This is the first post since the Budapest Trip in the middle of March. Much has happened.
As you all know (since I mentioned it in the aforementioned post), I was let go by Issuu a few days after we got back from Budapest. My severance package covers me through the end of June. I was confident I could find a job swiftly, since I had been getting persistent nudges from a couple of companies that had been stalking me throughout my time at Issuu, but I was also looking forward to a lot of time off. Well, I got some time off, and have done a lot of writing and have worked out enough to lose fifteen pounds, and have had a lot of good times with the girls, but I am back to work this coming Monday — freelancing through the end of May, then starting my new job as a “Senior CRM and Marketing Intelligence Consultant” at Adnuvo on June 1. (And yes, they know I will be taking a long vacation this summer!)
So it’s back to the daily grind on Monday. Tomorrow is a national holiday, and Friday børnehaven is closed, so today is actually the last unemployed “home alone” day for me — meaning I had better get the blog up-to-date while I can.
I described the “Easter Wandering” (Påskevandring) at Værlæse Kirke in the last post, but I didn’t share any pictures of the event. So let’s start there, with Molli Malou singing her heart out with the children’s choir:
…while Maddie is so enthralled she bounds from her chair to watch big sister singing up close!
Here’s the priest taking us through the last supper, with the choir members playing the parts of Jesus and the Apostles:
And here’s Maddie lighting a candle at Golgotha:
So much for the Easter Wandering!
The next picture is also from March. It was one of those Saturday mornings — or Easter vacation mornings — where Trine was sleeping in and I had been futzing around on the computer, when suddenly Maddie was calling out to me: “Daddy, Daddy, come see! Do you want to see? Come see!”
No, she hadn’t just lost a fight in the kindergarten boxing ring — she had just found all the toy makeup she’d gotten for Christmas and gone hog wild with it. (Her eyes are closed so you can see her eye shadow.)
At some point the next day, I believe, I was summoned again: “Daddy, Daddy, come see! See what Molli Malou did to my face! It’s a surprise!”
(Words every parent wants to hear, right?)
Well, bless her heart, Molli Malou had done just what Maddie wanted: she had painted her into a frog. And given herself a lovely flower on her own face.
Easter coming up! Time to dye the eggs:
For some reason all Danish egg producers have started stamping all their eggs with logos or little texts. Are they doing that in the states, too? It makes it hell to design a truly fancy egg. Also, the PAAS kits are still unavailable here, so we’re going to have to try and stock up this summer.
Easter morning! Time to find out where that wascally wabbit has hidden them! (The snow and leafless flora were not photoshopped in: our spring has just been that bad.)
Easter dinner!
Easter dessert! Hand-made confections assembled by Trine, Molli Malou, and Maddie:
Note to future self: teach the girls to eat chocolate-covered things with a fork and knife. That way pretty little dresses may stay pretty longer (examine Maddie’s fingertips closely and use linear regression to plot that trajectory forward…).
Now comes our CSI technology moment: in the full-size version of this picture, taken during our Easter Skype call with Nana and Pop-Pop, you actually can zoom in to see that it’s Maddie holding the camera that’s taking this picture. (In the “my video” picture-in-picture that’s blotting out most of Pop-Pop’s face.) So let’s not all snicker so much the next time one of those CSI hot-shots zooms in on the reflection in a piece of glass in the corner of the dressing room — to find the face of the unlikely killer!
The next picture looks like a “first day of school” picture, but it’s not. It’s actually even more momentous. It’s Molli Malou embarking on her first-ever unchaperoned walk to school. (It has a second purpose we’ll get to later.)
My heart was in my throat until the moment she called me to say she’d made it there safely. And I thought, how terrifying it must have been in the old days to send a kid off to school on their own like that without a phone with which to confirm they’d made it!
But then, she’s getting so grown up… probably she could have handled it months ago. But her ability to handle it was never the actual issue!
Maddie and Harald playtime!
Princess playtime!
Maddie in the Lady Gaga wig! (Called such because for a while Molli Malou used to wear this wig, sunglasses, and funky clothes, then run around the house calling herself Lady Gaga… then she’d take them off in another room, saunter into wherever we were, and say she’d been watching tv in her room, had anything interesting happened?)
Molli Malou is becoming a dangerously good baker. Her products are increasingly edible and sometimes, as in this case, even delicious! But she’s not very good at clean-up, so we’re reconsidering the rules on baking.
Zoe Bland and her friend Kiersten were with us for about 2½ days in April, and we hit all the usual tourist spots with them — sometimes with the family in tow, sometimes just me with the two of them. Most of these pictures speak for themselves.
The next one doesn’t speak for itself: it’s just a picture I took because I was so infuriated by these idiots who pushed themselves through us — with three little girls in our midst! — to have a better view of Nyhavn. So I started taking pictures of them and speaking loudly about how lovely the view was — how well the pony-tail juxtaposed the waters of the canal… but it didn’t help. Jerks. Still fuming.
Although I did finally force myself in front of them for one shot.
The next shot was accidental, but I just love it as a photograph. “Molli Malou in Motion.”
(I don’t know why she chose to run in big circles around Rådhusplads… probably because she could.)
Do you know the story of Chrysanthemum? It’s a children’s book about the eponymous little mouse girl, who loves her name until some mean girls at school make fun of it for being so long. And flowery. And scarcely fitting on a name tag. Until they get a pregnant music teacher named Delphinium, at which point all the girls wish they had a long flowery name and Chrysanthemum realizes her own name is and always has been just perfect. Anyway, it was one of Molli Malou’s favorites (I wonder why?), and recently I thought it was a good time for Maddie to get into it. She loved it… until this page:
Chrysanthemum has a nightmare that the wicked classmate Victoria is a giant, and that she herself is a real Chrysantemum, and that Victoria is plucking all her petals!
Maddie was stunned by this page. I kept reading the story, but she kept reaching out with her little hands to flip back to it.
“Victoria is bad,” she would murmur, “she’s bad!“
“Only in Chrysanthemum’s bad dream,” I would explain… but it didn’t help. She was terrified of that page, absolutely mesmerically horrified, yet she kept flipping back to it. Even when we were done with the book, she would grab it out of my hands and find the page and stare at it.
It was all she would talk about most of the next day. For whole days afterward whenever anyone new came into the house, or on Skype, she would grab the book and show them this page, often without any explanation.
“Look,” she would say. “See?”
We are no longer allowed to read it to her because of “the scary dream.”
Which would be hard to understand, except that during Easter Vacation we all watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and I kept telling Molli Malou how badly the Kidnapper had scared me as a kid. I was trying to buck her up so she wouldn’t be embarrassed to be scared. But she just laughed at him, as I probably ought to have been able to foresee. How can a girl who has been raised on Shrek and Monsters Inc, who has seen Voldemort, who has caught inadvertent glimpses of grisly scenes in CSI, Bones, Breaking Bad, Criminal Minds — how can such a child be scared of a skinny little dude with a long nose prancing around a castle that she herself has been to and has happy memories of?
And yet that guy had terrified me… so I have to allow that Maddie’s fear of Chrysanthemum’s bad dream is perfectly normal.
Anyway, back to our touring…
The Museum of Freedom (Frihedsmuseet) has burned down just a few days earlier: you can see the cops and firemen still investigating. Sad. They do believe it was arson.
Rosenborg is so beautiful in the full bloom of Danish summer, and so cold and forbidding the other 51 weeks of the year…
Well, no sooner had Zoe and Kiersten left than suddenly the weather began to turn for the better (it was by now May). It was finally time to hit our outdoor projects: restaining the deck, replacing the backyard rose/vegetable garden with more lawn, and expanding our driveway.
First, the deck. BEFORE:
AFTER:
Now, I didn’t take any before pictures of the driveway because the job wasn’t really planned. We were just kind of trimming it a little, and hating the big prickly bush with thorns like carpenter’s nails, and we started probing the ground to see how far deep into the brush the bricks went — and we next thing I know I’ve spent two days removing about 7-8 square meters of 2-3 meter high growth. Including the total annihilation of everything but the stumps of the Devil Trees, so named by me because I am still covered from head to tow in lacerations and puncture wounds from those damned thorns. (I will root out the stumps and salt the earth where they grew!)
So for comparison let’s have another look at the “Goodbye, Molli” pictures from above:
See, it had gotten so tight we could barely get the car through it! There were mere inches to spare on either side, and there was always a risk of scratching the sides of the car with the Devil Tree thorns.
And now:
As for the little garden: we did do a lot of the clearing last summer, which I chronicled on this blog. Here’s how the little backyard garden looked last July:
And by summer’s end I had hacked down all the high growth, removed all the stacked stones, and shoveled away about 15% of the dirt. Like a fool I took that dirt to the dump. This summer I did things differently, and look what we have now!
“But wait,” you say, “where did all the dirt go, if not to the dump?”
Well, it doesn’t read well in the following photographs, but I just used it all to fill in more of the sloping garden in front of the girls’ bedrooms.
# # #
That concludes the photographic portion of this post. Once again there are many fun videos from this period that I need to get to, but I think I’ve been saying that since about 2009, so there’s a lot of catching up to do.
In gathering pictures for Trine’s 40th last year I went through the old Kammer family slides and noticed that a big percentage of them were damaged, and many were decaying. But the slide and negative scanner I’d bought was lousy and stopped working so I had to return it. With all the time I thought I’d have on my hands this spring, it seemed like a good opportunity to get a new one and digitize all those slides before they disintegrated. So we have a great scanner now, and it works well, and I’ve digitized one whole set of slides — but there are about 15 sets in all, and now I have no time to do all the scanning. Argh!
(Also on the rainy-day list is the digitization of all our old videos — both VHS and the little cartridges. We don’t have too many of those though, so maybe I will just bring them to America and pay to have them converted by that place in Old Saybrook.)
# # #
Molli Malou is doing well in school and her activities. She has chosen to replace swimming classes with another sport, probably (to her mother’s enormous delight) handball. Piano and singing are going well, and the big audition for DR’s Children’s Choir is just a few weeks away (poor Molli is very anxious about the audition, on the one hand, but not very interested in practicing as much as she should on the other).
I had another follow-up meeting with her teachers on the topic of the difficult friendship (see previous posts); Trine was unable to make it, so it was just me and three female teachers. They agreed unanimously that Molli Malou was exhibiting “pubescent behaviors.”
“It’s not ununusal,” said her main (and wonderful) teacher Helle, “It’s a known phenomenon, kids are reaching puberty earlier and earlier, both physically and emotionally, my own 11-year-old, for example…”
The other two women nodded knowingly and in full agreement.
I have never, ever, ever so badly wanted Trine at my side.
The last of the projects to complete before I get back into work life is the painting and redecoration of Molli Malou’s room. She’s going to spend the weekend with Sofie and her famile at their summer house, so we have two days to make it habitable. It’s still a haphazard little girl’s room, and the goal is to make it a tidy big girl’s room… the kind of room where, I suppose, we can expect to see the modern equivalent of David Cassidy posters on the walls in just a few years.
Sigh.
# # #
Maddie is still in the Furious Fours: her fits are horrible and we’re doing all we can to stamp them out. It’s especially hard because, like her sister before her, she is so unutterably sweet and polite and adorable when she’s not in the throes of a fit. Then along comes a catalyst — it can be anything: an untied shoelace, a jammed kickstand, a tv commercial she doesn’t like — and all hell breaks loose. She stops using words and resorts to grunts and screams; she drops to the floor and shakes her head furiously no.
On the other hand, she is very interested in letters and numbers — and getting very facile at them. She can look at the on-screen TV guide, for example, and tell you what shows are coming up on Disney Junior because she recognizes the first few letters of each show’s name: Jungle Junction, Special Agent Oso, The Hive, Jake and the Neverland Pirates, Art Attack. She likes to play with numbers, adding and subtracting, and Molli Malou likes to help her. It’s charming to hear Molli Malou running Maddie through addition exercises!
Most significantly, though, Maddie transferred this Monday to the “Big Kids Group” at Børnehaven. They have much more responsibility for themselves now. They are the “seniors” of kindergarten, and the next step will be moving to “pre-0” at school itself! (Then 0-class, then first grade.) But all of that is many months away, and for now she is still puffed up proudly with satisfaction at being such a big girl.
That will have to be it for now.
Wonderful. Thanks for the update. Love the pictures and the stories.