Mostly Faaborg

March Madness doesn’t begin to do the past month justice. Trine started her new job, my already strained project at work exploded into a series of crises, and somewhere along the way I turned 47.

A quick aside for the permanent record before I get into the photodocumentation: we measured the girls today. Molli Malou is 132.5cm (4’4″) and weighs 50.5 pounds; Maddie is 102.5cm (3’4½”) and weighs 33.5 pounds. According to About.com Pediatrics, that puts Maddie in the 63rd percentile for weight and 93rd percentile for height. (I assume those are American measurements; against the Danish population — one of the tallest in the world — she would probably not score quite so high.) Molli Malou is in the 29th percentile for weight and the 83rd percentile for height. It’s staggering to look at them and look at those numbers and think how very tiny they were at birth. Wow.

Now, before we get rolling on the photos, I warn you not to get your hopes up. It was not a well-documented month, but there wasn’t much to document.

First, there is Molli Malou in her cheerleader outfit. Apparently the Søndersøskolen colors are black and black.

(I don’t know why she was a cheerleader, or what for — it was all kind of a blur, and it’s over now. She just needed to wear black leggings, a black skirt, and a black top to school one day so should be a cheerleader, and that’s the last I ever heard of it. But she wore it well, don’t you think? I say she’s ready for Manhattan.)

Whenever I make a fuss over one girl with the camera, the other insists on being photographed as well, regardless of how they look.

You may have noticed both girls were looking at the camera and wearing not unpleasant expressions. That’s because I promised them a smiley each if I could take their pictures. What are smileys, and why are they so powerful? Well, when Molli Malou gets 700 of them, she’s going to get an iPad. (It’s also going to be her birthday present from everyone — so you all stand advised, all she wants for her birthday is contributions to her iPad fund.) Maddie is too clueless to understand deferred gratification, so there’s no special treat lined up for her, but she likes getting the smileys.

Molli gets smileys for things like putting on her clothes in the morning without making a fuss, eating her meal, and staying in bed after lights-out. Maddie gets them for things like sleeping in her own bed all night, not peeing in her diaper (which she only wears at night), eating her meal, and not throwing temper tantrums (she doesn’t earn many from that last category). The smileys also come in handy as little incentives here and there, and we can award big chunks of them for special behavioral changes: this past week Molli earned 20 for letting Maddie and I drop her off in front of her school every morning (instead of walking her in, putting her lunch in the refrigerator, helping her get things sorted out in her cubby, etc). She earned a whopping 50 for really stepping up: 15 minutes before the end of day-care, she has to gather all her things and ride her bike, alone, to Maddie’s børnehaven, since Trine’s new schedule often makes it impossible for her to reach both girls before their institutions close at 5pm. We’ve offered Maddie a big bonus if she can go three nights in a row without peeing in her diaper, but although she sometimes does it twice in a row we can’t seem to get the trifecta.

(Yes, I know, the formal word for this is bribery and it’s supposed to be frowned upon in proper parenting circles, but since the only proper parents are people without children, I don’t care. Besides, if you use that same logic then bribery is also what gets Trine and me to work every day.)

So… back to our sheep. Like I said, I turned 47 this month. Molli Malou could hardly wait to give me her present, which you see below (and which many of you saw on Facebook). Maddie just wanted to sing to me, and was asking as early as a week before if she could sing to me on my birthday.

The Saturday after my birthday, Trine and I got to spend about 24 hours alone with each other on a little jaunt to Faaborg — sometime last fall we had purchased through Sweetdeal.dk (the Groupon knock-off I actually helped set up at Berlingske) an overnight stay at a hotel down on the bottom of Fyn, and it seemed like a good time to use it.

We took the main east-west highway most of the way, but once we hit the rural by-ways of Fyn the ride got much more interesting.

Faaborg itself is a cute little fishing town. We got there at about lunchtime, checked into our hotel, had a greasy lunch at a hamburger and pizza place, then took a walking tour of the little town.

The town was absolutely deserted. This is their main shopping thoroughfare at about 3pm on a Saturday afternoon:

And here is the lovely Faaborg Museum, which we did not visit:

For one of the tallest peoples in the world, Danes sometimes have funny ideas about doors.

Our hotel room had the ugliest lamp I’ve ever seen.

But it was miles ahead of the drapes:

We had a nice meal in the hotel restaurant (part of the package), but rather than belly up to the bar afterwards we made our own cocktails out on the beach across the street. It was wonderful (if a little cold) just to be out there by ourselves sipping drinks and talking like adults — no one calling out from the bathroom to be wiped, no one screeching because they can’t sleep and want to sit up and watch tv, nothing but the sound of the surf and each other’s voices.

Here’s a look back at the hotel:

And here’s a look out at Kattegat the next morning:

And in the light of day you can see the bench that served as our private cocktail lounge the night before.

And me, look!, it’s me! I’m never in here!

On the way home we were supposed to get a picture of the building where Gert first started business. So we drove a little out of our way into a tiny little nothing town about 10 clicks northwest of Faaborg and hunted down what we thought was the building. Turned out not to have been the building, but what the hell.

Back on the real route homeward, we swung by Egeskov castle, one of Denmark’s national treasures (owned to this day by a Danish Count). Naturally it was closed for the season.

We had some spring-like weather at last this past weekend, and Molli Malou made campfire bread in the terrace fireplace. (It’s called snobrød in Danish and is apparently sometimes also called Bannock in America.)