Molli Malou and Maddie Marie in the Merry Month of May

It’s been a while. We’ve been busy. You all know that. (Or if you didn’t, now you do: Trine’s been basically working full-time at her internship, Molli Malou has started fritidshjemme, and Maddie is an ordinary year-and-a-half-old and therefore time-consuming. Oh, and I have a job.)

We begin in early May, when Maddie discovers the joys of her big sister’s bike helmet.

Big sister not so sure she’s as enthusiastic…

Molli Malou gets a pic of Daddy and Maddie on a weekend morning.

And then Maddie digs into a bagel with cream cheese.

Notice, by the way, that the wooden bar securing her in her seat is still in her Trip-Trap chair. That was the first major development of the month: she suddenly began climbing up into, down out of, and all over her chair. The bar became more hazard than help. Removing it didn’t make her chair completely safe, as you can see below, but it removed more hazards than it created.

She is still young enough to worship her big sister… behold the awe!

And behold a full shot of her at 18 months.

Molli Malou is still a little princess.

And pulls her own chair around to eat with Maddie, and help feed her if necessary, on leisurely weekend mornings.

You could land a 747 in our living area, and we have — hold on, counting in my head — we have seven chairs and two sofas in the living area (not counting the two barstools), so how do Molli Malou and Mille want to watch an entire movie?

Trine kept chiding me for me not getting enough messy eating pix of Maddie into the blog. I respectfully honor her petitions.

We’re further along in May now, and the white rhododendron explodes!

We get two nice days in mid-May, and Maddie finally gets to waddle around in just her diaper. She loves to draw.

Molli Malou, meanwhile, gets hooked on the Beta version of Togetherville.com, particularly to a game involving — I kid you not — ironing and blow-drying.

Yard pics as spring begins to emerge… Last year’s vegetable garden is this year’s strawberry, rose, tulip, and rhubarb garden.

The apple tree blossoms and will therefore hopefully give us apples this year.

Study of toddler with chair.

(That’s not a peace sign, that’s V for victory over the chair.)

Not enough food shots yet?

See those weeds growing in the rhododendren bed? They were so thick and tall that one morning Maddie toddled off into them, fell down, and basically drowned. We couldn’t see her, we just heard her plaintive cries from the waving weeds.

Seriously, these were not amateur weeds.

Just look at them!

We’ll get to the “after” shots of those weeds in another post. Now we’re up to the gorgeous Pinse weekend weather.

Ah, wait! My weed-whacking has begun…

And the rhubarb harvest kicks in!

And Maddie is smart enough to get what looks like milk out of the fridge, get a cup out of the drawer, and try pouring some into the cup. She is not smart enough to know she is actually pouring buttermilk … or to get it all into the cup.

But she’s a fiend at the ivories!

Dining al fresco at last! (I know y’all have been having heatwaves since like April, but we had the coldest Danish May since 1940 or something, despite these anomalous pictures.)

The sandbox is finally being enjoyed…

Another rib-eater in the family!

Maddie’s vocabulary continues to expand. She seems to think “Daddy” means “parental unit,” because she applies it pretty indiscriminately to Trine and me, but other words are quite definite. “Mek” is milk/mælk, “od” (soft Danish d) is “on,” “meeh” is more/mere, food or meal is “deet deet” (because that’s the sound of the microwave announcing it’s completed a heating cycle), she sometimes uses dee-dee and doe-doe just as Molli Malou did for her pacifier/sut and blankie, she knows up/op, understands “hot ow-ow!” with respect to cups of coffee or an open oven door but has generalized it to any source of danger, so that even big flights of stairs, busy streets, and knives are identified by her as “hot ow-ow!” And so on.

Molli Malou’s growth continues to accellerate its rate of accelleration. At dinner each night she astonishes us with breathless tales of gossip from the Micro B group of fritidshjemme. Her nose still hasn’t healed from when Fie shot the flying disc right into it from point-blank range.

I’d write more about them — I could write endlessly about them — but I just want to wrap this up so I can start work on the next blog post, which will be a video of all the videos we have from May. And some pictures from June.

So that’s that.