Springing Forward

I’m starting with a little collage I made out of some crappy iPhone pictures of Maddie and myself. Individually, full-sized, they’re not so great, but I love the collage. (I’m using the forward camera here, so Maddie’s reactions are all to the images we’re capturing.)

Facebookers have seen this March shot of Molli Malou’s lemonade stand before, but I don’t consider FB part of the permanent record. . . so here they are again, doing their best to sell lemonade and “newspapers” (actually the Donald Duck comic books I bring home from work for Molli Malou each Wednesday). The weather was even colder than their wardrobes suggest, but neighbors were so taken by their ambition that the girls pocketed a nice little chunk of change for their godawful lemonade.

Really, the “lemonade” was horrible. They poured plastic cups half full of water, then dribbled a few drops of lemon concentrate — the kind that comes out of a plastic lemon — into the water. (In a variation, they also dropped chunks of apple into some of them.) I think they stirred each cup with their dirty little fingers.

It was the sign that seemed to win a lot of people over — Molli Malou’s untutored effort:

“Kum/o/kyp/di/lekroste/citronsaft/og/avis” = “kom og køb de(n) lækreste citronsaft og (en) avis.” In correct English, it would say “Come and buy the most delicious lemonade and a newspaper.” In English corresponding to what Molli Malou actually wrote, it would say, “Com an bi tha most dilishus lemonade and newspaper.” Not bad.

Hilariously, her partner Fie went home with the day’s take in her pocket. When Molli Malou discovered all the money was gone she began to cry.

“That’s a good lesson,” I told her, “always keep an eye on your business partners!“

She ran over to Fie’s house full of fury and came back smiling with more than her share of the profits. Fie doesn’t care about money, Molli Malou explained, she’s just absent-minded.

Another Facebook photo worth remembering is the back door to the Nordea over in Red Square (Bymidten). Still no stairs there. The bank is robbed so often maybe it’s a trap: they’re hoping one day at least one robber will try to flee out the back door, trip, and break his leg. (Just a week or two ago they were robbed by a duo so clueless that when the robber ran out of the bank the driver of his getaway moped had to holler, “over here, dummy, I’m over here!”)

Egmont Digital took a tour of the old Carlsberg brewery as a team-building thing on St. Patrick’s Day. Carlsberg shuttered up its Frederiksberg factory a couple of years ago and is now manufacturing outside of the city. (And doing very well: you should start experiencing their “That calls for a Carlsberg” campaign any day now.) We began the tour with a viewing of the world’s largest beer bottle collection, which passed the 20.000 bottle mark a day or two after our visit. The tour guide was very excited about that.

Unfortunately there wasn’t much he wasn’t excited about. He was very long-winded, and it all came from prepared scripts he’d clearly delivered a thousand times. It was like he had an on button but no fast forward, skip, pause, or stop buttons. So as it poured rain upon us, he carried on his tour of the grounds as though it were a lovely spring day. Here you see him going on and on while most of my colleagues huddle beneath the very narrow eaves of one of the buildings.

Can you just feel the misery?

And did you know the swastika used to be one of their symbols? They dropped it in the 40s. I forget why.

March also saw the official opening of the sandbox, much earlier than it should have been opened. This was also chronicled on Facebook.

Soon the weather was improving rapidly, though, and it was time to give the apple tree its annual haircut… get a load of our hippie tree before I pulled out the clippers!

And look at him now!

The patio furniture came out warily…

And the sandbox became more and more pleasant.

There are two tricks with apple trees, by the way — I write this mostly for myself in the future. The first is that you always want to do away with any branches that (a) grow inward, (b) cross other branches, (c) are too low or too high, (d) are barren of buds, or (e) bother you aesthetically or get in your way or scratch your face when you mow the lawn. The second is that in trimming the branches you aren’t doing away with, you trim them 3-4 buds in: that is, the outermost end of each branch is usually devoid of buds; the buds only appear as you get closer to the trunk. Count the first 3 or 4 buds in toward the trunk, then snip. You can actually see how right it looks.

The supermoon just never came out well on any of our cameras. We had poor Yasmine out there with us snapping away with her own, too. All any of us got was crap like this:

Molli Malou made me a birthday card and even included a balloon in my favorite color! She thoughtfully stapled the balloon to the card so it wouldn’t get lost.

“It says ’til far,’ Molli Malou,” I pointed out. “But shouldn’t it say ‘To Daddy?'”

“I don’t know how to spell Daddy.”

We corrected that on the spot.

The inside of the card was also Danish:

“Telyke far” = “Tillykke, far” = “Congratulations, Daddy!”

Meanwhile, Maddie is playing with hats.

… while big sister loses more teeth.

This is possibly the most unflattering picture of Molli Malou taken since she had the gunk wiped off after her delivery in 2004. I apologize to everyone, most of all her, for that, but here’s the deal, future Molli Malou: you had gone to bed and it was way past your bed time and you kept fiddling with your tooth as you lay there until finally it came out, along with a lot of blood. You came running into our bedroom freaking out about the blood but excited also. I only had time to take one picture before Mor rushed you off into the bathroom to deal with the blood.

So I took a shot the next morning and it wasn’t quite so bad.

In preparing to accommodate Yasmine, our temporary au pair, and with an eye on the bedroom shuffle we’re going to execute upon her departure, we thought it was time to get Maddie out of her caged bed. (Mostly because for the first time ever she’d crawled up into it on her own.) So we gave that a whirl.

She was so excited!

So cozy!

So comfy!

So free…

So bored…

So independent…

So gone:

Long night short: after three hours of being surprised in our room every fifteen minutes by a wandering Maddie, we finally boarded her back up in her cage. We’ll give it another go in a few weeks.

Maddie had also been fixating on buses lately. Trine said every time they were going to or from vuggestue and a bus roared by on Kirkeværløsevej, Maddie would get hysterical — “See bus! Bus! Maddie bus! Maddie bus!” So one Saturday I promised to take her for a bus and train ride.

She was beside herself: “Maddie bus train! Daddy drive bus train! Daddy Maddie bus train!”

Here she is on the train platform spotting the arrival of our train.

Riding in a train! It’s like Disneyland for her!

And the bus! What a delight!

It would have been for me, too, if the stupid driver hadn’t ignored our stop request until we were half a mile past our stop, then pulled abruptly into a field to let us out because he felt so bad about missing our signal.

Maybe he needed a visit from Dr Maddie.

Not just a doctor… also an artist.

…like her sister…

There need to be a lot of pictures of her in this shirt.

The cats are thriving and are revealing themelves to be brilliant hunters. If you’re ever in the market for a dead bird or mouse, we’ve got you covered. (Even more fun: every time we find a new dead critter in the house, Molli Malou won’t let us throw it out until she’s had friends come over to look at it.)

Spring means an hour of every day on the swingset.

And nest-building for the local birds. Maybe Molli Malou feels guilty about all the birds who become homeless because they can’t pay their mortgages after losing a wormwinner to Charlie or Emma?

Two words: nu tella.

Spring also means princess and tea parties.

…and backbreaking labor digging potato patches.

Quick, art quiz: identify the medium as quickly as you can!

Maybe it’s a little easier this way:

Or closer up:

Got it? If not, here’s the full context:

Yes, it’s a work entitled “spaghetti hurled to floor by raving two-year-old.” My first instinct was of course to yell my head off and tell Maddie how bad she was.

My second was, Hey, that looks kind of cool, where’s the camera?

The artist is also a biker.

And a miner.

And just an absolute clone of her big sister at the same age.

We keep getting love letters from big sister.

…and she happily interprets anything we can’t quite read on our own.

…except when she’s not so sure herself what she wrote:

That’s it for the pictures.

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One of the reasons I completely reset my computer to its factory settings was that it kept randomly shutting itself off. It did that most often when I was making videos, to the extent that I gave up on it last fall after losing my wonderful 15-carefully-edited-minutes video of the Lee visit for the tenth time. I was hopeful after doing the reset, and realizing the real problem was a heat/fan issue easily solved by propping the laptop up on some Legos for better ventilation, that I would at long last be able to edit videos again. Spent hours rebuilding the Lee visit video again last weekend, and alas it’s a problem with Windows Moviemaker. Tried installing the old version of Nero I still had on DVD: the DVD was so old some of the files were corrupted and it couldn’t be installed. Tried a trial version of another product, Movavi, and that failed me also. Anyone have a good video editing suggest other than “buy a Mac”?

It’s crushing because there’s so much great video, and it’s so easy to edit with a competent piece of editing software.

Both girls are thriving. Maddie hasn’t come any further along with her potty training, mostly because we haven’t been forcing it on her since we know they’re not doing anything for her at vuggestue, but once the weather warms up I’m sure it’ll just be a matter of weeks: she can run around bare-assed all weekend and find the potty whenever she needs it. (She is immediate in her demands for a new diaper once she’s soiled it.) In any case, I’m assuming she’ll be off diapers by the time we come to the states in July. 2½ is right about where Molli Malou went off them too.

Maddie’s also suddenly flinging sentences around, experimenting with pronouns. She called Molli Malou “her” once last week, which was a big breakthrough. (“Give to her!“) She’s also bossy as all hell and making interesting abstract leaps. Last summer whenever she wanted to swing and we went outside and the swing was still wet with dew or rain, I could say “Aw, hon, the swing’s all wet. No swinging. Let’s do something else.”

When it happened this weekend, she just turned to me and said, “Daddy get paper. Daddy dry it.”

I thought it was so clever until a little while later, when after riding Molli Malou’s scooter around awkwardly for a few minutes she got bored with it and just dropped it in the middle of the terrace.

“Put that away if you’re done with it, sweetie,” I said.

She stared back at me.

“Put it back,” I said.

“Daddy will put it back,” she said, and she waddled off to her next adventure.

Now it’s a recurring theme: “Daddy will clean it up.” “Daddy will put it away.” “Daddy will do it.”

That doesn’t apply, of course, to the things I am supposed to do that she would prefer to do herself. “Daddy not do it! Maddie do it self!” — these words come out when it’s time to pour a cup of milk, put on a new diaper, brush her teeth, get dressed or undressed, operate a blowtorch. And she is fierce in her determination.

She’s also good at requesting things not happen, which is also new.

“Daddy not sing,” I hear quite often.

Or: “Not milk. Soda.”

And she invents rules for herself based loosely on rules she’s heard before.

“No candy. First bed, then candy.”

“No candy at all, Maddie. Bed, yes, but no candy tomorrow.”

She nods.

“First bed, Maddie sleep, then candy.”

“No candy.”

“No candy, then bed. First bed, then sleep, then candy.”

And so on. It’s amazing how stubborn and demanding someone can be with a 100-word vocabulary.

Molli Malou, meanwhile, is caught up in the politics of school. She’s doing great and the teachers and her peers seem to love her, but when the boys tease her she’s convinced they hate her and that they hate her because she’s done something wrong. There’s no talking her out of it, it’s really deep and sad and horrible to her. She and her girlfriends have those nasty girl fights where two turn on one, or three on two, or one against another — where instead of slugging each other so I just have to break up a fight and dry a bloody nose, they… well, they do all that Machiavelli-on-steroids girl stuff, freezing each other out, playing one another off one another, politicking, lobbying, gossiping, snitching, undermining. It’s terrifying to watch.

# # #

I’ve been showing Molli Malou pictures and videos of New York to get her excited about it. She is very excited about it, in a sweet and clueless way that I think is really just her trying to act excited because she can tell I want her to be. In reality she’s much more excited about seeing her family, and I think that’s just as it should be.