Maddie’s First Three Years, One Month at a Time

Maddie is three today. (Or tomorrow. Depends when I finish this blog.)

She’s very excited about her birthday.  She’s been talking about it for weeks.  Tonight after I read her her goodnight story (The Very Hungry Caterpillar) and she read me mine (she flips through the Golden Book of 101 Dalmatians, points to the pictures, and says, “Dog!” and “Bad man!” and “Cru-de-vil!” — and, when I start singing Cruella de Vil, “Stop, Daddy!  Don’t sing that!”) — tonight, as I say, after our reciprocal readings, I reminded her what a special day it was going to be tomorrow.

“And you will sing to me?” she asked with shining eyes.

“Of course!”

“And mor?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And Molli?”

“Yep.”

She actually sighed with happiness.

“And they’ll probably sing to you at børnehaven,” I said. “And you’ll have a cake with candles you can blow out. And you’ll get presents. And…”

Well, on and on I went, to the extent that she spent the next hour getting out of bed every five minutes to see if it was her birthday yet. So maybe that wasn’t the right strategy.

Who is she these days?

She is thirty-some pounds of iron will.  She is a candy junkie.  She is fiercely possessive, even of things that are not hers.  (Especially of things that are not hers.)  She is sometimes violent and wicked, sometimes unbearably sweet.

One linguistic problem she has is that she often assigns the wrong gender pronoun to people and animals.  She does it in both languages.  It’s not a big deal — little Mille next door was doing it up until about last year — but we think it’s our own fault: at the age of 15 or 20 months she undressed one of her girly dolls to discover it had a plastic penis (not anatomically correct in any way, but recognizable for what it was just the same).  “She has a tissemand!” she squealed delightedly.  For weeks she wanted to play with “the doll with the tissemand.”  Tissemand is Danish for, well, weiner or pee-pee or whatever.  It creeped us out, but we didn’t see the harm.  Little did we know the confusion it would cause her later.

But forget how we feel about it — how do you think the guys in the swimhall locker room feel when she points at their privates and exclaims, “See, Daddy, she has a tissemand!”

She still likes Teletubbies and Barney, but thanks to the influence of an older sister she seems to be skipping over the Blue’s Clues and Elmo phase directly into the full-length animated feature phase.  Except she invariably gets bored half an hour into any movie and begins wrecking the furniture to try and get our attention.

She is at the awkward age of not wanting naps but still needing them most days.  Just a few days ago she was acting cranky all evening, and after an early dinner she curled up on the couch with my iPhone to watch her favorite YouTube videos.  (She is addicted to Annoying Orange.)  Five minutes later she was snoring while Annoying Orange loudly and gleefully narrated the demise of Apple or Pineapple or Tomato from her lap.  It was about 6:30 in the evening.  She could not be awakened and had to be put to bed as she was.

Her tastes haven’t changed much: she’s into pasta, rice, cruidté, oatmeal, muesli, pancakes, meat, and potatoes.  She also likes soup.

She is bossy and hot-tempered, at her worst, solicitous and charming at her best. 

Her pet phrases at the moment are “I don’t know” and “Dammit.”  I take full responsibility for the latter…  she spilled her milk or something one night a few weeks ago and roared, “Dammit” and I howled with laughter.  She glommed right onto that and has been happily “Dammit”ing ever since.  Sue me.

She hates the color yellow.  Hates it.  I just learned that tonight.

She is good at coloring in the lines.  She has regressed at puzzles.  She still rocks my world every day when I come home, still rushing to the door to greet me and squealing, “Daddy!  Daddy!  Daddy!”  Tonight her friend Astrid was over, which I had forgotten would be the case, so I was surprised after getting the usual Maddie love gush to hear Maddie saying, “Say hi to daddy.  Say hi to daddy!  SAY HI TO DADDY!”

She was talking to poor little Astrid, who doesn’t speak English, and was gaping at me from the hallway, baffled by the bizarre sounds coming from her best friend.

“SAY HI TO DADDY!”

“Astrid doesn’t understand English,” I said in Danish, “You have to talk to her in Danish.  You know that.”

Maddie shook her head in exasperation, led Astrid over to the play area, and started telling her what to play… in English.

Weirdly, Astrid obeyed.

Well, it’s getting late.  I could talk about Maddie all night.  I’m sorry she’s always got some kind of bruise or scratch or something in half the pictures, but that’s just who she is: a 3-year-old girl who likes to learn about the world by smacking herself into it.

So here is Maddie Marie Kammer Nagan, the first 36 months, one month at a time. (Two from August of 2010 because I couldn’t choose just one.)

Happy birthday, Maddie!