Our Easter vacation (Påskeferie) began about the moment I left work last Friday and lasts until I head into work next Tuesday. We’re not doing much with the vacation besides getting ourselves caught up on the kinds of things that fall behind in the full swing of regular life. Also we’re trying to have some extra fun with Molli Malou.
Mormor and Trine took Molli Malou shopping on Saturday to take advantage of some big Easter sale at all the major stores downtown. I think everything in Copenhagen was 25% off, or something like that. So with Molli Malou right there with them Trine went ahead and bought her a birthday present and a little Easter toy, which cost about a third of its original price.
Because Mormor took Molli Malou back home to entertain her and Jørgen Saturday afternoon, evening, and Sunday morning, Trine and I were able to commit the time and resources required to construct Molli Malou’s first massive playset… behold!
As much as Trine and I enjoyed the time to ourselves—dinner at a French restaurant downtown, after-dinner drinks one of our favorite bars, and the ability to sleep in on Sunday—we honestly couldn’t wait to see how Molli Malou would react to her new toy. It was with enormous excitement that we finally brought her home and ushered her into the living room.
She was literally very into it!
Molli Malou hadn’t let “Po” (her Teletubbie doll) out of her hands since I’d given him (her?) to her about ten days ago. She slept with him, ate with him, watched tv with him, played with him, and could only be convinced not to take him out of the apartment by our having explained that Po couldn’t breathe outside and would die a terrible instantaneous death if brought out of doors.
Yet she played hours with the kitchen before she even bothered to look for Po… and then she just brought him along as her sous-chef.
She’s a very good cook, and getting better all the time.
She likes to make oatmeal (“oh-mee”), noodles (“noo-luhs”), and her own personal favorite, pasta with pesto sauce (“pass a poe!”). She no longer insists that all of her dishes are too hot to eat, and one can have a pleasant sip of imaginary oatmeal without having to feign third-degree burns to the tongue.
All the closeups do make her and her toys look a lot bigger than they really are. Here’s some perspective on our little twenty-pound bean.
Ah! A fresh new serving of pasta with pesto…!
We brought her into Tivoli yesterday. It had only opened for the season on Wednesday and it was an ugly, ugly day, so the usual throngs were conspicuously absent (as were the sun, the warmth, and the lush flora).
We brought Molli Malou in her new umbrella stroller, its maiden voyage.
The real purpose of the trip was to finally get our baby girl on a ride. The first one we came across that we thought she might enjoy was the little revolving aeroplane ride. Here you can see Trine handing over her ticket for the first ride of her daughter’s life!
They got a nice blue biplane, a two-seater.
The two-seat concept was a nice idea, but the idea of Molli Malou being tossed across the park by the unhappy intersection of centrifugal force and her own peripatetic nature horrified us. Other seating arrangements were made and Molli loved the ride.
(I have video, but it’s not really that interesting.)
Next it was my turn to take a ride with my daughter, and we ended up on the “Veteran Cars.”
Molli Malou hated the line but loved the ride, especially since she had control of the wheel, and when the car finally stopped she wouldn’t stop saying “drive more!” (in Danish) until distracted by the sight of another kid’s ice cream cone. Then it was all, “Is! Is! Is!“
So what the hell. We’d bumped into Mormor and Jørgen by happy coincidence, and Jørgen offered to treat all of us to a hot drink and a pastry.
(Molli Malou was so enthralled at having flown a plane and driven a car that she insisted on pushing her own stroller.)
Here’s Molli Malou eyeing the dessert case from our table in the cafe:
And here is one of my all-time favorite pictures of her. This is Molli Malou. Not because she’s a blurry kind of person, but because the joy and life in that smile are so expressive of who she is. Oh, hell, I don’t deny she can be a hell-raising banshee demon from time to time, but from the day she was born she’s had such an expansive sense of joy and I just think this picture captures it almost perfectly.
It also reminds me we’re in the market for a new camera.
Grandparents just get away with the darnedest things! Trine hates it when I let Molli Malou play with knives!
Just as a cultural sidenote, I got a kick out of this arcade game. It’s a standard water shooter, where you get different things to happen by shooting at different targets with your water pistol. (Make the pirate laugh! Twirl the Jolly Roger! Make the treasure chest open and close!)
Why are the boys squatting? Because the Danish passion for egalitarianism extends all the way to midway games! If you look closely, you’ll notice that this game actually shoots back! (The two crossed streams are from the boys’ pistols, but the little stream at the top right of the “X” defined by the other streams is coming from that little blurry cannon, and is a lot more powerful than it looks!)
What lovely photos of such a lively and happy little girl. I hope she maintains that forever.