Rhododendra, Paint, and a Whole New Room

Here’s the deal: it’s a Friday night, all 3 girls are asleep, and I’ve promised Trine she can sleep in as late as she wants tomorrow. I’ll be sleeping in Maddie’s room to take care of any midnight and morning feedings, and I’ll be sure to be awake in time for Molli Malou’s usual 7-8am wakeup. So this is going to be FAST.

Wait, did you catch that? I said I’ll be sleeping in Maddie’s room. She has a room now. And in that room she has a bed. And on that bed she has a pillow. (Og “på den lille pude lå en lille pige,
aldrig så jeg så dejlig en pige…” ok, det har jeg nok set én gang før…)

Anglophones, sorry, you get all the inside jokes in English. Let the Danes have one.

Yes, Maddie is now in her own room (pictures in the next post) and seems to love it. Last night was her first night in her crib and in her own room, and Molli Malou was so excited she simply had to keep her company, so she slept in the guest bed. (It’s not fully Maddie’s room yet, really just a guest room with a canopied crib where the writing table used to be and a lot of little baby toys dispersed among the shelves and sills.)

No pictures of Maddie below, but start loading the spectacular video of her (18MB) right now. It’s a good one. (Two notes: her eyes are blue, not green as they appear in the video, and the weird sound at the end is just the sound of Nana and PopPop Skyping in.)

Plenty of pictures of Maddie, her new room, and her first night in there with her big sister in the next post.

In addition to gardening, I’m going to be posting house work photos in here from time to time. They don’t need a lot of commentary, but they’ll help Trine and me keep track of what we’ve done and when, and how, and the extent to which we screwed it up.

One of the big tasks we knew we had to get to this spring was stripping, staining, and painting the window frames on the “morning terrace.” (The blueprints call the terrace we use all the time the “morning terrace,” and the terrace we never use outside the pool the “evening terrace.”)

Those were the before pictures, taken about a week ago.

But wait! The Rhodedendra or whatever the heck they are are blooming like mad, and so is Molli Malou.

Okay… a few more before pictures. Actually, these are “during” pictures: at this point I think I’ve done all the stripping and sanding. (We bought a new Bosch power drill because our battery-pack powered cordless drill used up its battery-pack after about 10 minutes of stripping.)

Yeah, those were definitely “during” shots — notice my excellent taping job!

Back to the rhododendra: blooming, as I mentioned…

Two of Trine’s gymnasium friends, Kirsten and Malene, visited last Sunday with their husbands and kids. Five kids between them, plus our two, and of course Mille from next door heard the commotion and came on over, so we finally got to put the back yard through its paces with 8 kids (okay, 6 kids and 2 babies, but still).

After pictures! After pictures!

Er… that should have been singular.

Anyway, there it is. The video’s surely downloaded by now. Enjoy!