Miss June

Things are getting back to an ordinary pace now, but I’m not caught up until the Molliblog is caught up, so I’m going to try and address that now.

To start with, the temperatures have actually been quite nice for Denmark in June. The month began with a heat wave, tapered down to seasonably warm but cloudy (and often very rainy) weather in the middle of the month, and ended with another beautiful streak of hot, cloudless weather.

In the earlier part of the month, we let Molli Malou run amok in the courtyard without any clothes. (There are dozens of kids out there, and none of them under five ever seems to be wearing a stitch on the hotter days.) Here she is mixing it up in the ball court. And for all the complaining I’ve done about the camera lately, look how sharply it captured that ball in mid-air.

She insists on climbing all stairs on her own, now, regardless of her wardrobe.

But she takes time to check out the scenery.

Most of the rest of the pictures come from two mid-month events: Joergen’s granddaughter Emma’s non-confirmation confirmation, and a pot-luck dinner at Molli Malou’s vuggestue. I don’t remember which was when, so I’ll start with the latter since they seem to have been numbered earlier anyway.

Molli Malou was very proud of her vuggestue. Like all the kids, she seemed to recognize that all us parents were visiting their turf, and they seemed electrified with a special energy because of it. You can see her pride in this picture, I think.

Molli Malou kept running around with different toys, babbling constantly in her weird hybrid language, now bringing a plastic cup to Mor, now jogging over to Daddy with a broken doll, now dashing off to pour sand on a friend’s toes. Here she comes now:

Toward the end of the night they filled a big tub—literally a big red plastic bathtub—with popcorn and set it on top of the grassy hill in the play yard. The kids were given little paper cups to scoop up their own popcorn. Molli Malou enjoyed four or five full cups of it. She enjoyed one cup with her friend Anna Lina, sitting beside her on a tree stump.

In the midst of the silliest things they can look so serious.

Here’s her hundred-and-seventeenth mouthful of popcorn. It looks like it’s not going to make it down to her stomach, but it did. So did the next three dozen mouthfuls.

Emma’s party was held outside on the Commons. Molli Malou got a little clingy at first.

But she opened up quickly.

Joergen’s son Jesper was there (Emma’s uncle) and got some fantastic shots of Molli Malou. At one point we actually took two pictures of her at about the same instant.

Here’s my shot: you can see Jesper taking his.

And now here’s his shot.

Molli Malou spent plenty of time with Mormor. In this shot you can see Anne, Emma’s mother, in the background.

Just a nice shot of Molli Malou with her maternal grandmother:

And a nice one of her with her mother (we’re going to try and get more shots of us with her).

There was a little pond nearby and Molli Malou went berserk throwing sticks and leaves into the water, exclaiming “splash!” with glee whether or not the objects thrown even made it to the water. She moved too quickly to get a shot of her in action (although I have some great video that I’ll share eventually), but you can see some of that crazy energy in this shot.

This is actually a very nice shot of her with Mormor in the filtered light of the sun falling through leaves, but it doesn’t look as nice shrunk down this small: instead of filtered light it looks like an unevenly exposed photo. It’s not. It’s art, dammit.

The batteries in my camera died about then. It wasn’t until later in the evening, much later, that I managed to buy some new ones. By then we had had dinner and dessert and done everything we could to get Molli Malou to sleep in her pram. We’d look out the window at her pram and suddenly she’d pop up, smiling goofily, waving and even trying to climb out of the thing. So we gave up at about 9:30. A little boy was having similar problems falling asleep. They ended up doing a little dance in their pajamas out in front of the community room where the dinner was held

Moster Mette arrived earlier this week, and she and Trine got Molli Malou out to Tivoli.

I’ll try to post a few pictures of her birthday party tomorrow, and on Monday I’m going to do what I did last year and post one shot from each month of the last year. In fact, I’ll include the previous twelve shots, too, so there’ll be a whole two-year Molli-at-a-glance thing going on.

* whew *

Okay. I feel caught up now. Good night!

No, wait!

My favorite conversational anecdote to date… I wasn’t there, but when Trine and Mette were visiting their grandmother with Molli Malou earlier this week, Molli Malou was fascinated by her grandfather clock.

She kept trying to say something to Mette that Mette, lacking context, couldn’t quite get. Finally Trine interpreted:

“She say’s there’s no mouse in the clock,” Trine said.

“No mouse in clock,” Molli Malou confirmed.

Moster Mette then explained to the bean that maybe there were mice, but they just weren’t coming out where they could be seen.

Molli nodded sagely and said, “De hygger sig.”

Which means something like, “they’re enjoying themselves,” or “they’re having a cozy time,” or whatever.

So her conversation is beginning to take unexpected twists and turns, very exciting. And very horrifying. Loading some bottles in the community room downstairs in prep for tomorrow’s party, I dropped one—and reflexively exclaimed “oh, merde,” except I didn’t say merde. And my daughter instantly laughed and exclaimed the same thing in perfect English… and then began repeating it over and over and over.

And over.

But hopefully she’ll forget it in her sleep, right?