmark, we let her decide where to eat.

“Somewhere with fries,” she said.

We drove about in Hillerød looking for any of the millions of places where fries could be ordered.  We had to pass the first place we spotted because I drove by its parking lot before we noticed the restaurant.  At the next intersection I couldn’t tell which way to go.  None of the three available directions looked promising, and a u-turn was out of the question.  Then I noticed a highway sign with what looked like a shining sun on it.  It was pointing left.

“Let’s follow the sun!” I exclaimed.  Everyone agreed that was a good idea.  We’d all had enough of the lousy weather.

The sun sign told us to take a right at the next intersection.  Then another right.  And suddenly I realized we were on the big highway out of town.  And that the signs we’d been following didn’t have suns on them, but daisies.

“Oops,” I said.

And then we stumbled across the Danish restaurant where Hannah would eat her last Danish lunch of the visit: that iconic showcase of Scandinavian cuisine: McDonalds!

It was a predictable McDonalds lunch and we were all grateful for it, right up until Maddie climbed up into the slide tubes and got too scared to come down.

It took about ten minutes of coaxing, persuasion, coercion, bribes, and blackmail before we were finally able to get her to come down.  At which point she exclaimed perversely, “I did it! I did it!” and scrambled right back into the “up” tube.

But this time, with a little support from Big Sister, she made a successful slide down.

And suddenly it was our last night together!

…and the sadness began to creep in.

I woke up at 4:45 in the morning, woke Hannah at 5:00, and we reached the airport before 6:00.  How awesome does Hannah look for a 15-year old awakened at that ungodly hour?

And that was that!

The movies will follow later this week.