The Past Month and a Half

This post is being edited in stolen moments, so it’s going to be choppy and disorienting. If it’s not, that’s only a question of luck.

We start back in the last week of February with a Maddie bath.

And Molli Malou’s first-ever, made-it-entirely-herself snowman.

And adorable braids.

And the headlift that came out of nowhere (and is only rarely replicated).

And sisterly love.

For several months Molli Malou has been fond of building houses using the various bits of furniture and cushioning in the living room and dining room. We finally found out what she’d been building up to.

Better head lift, but with a little assist:

And a period of recovery afterwards.

Molli Malou declares herself “Mollikat” (or “MolliCat,” whichever) — she still seems intent on working towards a role at the Playboy Mansion.

…but only at home. Out in the real world, for Fastelavn for example, she’d still rather be the unicorn with shiny wings. (Yes, that’s our old apartment… we went back there for the Fastelavn activities this year.)

Molli Malou was lucky enough to be batting after the girl who became Cat King this year, and with the barrel shattered and smashed Molli Malou was able to deliver the killing below that knocked it to the ground (see above) and earn herself the Cat Queen crown.

(So maybe the whole Unicorn thing was part of the whole MolliCat strategy all along.)

At børnehaven, she chose to wear her Bride costume to Fastelavn Monday. The grown-ups helped all the princesses make themselves up.

And finally, February 27, Nana and PopPop arrive and open their bag of tricks! It was like Christmas II, with piles of goodies from themselves and all the Lees.

Look at Molli Malou’s response to a pair of golden sandals. I’m going to have to pin my hopes for a tomboy on Maddie, I guess.

PopPop gets some time in with Maddie after the long flight over.

Molli Malou was in her Dressing Hell phase when Nana and PopPop arrived. The act of getting dressed had devolved into an hour-long battle of astounding proportions, to the extent that we actually sometimes had to send Molli Malou into the guest room for a time-out. She was so bad (“these stockings ITCH!” “this shirt is UGLY!” “these underwear give me a wedgie!” “I hate these socks, I hate them!”) that I was actually reduced, within earshot of my own mother, to threatening to tear all Molli Malou’s toes out.

So here you go: “this skirt is too LOOSE!”

But just when you think she’s become an irredeemable clothes-horse brat, she reverts back to her exuberant self.

Somewhere on this blog is a picture, I think, of Molli Malou in the same dress in the same pose, probably even on the same changing pad. They’re not identical — their chins and foreheads are distinctive — but sometimes they are very hard to tell apart.

Oh, hell, not every picture needs an explanation.

(PopPop did more to help Molli Malou’s reading and writing in one week than her parents have done in 4½ years. Props to him… or shame on us?)

Only when I saw this picture did I realize it echoed something in my scrapbook memory… is there not a picture akin to this one of little Greg, aged about this range, waddling with an umbrella alongside a grandparent in rainy London?

Man, we’ve tried so many times to replicate the photo of Molli Malou in Trine’s hands… we have a lot of not-quites from the hospital, and now this not-quite from early March.

Molli Malou ain’t the only craps player in the family.

Furesø (Fure Lake?), in case you’re wondering:

On our way to have Maddie Americanized at the consulate:

This was a picture Trine appears to have taken for someone else’s behalf. I don’t know whose, but I include it for their benefit.

Elisabeth, the visiting nurse, weighing Maddie.

Kongens Nytorv:

The top of the Berlingske building on Pilestræde.

Some kitschy tourist shop:

Um… our front hall?

Molli Malou finds a novel use for her pom poms:

Nana’s last day: walking Molli Malou to børnehaven one last time.

Ready for gymnastics!

Oh, wait… an hour or two after Nana’s flight left Denmark:

Oh… for the next two photos, I have to copy text from an email I already sent my family. That text follows.

* * *

Molli Malou sits next to me at the dinner table, across from Trine.

“Honey,” Trine says to Molli Malou at one point during the meal, “your hair looks a little funny. Let me see your bangs.”

Molli Malou starts giggling.

“Sweetheart, did you do something to your bangs? Did something happen at børnehaven?”

More giggles, and Molli Malou is now showing off, flipping her bangs around so I can see the damage too. They are cut — chopped would be a better word — here and there at different lengths. I remember a story about Sophie.

“Molli Malou, did you give yourself a hair cut?”

“Yes!”

“When?”

“The other day.”

Trine and I debate this. No, it couldn’t have been the other day.

“Where?”

“Over there!” She points to her play table in the sunroom.

I inspect the grounds. No hair.

“If you cut your hair here, honey, how come there’s none on the floor?”

Stupid question, right? Her answer:

“Because I put it on the shelf, Daddy.”

Sure enough, on one of her shelves there’s a bunch of hair and her scissors stashed in a way that suggests she really didn’t want us to find them.

* * *

So here’s how she looked — can you believe it took us (by our later calculations) at least an hour to notice?

And here she is confronted with the evidence:

And now I switch to Nana’s pictures, which are out of sequence because her camera obviously numbers differently than mine and I was too lazy to make a chronological narrative.

And there we are.