Sommerhusene

I took a vacation day Friday and we all took a long weekend up in Nordsjælland, dividing our time between summerhouses.

But before we get to that, a couple of things from last week. First, this:

It doesn’t look like much, but Molli wrote it all by herself and all I had to do was to prompt her which letters to write. We haven’t had very good results trying to replicate the experiment, but there’s no getting around the fact that this was the first time Molli Malou had ever written her name by herself. (I didn’t push for the Malou because there wasn’t room.)

And if you want to see her opening the birthday present from Nana and Pop-Pop, which was mailed on June 16th from Connecticut and arrived here the evening of July 24th or 25th (I don’t remember any more, but the video is probably datestamped if you just have to know), click here. I think we captured the baptism.

We drove through some hellish rain on our way up to the summerhouse—rain that could have held its own against those championship downpours we were so familiar with in the midwest. But the sun was shining when we finally arrived up at Mormor’s.

A couple of weeks ago we “claimed” an abandoned child’s bike from the basement of our apartment building, and with just a little bit of work it was suitable for riding. Molli Malou loved in, and was very sad when it disappeared up north to await her at the summerhouse. So no sooner had we arrived then she began squealing, “My big bike! My big bike!” And blam!—she was riding it.

Riding it very fast, I might add…

Eventually she rode so far off that she came back around the other side of the planet, circumnavigating the globe in record time. Then she snatched the camera from me and took about fifty pictures of random objects. I thought this was the most interesting of the bunch: after the summer we’ve been having, I’m not at all surprised she should have taken about a dozen shots of this big unfamiliar object in the sky.

The attention span may actually be increasing! She entertained herself with her big bubble gun for at least forty-five seconds!

Molli Malou spent Friday afternoon and evening with Mormor and Joergen, while Trine and I shipped off to the non-family side of the family’s summerhouse, about a twenty-minute drive away. (The weekend there had been divvied up so that Friday would be designed for grown-ups, and Saturday for the kids.)

Saturday morning we drove back to get Molli Malou and took her crabbing with Mormor.

Here’s a map of the area, by the way:

Mormor and Joergen’s summerhouse is up around the very top right of the map.

I had to get a shot of the menu at the restaurant on the pier where we did our crabbing, because it reminded me of the old Monty Python spam skit. “Would you like the fish, fish, fish, and chips, or the fish, fish, fish, fish, chips, and fish? Of course, if you’re in the mood for something different, I can recommend the bagel sandwich: two fish filets nestled between the fresh-baked goodness of a fish bagel, served on a bed of fish…”

Molli Malou has her own net (also used in the pursuit of butterflies, clouds, and flying chocolate, if she’s to be believed), and Mormor got her set up with a line and a big hunk of fluke to draw the crabs out from under the rocks. Molli Malou didn’t seem to know whether to be amazed or disgusted at herself for this activity… here she is staring at that bloody hunk of fish bobbing just above the surface of the rocky seafloor.

Here’s a little more perspective on three generations a-crabbin’.

And a longer shot for some perspective on the whole crabbing scene up there in Rørvig.

It didn’t take long for Molli Malou to catch her first crab.

Those crabs were as numerous as they were stupid. She had half a dozen within about twenty minutes.

When you’re done crabbing, you just dump your bucket into a big tank down on the beach where littler kids can look at them. We did this, drove Mormor back to her summerhouse, and then the three of us drove off to the other summerhouse again.

The big event of the day was the treasure hunt that Lise Lotte, Susanne, and Anne had arranged. Molli Malou is sort of awkwardly spaced between all the other kids—they’re either at least a year older than her, and therefore capable of understanding things like a treasure hunt, or babies and toddlers that are too young to really interact with much. So Molli Malou sort of wandered around with her “team,” muddling along quite happily, obvlivious of any real objective.

Here she is playing a memory game, the point of which was entirely lost on her.

There were two dogs at play: the big old playful Povl, from across the street, and the indefatigable little Tejsa, or Taisa, or Teisa, Jacob and Line’s nine-week-old Icelandic Sheep Dog.

We’ll get back to him. Meanwhile, here’s Molli Malou being coached by her mother on a game where she had to reach into a bowl of yuck (yogurt, I think) and identify whatever it was her fingers clasped around. Okay, no, I just realized that’s the wrong picture. Oh well. I’ll try and remember to update it at some point, but for the time being: that’d be Sofie reaching into the yuck, and Molli Malou standing by.

And here are the girls off on a hunt for some clue or other. You’ll notice Molli Malou’s compass appears to be pointing on a direction entirely its own.

The last game was a blindfolded taste test.

A boy and his dog (Anton with Sejta/Seita/Sajta):

And here’s the payoff… Molli Malou, walking a dog!

This next shot is one Molli Malou took of Sofie and Olivia. It’s one of her better shots, so I thought I’d share it.

Not long after dinner it was time to drive back to Mormor’s summerhouse. The day had been a little too much for Molli Malou, who smiled happily as I strapped her into her car seat in the quiet of the front yard and said with a very satisfied tone, “No one is talking now.”

A parting shot:

The next morning we had breakfast and hit the road by about eleven-thirty. Traffic came to a standstill due to a horrific accident, and we got lost on the detour. But Molli Malou had a bag of candy in her hand, and the view didn’t suck, and we had nothing but time, so it wasn’t such a bad detour for all that.