In Production

There haven’t been many pictures of Molli Malou lately, I’m sorry to say. I thought there had been. I thought it had just been a long time since I’d emptied the camera, but was sure there’d be hundreds of pictures on the flash card. In fact there weren’t. There was a pretty fair amount of video, and I’ll get a video out to you this week one way or another, but there just weren’t that many photos.

I have a theory why. My theory is that Molli isn’t changing very much from day to day physically at this point. Yeah, her hair’s getting longer, but a still picture taken today just won’t look that different from a still picture taken two weeks ago. Developmentally, on the other hand, Molli is charging ahead at breakneck pace, constantly amazing and bewildering us.

This is apparently the stage of parenthood where the most frequently uttered phrase is, “Where’d she get that?” It’s most often meant in the abstract, as in “Where did she learn how to say ‘Boo?'” or “How on earth did she learn how to work that switch?” But it’s also sometimes meant very literally, as in “Where did she get that disgusting thing she’s playing with? Oh my God—is it alive?!“

Behaviors obviously don’t come off too well in still pictures, and I think that’s why we’re getting much more video than still photos these days. After all, you’ve seen her in her Winnie-the-Pooh pajamas. But have you seen her squatting in the middle of the floor saying, “Pooh! Pooh!” as she struggles to unleash the human by-product of that name? (Stupid question: of course you haven’t, since we still don’t have any video of her sudden inclination to announce the fact of her bowel movements as they happen. And frankly it’s not the kind of thing that gets me to run for the camera anyway, so don’t hold your breath. Unless it’s happening right in front of you, in which case do hold your breath. Or at least your nose.)

Molli is talking more and more, her vocabulary growing by leaps and bounds. She’ll imitate me through the first part of the alphabet when she’s in a good mood: A and B come out without a problem, C comes out kind of like “tsi,” D is fine, E is fine, then it all goes to hell on F. And if you try skipping to G or H things don’t get any better.

She’s learning colors. If you ask her which is the red one, for example, she can distinguish it (whatever “it” is) from other similar objects of different colors. She can even sort of say red, blue, green, orange, and yellow, although it’s not quite clear what language she’s working with in any color except yellow, which is clearly very bungled English—actually it sounds more like Hawaiian. “Wallayi” or “lawayo” or something. (Miles away from the danish gul, though.)

She’s eating with more and more independence. She’s finally figured out some of her more “complicated” toys: she can stack and unstack sensibly now, instead of just gleefully knocking over every pile that presents itself. She’s more and more interested in being read to. And she seems to be developing some kind of empathetic sense: yesterday I threw her doll around a little too aggressively and Molli seemed to become concerned for her well-being. She took the doll away from me and hugged her closely.

Anyway, all of that’s just my way of apologizing for the dearth of pictures… and whetting your appetite for the video to come. So without much further ado, here’s what we’ve got.

We had St. Morten’s Eve dinner hos mormor and Jørgen last weekend. St. Morten was the humble 16th century priest who was so humble that when he learned he had been nominated for election to a Bishopric, he hid in a barn or something. Everyone ran around looking for him but no one could find him, and just as they were on the brink of nominating someone else, a bunch of geese in the barnyard started honking and directing attention to his hiding place. As a result, on the first anniversary of his elevation to Bishop, Morten declared that everyone should slaughter and eat a goose. The tradition gradually evolved to permit the consumption of duck. Molli, we have now learned, loves duck. Here she is with a drumstick:

And here she is getting ready to root for her favorite football team in an important divisional contest last Sunday:

Actually, that was about twelve hours before kickoff. We had some time to kill before the 7pm games, so we visited the zoo again on Sunday. I like this picture from the “bird path,” but wish it showed just a little more of her face. It’s hard getting used to the winter outfits again—Molli’s just going to look like a blob of bright textiles in most outdoor pictures from now through May.

We showed her the reindeer and tried to explain their significance. She wasn’t interested. Maybe certain little girls in Massachusetts would like to see what reindeer do toward the end of their offseason?

The brown bears were extremely active and photogenic. Molli was engrossed.

This rooster popped up out of a bit of shrubbery in the middle of one of the paths. Probably the same rooster Molli chased around on one of our earlier visits.

The iconic zoo tower is under construction. That’s Trine and Molli in the lower left.

Molli not only likes being read to now, but she’s also fond of flipping through books on her own. (Average attention span per book she “flips through” on her own: about fifteen seconds. Average life span of book she’s permitted to “flip through” on her own: about twenty. The window of intervention is narrow!)

We’ve just started putting her in this Chelmsford hand-me-down. She’s adorable in it, so add these shades of blue and green to the list of her colors. Also, we haven’t feathered her hair or anything: it was just very gusty when I snapped this shot.

That’s it. I know it’s not much, and I know I was probably just trying to make it feel like more by stuffing those stupid animal pictures in there, but that’s really more or less all there is. The video will come out soon!