May (And a Little June)

Less than four weeks until we fly to America, so we’re into the Final Countdown!  (Go ahead and cue the music, I’m deep into Arrested Development right now anyway.  And if that joke flew over your head, no worries.)

It’s later on a Sunday that I wanted it to be, but I want to get this stuff in the can before I begin a hardcore month of work and working out.

Let’s start with this lovely shot of Maddie, who is clearly on the brink of exploding with some sort of secret pride.

What’s she so excited about?  Turn around, honey, no one can see it when you stand there smiling at the camera!

Ah! There:

She can make her own ponytail!  She does this just about every other day now.

And she is developing some fine photography skills:

…Although the following action tennis shots were taken by me:

I leave it to the many more-accomplished tennis players of Molli Malou’s family to comment on her form.  But she certainly loves the sport, and is now taking lessons once a week — just prior to Trine’s weekly lessons every Friday!

Those of you on Facebook will be familiar with the following photographs, which I cropped and combined into a collage on that site that I entitled, “Watching Maddie discover and exploit a puddle is a good reminder of how I want to live my life.”

May was supposed to be my final month of leisurely unemployment before starting my new job, so I decided it was finally time to give Molli Malou’s bedroom the makeover we’d promised her long, long ago.  Why did it need a makeover?  Let’s take a tour.

OK, now the after shots:

Hahaha!  That’s right, we’re going to raise her to be a monk!

Well.. a monk with a desk.

…and a keyboard…

No, no, no.  See, what happened is that in the middle of the painting project (you did notice the walls in the before pictures were cream colored, whereas in the after pictures they were white, right?) — in the middle of the painting project, I was called in by my new employer and asked to start three weeks early.  I sort of had to accept.  So we had hauled everything out of Molli’s room, thrown most of the big furniture out, painted her room, refurnished it with what few things we’d agreed she should keep, piled the rest of her stuff in big heaps all over the rest of the house — and were suddenly out of time.

So I spent most of the past three weeks working every day and then rushing home every evening either to buy stuff at IKEA, assemble IKEA furniture, mount IKEA furniture, or relocate Molli’s dislocated stuff into the new, freshly assembled, freshly mounted IKEA furniture.

And the after pictures will be appearing in this space shortly.  (I just put the last finishing touches on her room yesterday, so there hasn’t yet been time.)

Meanwhile, a couple of Saturdays ago we went up to visit Steve, Elisabeth, Becca, and Sebastian in Espergæde.

It was a lovely visit, and because it was the night of the Eurovision song contest we spent the night.  For the first time ever, Molli Malou stayed awake for the whole thing.  Here she is around 11:30 pm.

How wonderful is it that the first Eurovision Molli managed to stay awake for, and will probably (inevitably?) remember, Denmark won!

The next shot is just a random shot with no real backstory or anything, I just love something about it.

This past Thursday was the annual “late night” in Værløse Bymidten: the one night a year where all the stores stay open until 10pm and there’s live music and entertainment and a whole carnival atmosphere.  And as in previous years, there is also the Massive Climbing Wall of Doom!

…Molli Malou stood in line 45 minutes to try and climb that thing — and then scrambled up and down in about 30 seconds.  I have the whole thing on video, but not a single photo.  Sorry.

Today we joined the families of her entire class for a bonfire afternoon in Hareskov.

The woods were beautiful.

Before the bonfire everyone had to do an obstacle course through the woods.

Another photo familiar to Facebookers:

Finally we were back to the bonfire, and snobrød (“campfire bread”):

Then tug of war between the boys and girls of Søndersøskolen 2.b!

The girls were only so dominant because they outnumbered the boys present by about 2:1.  And as you can see, Maddie tried to help the boys (Maddie is in the pink fleece second from left on the rope), but the boy in the picture gives a pretty good visual indicator of how valuable Maddie’s assistance turned out to be.

But come on, she’s half their age, what’s she supposed to do?

How about… sit on a rock and be adorable?

# # #

So here we are, all caught up, and four weeks from now we’ll actually be IN America where all of the girls’ American relatives can see them and talk to them and play with them in person instead of through the medium of this blog.

We can’t wait!