Learning to Crawl

There’s been a lot going on over the past few weeks, but not so much picture taking. (Relatively speaking, anyway. In fact I can remember a time when 51 pictures in 2-3 weeks of “just normal life” would have been excessive and extremely expensive.)

My one-week home vacation ended and we kicked back into “normal life,” a phrase that requires scare quotes since it seems like every day introduces a new normal.

Maddie has been eating more and more solid food, growing like tomatoes (I know the usual growth simile is weeds, but based on the success of our tomato plants this year I have to say I’ve never seen anything grow with such alarmingly aggressive exuberance as a tomato plant). She giggles a lot — so much that I’ve taken to calling her Giggles. She has several giggles at her disposal:

1. The monosyllabic, I’ll-be-damned “huh!”

2. The broad smile accompanied by a hey-that’s-kinda-funny “hunh-hunh!”

3. The uncontrolled, rapid fire-release of “hnh-hnh-hnhs,” emphasis on the final syllables, usually expressing delight, intense amusement, or devilish curiosity in some new stimulus.

She can also howl like a banshee when she’s unhappy, and can have hour-long (or longer) fits of intractable, inconsolable, irreconciliable misery that are not much fun.

With the introduction of solid food earlier this summer we noticed she seemed to be digesting better, so we have very slowly, very cautiously lowered her lactalose (the regular administration of which has been the only real reminder of her difficult arrival). She was taking 9ml per day at one point — the maximum dosage for infants — and we have worked her down to 1ml per day and have just now decided to suspend it all together starting tomorrow. The girl who once went weeks between her poops, even on maximum laxatives, now cranks them out at her pleasure. One day last week she crapped four times in a day. It sounds strange, but tomorrow will actually be the first day of her life, I think, where we give her no medicine at all. (Vitamins yes: the D and the Iron, but no medicine.) Everyone say cheers to that!

But her most impressive development has been her scooting. She’s still not actually crawling — or wasn’t until tonight, after I’d unloaded the camera, so that video will have to wait — but she scoots like a madwoman. (A legless madwoman with Herculean arms and abs of steel.)

I’ll post the video of that — of her creeping and scooting and even tonight’s preliminary crawling — tomorrow. Or whenever I get to it. (This shouldn’t be a chore, it should never be a chore, it is just part of how I share the joy (and horror) of being a father thousands of miles away from my family and so many friends. So it has to follow my whims or I’ll start thinking of it as a job and begin to hate it.)

In keeping with the notion of not letting this become a pain in my butt, I will not even bother to arrange the photos, already uploaded and tagged into the vast space below me in this Blogger composition box, into chronological order. I will take them as they come. And it’s going to be fun.

Most of you know I got a new phone and I love it. Molli Malou insisted on being the subject of it’s first picture.

The following pictures from Molli Malou’s børnehaven “Sommerfest” (Summer Party) were posted to Facebook, but I don’t think all of you are on Facebook yet. (Slackers.)

This one wasn’t.

Last weekend the girls spent the night with Mormor and Jørgen. They were so adorable when we came to pick them up Sunday afternoon it was unbearable: Molli Malou was sitting on a bench by the tennis court making little bouquets while her friend Anton from the third floor stood beside her rocking Molli Malou’s toy pram back and forth and calling Dolly “a naughty little baby.” She hardly registered our arrival.

Maddie had apparently just fallen asleep in the portacrib on the terrace, and did not register our arrival at all. But behold the face of utter innocence — and those tiny hands!

I guess we’re just dealing with phone pictures — this is Molli Malou “meeting” our new car on the lot of the dealership.

And this is Molli Malou astounding us at a little entertainment thing they had at Bymidten the other day. The pictures say more than I can. (This is the same girl who’s scared of the baby rollercoaster at Tivoli.)

No lie, she was about 25-30 feet up or higher. No fear, no worries. The only anxiety I could read from her was she she repelled down (honest to God) and kicked off too hard with one foot, so that she spun a little and bonked her head and shoulders against the — what the hell is that thing, anyway? — against the surface of the thing. She was low enough by then that I could grab her foot to stabilize her and stop her spinning, and she came down quite merrily from there.

Weirdly, she was too afraid of some bouncy slide thing to even try it.

Scale vertical pillar 30 feet into the air and repel down: check.

Play on a bouncy thing? Hell no.

Ah… I see we’re up to the real camera. Here are those pink bagels I’d foolishly promised Molli Malou and finally delivered on.

The dough:

Boiling away:

On her plate:

I love my girls!

Maddie with cucumber:

Cucumber and bagel half:

Big sister is jealous of Daddy always taking all the pictures.

And here is day 1 of Maddie beginning to creep and scoot:

I love the next picture, which I took at Nikolai’s 40th birthday party:

I chopped down the Rowan tree that blocked so much sunlight from our office.

I remain proud of myself for cutting down a tree. I’d never done that before. I’d like to do it again. I must have included the following shot to show how high it went:

Yeah, but look at it an hour later!

And 20 minutes after that!

Remember all those pictures of our growing potato plants? Success! (And this is just a small sample of our yield.)

As for the felled Rowan tree. . . it was bearing its berries, which Trine gathered once they were easy to reach.

Ever have Rowan berry jam?

…neither have we, nor will we ever.

Here is Maddie with her first ever smørrebrød:

And some pics requiring no explanation.

Trine taught Molli Malou how to use a calculator to add 1 to any number:

But she still needs a little help sometimes.

The new car in its new home:

Scooter McGiggle in a hat selected by her big sister:

And there we are! (Thank god… it’s later than I meant to stay up!)