Monkey Malou

(I’m going to copy a lot of text from emails I’ve sent to my family in here, with just minor edits, because there’s no point in telling the same story twice.)

Molli Malou has been developing by leaps and bounds over the past couple of weeks.

I thought her IQ had shot up 100 points last week alone, because I noticed all these breakthroughs: for the first time ever, she climbed up onto the kitchen counter by herself. And climbed back down. She figured out how to unlock and open the front and back doors. (God save us.) She was getting close to figuring out the keypad lock to the courtyard door. She had learned how to climb over the fence between the sandbox and terrace.

It seemed like everytime I spoke to Trine on the phone (by now you all know Trine was in and out of hospitals all week) there was some new development to report. “It’s like she’s suddenly this super genius,” I said. That was my explanation. Which only goes to show that if she is a supergenius, it ain’t coming from my genes. Read those developments again, in the preceding paragraph. Is it clearer to you than it was to me?

What had actually happened, of course, is that Molli Malou has grown like a weed this summer. I measured her at 96-97 cm the other day, up from about 92 as recently as May. (So she’s now about three feet on the button.) She’s no smarter than she used to be, just taller. She can reach things she couldn’t before.

On the other hand, she really is making some wild strides in language and other development.

One night last week I was picking up Molli Malou’s mess in the living room. She was playing in the hallway or her bedroom. Suddenly I heard her shout, “No, Ollie… You idiot!”

I still don’t know what the poor cat had done to deserve such an upbraiding, but deserve it I’m sure he did. And I don’t suppose that anecdote illustrates any particular developmental milestone, I’ve just been meaning to get that blogged since the night it happened.

She’s learned some blue language and seems to know what contexts to use it in. We have our own philosophy about dealing with it: instead of calling them bad words or yelling at her for using them, we treat them the way we treat stinky poo: sure, it’s out there, and everyone does it, but it’s ugly and yucky so it’s not something you want to do in front of other people. She seems to get it, and now chastises me and her mother when we use English or Danish cuss words. (I didn’t even realize how often I was saying for fanden — literally just “to the devil,” but strangely the absolute worst Danish cuss — until Molli Malou started correcting me every time and telling me to say, ,for Søren — the equivalent of transition from “for f—’s sake” to “for Pete’s sake.”

She knows all the standard American cuss words but we rarely hear them… although we were having some fun at the dinner table reciting variations of “Toot toot, chugga chugga, big red car,” and I after I made her laugh with “toot too, chugga chugga, big red fart,” Molli Malou responded with what sounded like an attack of Tourette’s: “Toot choo, f—a f—a, f— you fart!”

We let her get away with dammit, at least I do, since absolutely no one anywhere seems to say “darn it” anymore. Anyway, it’s not like she says it often.

She gets out of bed on her own more often than not now, and this morning came bounding into our bedroom saying she wanted to see “the tishin! Wanna see the tishin! Mo-ar, Daddy, I wanna see the tishin!”

It was Trine that figured out she was trying to say magician.

She is beginning to resist speaking English with me sometimes. We expected this at about this age: she’s old enough to know that everyone around her speaks Danish, but too young to realize how “cool” it is to speak English (she will be the envy of her grade school and teenage friends). Anyway, when she gets especially strident I remind her that Shrek and Lenny (from Monsters Inc) and Marty (from Madagascar) and Elmo and Cookie Monster and Barney all speak English, to say nothing of the Simpsons, or AFV, or her own American relations, and then she relents.

She informed me recently that Dolly speaks English but Haddie is bilingual. (But both use that same creepy redrum voice to talk.)

She has finally learned that drawing involves more than just taking a pen or brush to paper and jerking it around. On recent evenings she has drawn some very detailed pictures of stick figure people and she is very careful and precise with the pen movements. There’s a little Danish rhyme:

Punktum, punktum, komma, streg:
sådan tegnes Nikolai!

(In English that’s “Period, period, comma, dash: thus is Nikolai drawn!” But it rhymes in Danish.)

You draw as you recite: each period is an eye, the comma is the nose, and the dash is the mouth, then you draw a circle around the face while you say the second line. The poem goes on to give ole Nikolaj a big tummy and four limbs. Anyway, Trine did it for Molli Malou the other night and Molli Malou was enraptured. She suddenly seized the pen and did her own Nikolajs. It was the first time she’d actually drawn anything other than scribbles.

Here’s the whole page, including Trine’s Nikolaj and the text of the poem:

Here’s a closeup of Molli Malou’s first actual drawing:

She hit another major milestone, too: her first point and click on the computer! We were watching the Shrek 3 trailer over and over on YouTube on the living room PC and eventually I got sick of clicking the “Play Again” button every three and a half minutes, so I showed her how to do it herself. (Halfheartedly, since I was sure it was an exercise in futility.) Next thing you know she’s not only able to move the mouse to and click the repeat button herself, but she’d realized she could click on any of the suggested “related” videos and play them. Trine and I were speechless in the kitchen listening to Molli Malou browse the Internet. (Time to update those parental content controls!)

She probably “got it” at last because she’s been playing her V.Smile a lot (Winnie the Pooh and Simba, both in Danish because of the technology difference that created such problems with the set the Lees had sent her) and has grasped the connection between moving a thing with her hands to elicit a response on screen.

She is beginning to make friends with the slighty older girls, 4-year-olds, in the complex who used to tease her for being such a little squirt. But we have to watch this carefully: Trine and I were horrified to look down from the kitchen window Tuesday night and see Molli Malou trying to climb the fence up onto the roof of a little shed with them. I got down in a flash and extricated Molli Malou from the situation in a way that left her pride intact.

Then yesterday we looked down from the window a little while before dinner and there was Molli Malou, entirely on her own, clinging to the mesh fence—five feet off the ground!

Here’s the camera at max zoom:

I got down there in time to keep her from getting hurt, but really I was just a superfluity. She managed to do all the things the four-year-olds had done, and then some. And once she realized she could do it, she spent half an hour climbing the fence, working her way around the corner, sidling along the top of the wooden fence that runs parallel to the mesh fence, stepping onto the roof of the little shelter there, then literally leaping off it for me to catch her.

Here’s a 2MB video (in tiny net-friendly format) of her first effort. (If you’re wondering what kind of sick bastards watch their 3-year-old daughter climb up a fence like that without rushing down to stop her right away… well, sick bastards like us, I guess. You can see one of our neighbors wandering over to inquire what she’s up to—he had already seen us and waved and winked, so although we knew one of us had to get down there pronto, there really was no desperate rush.)

And here’s some closer footage (about 6MB), in which you can hear her talk a little about how she’s climbing up to the clouds, and what a big girl she is.

What a strange little nut she’s becoming.

She walked up to Trine last night in the kitchen and said, a propos of nothing (all this was in Danish):

“His name is Mads.”

“What?”

“His name is Mads.”

“Whose name is Mads, sweetie?”

“One of my good friends.”

“Isn’t that lovely! I’m glad to hear you have so many good friends. Who is he?”

Molli Malou walked away: conversation over.

At dinner I tried to broach the subject again.

“What color hair does Mads have?” I asked.

“He doesn’t have hair.”

“Is he a baby?” Trine asked in Danish.

“Yeah,” Molli Malou said. (Or more likely “ja”.)

“But babies don’t go to Woods Kindergarten, do they?” Trine tried.

“He’s not a baby,” Molli Malou said.

And the conversation was terminated again.

Who’s Mads? We may never know.

But he’s one of her good friends.

* * *

I’m reminded that with the Chicken Pox and Trine’s illness we haven’t had a chance to help Molli Malou write her birthday thank-you’s yet. We’ll try to help her get them out soon. But here’s a shot from last week of Molli Malou using one of the lovely butterfly picture holders (which she loves) she got from the Asheville Nagans to show a picture of the Chelmsford Lees.

It’s surely not making the news in the states, but honest-to-god there’s a big fuss over Iberian killer slugs in Denmark this summer. They don’t kill people, I’m afraid… they’re apparently called killer slugs because they eat slugs. I’m not sure what’s so awful about slugs who eat slugs, but everyone’s deeply concerned about them. (Since my reputation always precedes me, I’m going to back up the story with a few links: here, here, and here.)

Anyway, up at Morfar’s house last weekend we found a whole pack of them running riot in the back yard and I got some very nice pictures with the camera’s macro function.

Molli Malou’s first day of Forest Kindergarten! But her backpack’s apparently a little too heavy…

She’s really loving Forest Kindergarten, though. (And it turns out, Trine learned today, that the mysterious Mads is actually one of the kids in the little group of Forest Kindergarteners—is in fact the son of an American (an Alaskan that Trine and I met a couple of times at Vuggestue parent functions). So Mads is also half-American, half-Danish, and bilingual, so that could be why he so swiftly became, “one of her good friends.”

Enough for now. Go watch those videos!