Into September

Sorry for the lapse between posts. I’ve been a little extra busy these past two weeks. For one thing, Molli’s getting wilder with every day and now that she’s down to one nap a day there isn’t much extra time for blogging—and when there is, I’m often too exhausted to feel up to it. She’s entering the Crazy Monkey Phase.

Here you can see the devious little chimp risking life and limb for. . . what? A better view out the window? A chance to grab and smash the candleholder?

Her objectives aren’t always clear when she climbs things. She just has to climb. And what cannot be climbed can be scaled:

(The baskets she’s reaching for there have now been moved to a secure location. We’ve now lost the third level of shelves. It won’t be long before she figures out how to move furniture around to climb even higher. I don’t imagine there’ll be much point in even owning any shelves come October or November.)

Molli isn’t always happy, obviously. I don’t usually go for the camera when she’s crying, but I thought for once I ought to. After all, this isn’t the Happy Molli Blog. Molli’s only human (more or less), and to share her with you properly I suppose we ought to show all sides of her. So here’s a weepy moment from about a week ago (I don’t remember why she’s crying—probably we’d just relieved her of some dangerous plaything):

We’ve been having some kind of Indian summer this week (Viking summer?), and one afternoon was so warm we decided to take Molli up the street to the public wading pool. Here’s Trine lathering her daughter in SPF 5000:

And here’s a shot of me walking Molli along in the pool:

(We have to watch her carefully around the water, because she’s been learning to dive and dunk at her Wednesday swim classes and has a tendency to dive on a moment’s notice.)

She was a little disappointed with the temperature of the wading pool…

But seemed to enjoy herself anyway.

After the wade we dried her off, dressed her, and brought her to the playground of the same little park (Langelands lejeplads). I bring Molli to this playground almost every day… it’s one of the best around for her particular age.

The ring thing, above, is on some kind of ball bearings, so the plastic ring whirls around on its tilted frame. Molli loves it, but gets dizzy. So does her father. One day this week while we were there some 10-11 year old boys were playing on the thing, trying to outdo each other by standing and even walking on the ring as it moved around. Molli was mesmerized. She stood a few feet away, transfixed, and gaped at them until the last of them had fallen off and given up.

Of course there’s always ging-gang:

The next picture is from a couple of days ago. It’s from a weird angle and she’s got a strange expression so I thought it was kind of fun. Maybe not. I don’t know.

Our building had its big annual yard sale (loppemarked, which is literally “flea sale,” even though I think this wasn’t the kind of thing we’d call aa flea sale in American), and Trine scooped up some clothes and three exciting new toys for Molli: a wooden rocking-horse, a little baby stroller for a doll, and a little plastic house with a locking door full of plastic numbers and letters that can be pushed through matching openings on the sides of the house itself.

She has a hell of a time opening the house—in fact she can’t, since the key is too much for her to manage. Her instinct with the stroller was not to push her doll around the house, but to throw the doll to the side, climb in, and fall with a very painful thump on our hardwood floors. (The stroller is now hidden away for later deployment.) The rocking horse, however, has been a huge success.

(That’s from this morning.)

Here’s an adorable closeup of Molli on her horse, in which you can simultaneously see how much she’s enjoying herself and the atrocious haircut her mother and I inflicted on her earlier in the week. (We wanted to get the bangs out of her eyes.)

Later in the morning we decided to take her to the zoo again—this time to the children’s part of the zoo. I thought I’d get a shot of her in her carseat, since it was (mostly) a present from moster, who hasn’t seen it yet (I don’t think):

I was impressed by the children’s zoo. It took a very practical approach to the animals. Here, for example, is a display the like of which I don’t think I ever saw when I was growing up. A sign to the right of the display explains its purpose: it’s called “What Do We Get from Our Animals” or something, and each hatch opens up to a window through which you can see some of the products we get from the animal painted over the hatch.

You can see Trine observing that cows give us milk here (although a child might conclude we also get glasses and cardboard cartons from cows):

And here’s Molli about to learn that cute little bunny rabbits give us hassenpfeffer, potatoes, gravy, and ceramic plates:

The best part of the kids’ area, I thought, was the goat pen. There were just dozens of goats, laid back and utterly imperturbable (possibly drugged? how could they put up with all that?), swarmed by kids of all ages.

I think the goats may actually have been too dull for Molli. She preferred climbing the logs that lay scattered throughout the area.

Weird girl—in a pen surrounded by goats, the most interesting thing she can come up with is to play with a stick:

There’s only one more day of “practice” vuggestue, then Molli has her first full day on Tuesday. 7-1/2 hours. And again Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. That’s thirty free hours for me this week. I solemnly promise a full account of the first real Vuggestue drop off on Tuesday.

We’re still taking lots of video, by the way, but I don’t know what to do with it. I’ve tried emailing a lot of you the videos I promised to email, but they came back because your mailboxes rejected them as too large. I don’t know what to do.

Yes I do! I’m going to make some space on JustMorons, then I’ll just name all future movies the same name: mollimovie.avi or something. That way old links won’t become roads to nowhere (which is what would happen if I just deleted movies after I posted them without going back and deleting the links). The only thing is, you’ll have to download each movie before I post the next one.

ørv… Jeg sagde at jeg ville skrive på dansk hver gang, og her står jeg (sidder jeg, i virkelighed) og ikke et ord på dansk hertil! I må undskylde… men jeg mangler tid for at skrive mere. Næste gang! (Den sødeste gang, ikke? Man har altid en næste gang for at forbedre…)