March Madness

March didn’t come in like a lion this year. It came in like a drunken sailor. A one-legged drunken sailor. With rabies.

It was another one of those months we experience so regularly but without becoming used to.  It was, therefore, just another month.

But first we have a few pictures left over from February.  For example, another photo stolen from Facebook of my new favorite street in Chicago (come on, show of hands, how many of you had a close friend get a street — or, as in this case, even just a particular leg of a street — named for them in one of the world’s great cities?):

Aunt Deb put this up on Facebook and I loved it so much I stole it onto my phone.  (She posted it in March but since it’s date-neutral I thought I’d frontload it with the February stuff.)  This photo is a crash-course in metaphysics.

We saw Zootopia in 3D!

…And yet another neighborhood house is being torn down for rebuilding.  Didi was furious at this tableau: she barked madly and whimpered with her tail between her legs at the sight of the giant dragon monster with its jaws clamped around an innocent dumpster.

Which brings us directly to our closer neighbor’s house.  I took a picture of its development nearly every day and will continue until it’s finished.  I’m going to leave the pictures in their chronological order rather than jam them all into one sequence; it’s a fun way of noting the passage of time.  (I won’t bother commenting on any of the other pictures.)

The first picture of March is hopeful: the first little blossoms of spring were poking up out of the cold earth.

Oh — just to be clear, this is not the house on Hybenvej, this is (or was) the house with the dragon in the dark, from above.

I adore Maddie in pigtails.  So do you.

And here’s Molli posing for a casting shot.

Maddie at work:

Maddie has really matured a lot in the past couple of months.  She’s started the process of making her room more mature — she spent hours cleaning it several weekends in a row, and she generated about three huge lawn bags of toys and dolls we were given permission to store in the garage and perhaps, eventually, give to charity or the dump.  She sets her alarm every morning (though often sleeps through it) and lays her clothes out before going to bed most school nights.

She’s maturing in other ways, too, and her intellect continues to explode.

I took Didi for a romp at the Old Golf Course one windy afternoon; the long yellow grass was undulating like the sea.  The photo doesn’t do it justice, but here it is anyway.

AS SEEN ON FACEBOOK: My New York absentee ballot — yeah, the “digital one.”

The Didi romps don’t really require much commentary, do they?

Ex-stepbrother Uffe’s 40th birthday was celebrated with a big party down at Jesper & Gitte’s in Sydhavn (“South Harbor”).  We took the girls down to Mormor’s on the train, en route to the party.

And here’s the 40-year-old in the flesh, addressing us all at his party.

His mother gave a touching speech…

… his brother gave a touching speech …

… his aunts gave touching speeches, his wife gave a touching speech, I think one or two of his cousins may have given touching speeches.  It was all very touching.  And speechy.  Hard to believe Uffe’s 40, I think he must have been around 21 or 22 when I first met him in Chicago.

Maddie’s songwriting continues apace.  We find her songs lying around all the time.

Ah yes… Daddy got a new toy for his birthday!  And permission to open it a little early, since I was going to be out of town on the day itself.

I know it’s not a proper unpacking sequence: after the above photo I just got too excited and spent the next five or six hours getting it all configured.

Maddie is experimenting more and more with make-up.

And her fascination with DIY videos is unabated.  Here is our (failed) experiment in making our own soap.

My official employee photo for PensionDanmark.  God how I hate it.

One afternoon a propos of nothing Maddie suggested we go for a bike ride to the black playground.  Even more unusual, Molli asked to come along.  It was actually a golden moment, one of those surprising little times you get with your kids that remind you how great it is to have them.

Ah, March 15, 2016!  My fifty-first birthday!  I was up at 3:30 in the morning, in a taxi at 4:30, and on my way to Amsterdam by 7:00.

DFDS Seaways isn’t actually based in Amsterdam, but in a little port town half an hour outside the city.  It was lovely.

But they had a sense of humor about it…

Here’s a shot of the Princess at port.  After our all-day meeting we boarded to take her to Newcastle.

They all felt bad about it being my birthday, so they brought in some cake and offered to sing to me in English, Dutch, or Danish.  I declined all three.  But man, it was some good cake!

The lunch wasn’t all bad either!

We got “Commodore Class” cabins which are very nice… no different from a smallish hotel room.

And here I am: Greg at 51.

And here’s where I was: somewhere on the North Sea.

We got a thorough tour of the ship from one of the staff.  I was (surprisingly?) impressed by the whiskey bar.  Note the whiskey in the barrel below: it’s Braunsteins, the Danish distillery Trine and I toured a couple of years ago — as a birthday present.

Here’s the mad crew: my Responsive colleagues and a couple of the DFDS employees (the others were standing beside me at the bar).  We had a couple of drinks and they all went to bed.  Every one of them.  At like 21:30.  On my birthday.

So I went to the whiskey bar by myself and enjoyed a couple of lovely Tallisker Storms then turned in.  I was so comfortable in the bed, and so comforted by the heavy seas we were by then sailing through, and so soothed by the old familiar sounds of wind and waves, that I actually tried to stay awake just to enjoy it.  (In contrast to my colleagues, several of whom I later learned spent a good part of the night fighting seasickness: lousy landlubbers!)  Alas, nothing gets you to sleep faster than trying to stay awake.  I got more than eight hours of sleep and because the ship remained on Central European Time despite my alarm clock having made the transition to GMT, I ended up waking up thinking I was an hour late because the ship’s loudspeakers announced it was 8:00.  I had thought it was only seven and that I’d have time for a leisurely wake-up and shower before our 8:00 breakfast!  Instead I rushed through a shower without shaving, threw on my clothes, and rushed out only to bump into a very relaxed looking colleague.

“Wonder why the ship’s still on Amsterdam time when we’re practically in Newcastle,” he said.

“What time is it officially?” I asked.

He pointed to the land:

“Quarter past seven over there,” he said.  “But quarter past eight here on the boat, apparently.”

“Are we meeting for breakfast on boat time or land time?”

“Land time,” he said.  “The dining room people told me it was 7:00 when I got down there at 8:00.”

I love DFDS but in an era when virtually all of their passengers have GPS-calibrated smart phones, they ought to stop playing around with the clocks: our phones know what time zone we’re in and there’s no point pretending otherwise.

After breakfast I returned to the deck to behold the glory of Newcastle.

And, AS SEEN ON FACEBOOK, I had indeed brought coal with me.  A single briquet that I’d packed in a plastic bag and stuffed in my roll-aboard in a roll of socks because I was afraid some security jackass at the airport would tell me charcoal briquets were flammable and therefore Prohibited and would have to be confiscated because otherwise the Terrorists Would Win.

And I didn’t think they would understand my intense desire to have my little joke with myself.

But my coal escaped detection and I did it: I actually brought some coal to Newcastle.

As in Amsterdam, so in Newcastle: the offices where we held our meeting were not in the city proper, but in an ugly little building squatting alongside the ugly little port, miles away from town.

After the meeting, however, we had a few hours to kill, so we took a taxi into town.

Newcastle’s a lovely old city I wouldn’t mind (but am in no hurry) to visit again; it’s a very old city full of very old buildings all sort of cobbled together on top of each other on the hilly bank of the Tyne.  Except for this one massive silvery peanut of a spaceship presiding over the bank on the other side of the river.

My photos are terrible, but they’re all I’ve got.

Exciting, wasn’t it?

So… shopping with Trine the previous weekend, Maddie had made a fuss about getting a bath bomb like she’d had in America.  Trine warned her that we wouldn’t have a bath in the house for many, many months, probably more than a year.  Maddie didn’t care, and it was cheap, so in the end Trine caved.

The bath bomb sat on the kitchen counter, for some reason, for a whole week, before Maddie suddenly remembered we had little plastic baby bathtubs.  Couldn’t she use one of those?  Pleeease?

Why not, right?  So I dug the little baby tub out of the garage and she got to use her bath bomb.

Only much later did both Molli Malou and Trine remind me that we hadn’t used the baby bathtub in about six years: we had the toddler tub, remember?  I wish I could post a picture of Maddie squeezing what she could of herself into that little tub, above, — and so happily, so sweetly! — but there was just no way to do so decently.  Still, if you try to imagine a fully grown adult trying to bathe in a large soup tureen you can probably imagine how it went.

AS SEEN ON FACEBOOK: we celebrated my birthday, like every other birthday, at Restaurant Hai Long in beautiful downtown Værløse, and it was worth it for this picture alone:

The following pictures are horrible even for me, but the story they tell warms my heart anyway: you can actually see their relationship!  (They’re making themselves some ice-cream sundaes, even though neither of them has any idea what a “sundae” is.)

Thank you, spring, for letting our already sheddy dog shed just a little more.  These clumps are from Trine giving Didi about half an hour of hardcore brushing.

Thanks to Nana and Pop-Pop for the Patriots collar for Didi — as promised, I did try to get a picture.  This was the best of the bunch.  She kept trying to chew it off herself, so I’m saving it for the regular season:

Didi in the woods is fun.  Didi in the woods with Maddie is magic.

Oh!  So, besides our new washer, new dryer, and new dishwasher, the time had apparently also come for new toilets.  See our stylish new thrones!

Maddie cut a haircut, which is why from this point forward you’re going to see her with bangs.

One of my last days at Responsive a colleague put this lunch plate together.  It was such a quintessentially Danish lunch I had to take a picture.  Not because of the ingredients — it’s all pretty normal stuff, nothing fancy — but because of the attention paid to presentation.

Molli Malou spent her second Easter weekend in a row at the handball tournament in Holstebro. The Værløse Handball Club 11-12 Year Old first team won all their games on day one, but the wheels fell off their bus on day two and they ended up just missing the semifinals.

But that was all still in the future as Molli Malou awaited the bus that Thursday…

We ourselves didn’t make the trip (Holstebro is way out on Jylland) but thanks to another parent we got some great shots from the tournament, including this classic:

And this:

And this:

No, wait, that was just me trying to entertain Maddie while she enjoyed being an only child for a weekend.

She reciprocated with a fashion show, AS SEEN ON FACEBOOK.

It was our turn to host the annual Easter Lunch with Kirsten & Frederik and Malene & Sten and all their kids (several of whom were also off at various tournaments), and it gave us the impetus required to clean house.  God it’s a nice house when it’s clean!

There was a lump in the middle of the road as I walked Didi that night: the lump turned out to be a frog.  Even with my using the flash to take a picture, Didi never noticed the wily little amphibian.  Lucky for him, because I’ve seen her eat frogs.  Really.

Easter Lunch: the traditional string licorice eating contest (traditional only with us):

Julius and his brother Johan watching television while loving Didi:

Easter morning: time for the hunt!

Later that day, our first visit of the season to Puppy Lake:

…where I got an adorable sequence of Trine and Maddie playing Red-Light-Green-Light:

On Second Easter Day we had another Easter Lunch, this time with Mormor and Jørgen.

The picture below seems very unremarkable, except that I have, I think, a virtually identical photo from the day Trine and I moved into that apartment almost exactly 13 years earlier.  I had hoped to find that picture and place it alongside this one, but we have internet problems at home right now and without the cloud server readily available I can’t be bothered to dig the old picture up.

Molli Malou had obviously missed our Sunday egg hunt, but was lucky enough to have one here.

The pictures above and below are from our walk with Didi after the lunch; this playground is actually the playground of Molli Malou’s old vuggestue.  (The grounds are the same, the equipment is all new.)

Molli got strangely nostalgic for the old joint, though I doubt she remembered it any better than I did.

Scenes from everyday life: I love discovering things like what you see in the picture below.  “Oh, look!  Maddie finally found a sensible place to store her sunglasses!”

Why is Maddie so happy?

I honestly don’t remember.

But she does it so well!

# # #

So it was busy month, as you have seen, and all of these events took place against a backdrop of my working my last few weeks at Responsive and preparing for my new job at PensionDanmark.  It was stressful and frantic and I’m very glad it’s over.

Maddie and Molli continue to thrive, as I think the photographic evidence attests.

I would like to share two recent Maddie anecdotes as a kind of snapshot of who she is these days.

While walking with Didi in the forest one recent Saturday, I was trying for some reason to explain to her that family was about more than mere blood, and that riches weren’t always material.  I forget why.  To illustrate my point I made up a little story: imagine if tomorrow someone came from the royal family and said, “Maddie Marie, you are not actually the daughter of Greg and Trine.  You are a princess of the royal line and it is now time for you to come and live with your royal family at Amelienborg.”  And they took you in a big fancy car to go live in the castle with your real royal relatives.  You’d miss us, right, no matter how nice your life at the castle was, no matter how nice they were to you?

Maddie seemed to miss the point of my tale.

“But you and Mor are my real parents,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.  “But–“

“You have pictures,” she went on, “pictures of Mor with me in her tummy, and then of me being born, and then of me in the hospital with you and Mor.”

“Of course,” I said, “But–“

“So you could show them the pictures and it would prove you were my parents.”

“We wouldn’t have to show them the pictures,” I said.  “They could take your blood and ours and see that you were our child.”

That got her attention.

“So we wouldn’t even have to prove it,” she said triumphantly, “we could just say it and mean it!”

I’m not quite sure what she meant by that — but she was, and I loved it.

The second and completely unrelated anecdote: we were talking about all the great trips we’re going to take this year: a minicruise to Oslo, a vacation in southern France, an autumn vacation in Portugal — and this got Maddie speculating on her favorite times of year, which led to a peroration on her favorite holidays.

“My birthday is my favorite,” she said, “or not favorite, but definitely tied with Christmas.  And then comes Halloween.  And after that comes Easter — well, no, I don’t really think of Easter as a holiday, it’s more of an accessory.”

I love the way her mind works, because I have no idea how her mind works and the surprises are so enjoyable!

# # #

I have no anecdotes about Molli Malou because we hardly ever even see her these days.  She’s always off at handball practice, or a handball match, or a tournament, or watching other teams play, or hanging out with her handball friends at the sports hall.  Or curled up on the couch watching handball videos on YouTube.

But she did come home very giddily from the class party this past Saturday (April, alas, but so be it).

“It was so much fun,” she gushed, “I always hated soccer, Daddy, I thought it was boring, and hard, but I just played soccer with the boys all night and I was really good!  I thought, this is going to be hard, but there was Nikolai with the ball and I thought, I can never get the ball away from him, but then I just did like this, and like this, and I totally got the ball from him, and it was awesome!  And all the girls, they were so boring, they just sat around in a circle talking all night. . .  I didn’t play with a single girl all night, I just played soccer with the boys, and it was awesome!“

On the one hand I love her enthusiasm for sport, her confidence, the way she throws herself out there into whatever she’s doing.  I admire her athletic prowess.  On the other hand… yikes.  Can’t we have a few more years of her and her friends messing up the kitchen with their baking experiments before I have to hear about how awesome all the boys are?

Sigh.