October had a rough start and a really rough ending. I don’t want to gloss over rough times in this blog, since it’s otherwise such a forthright chronicle. But there obviously aren’t lovely stories and pictures of the bad moments in our lives. So we’ll just say: the month got off to a rough start mainly because our life got a little crazy hectic, and a lousy finish mainly because of Nana’s injury and illness. We won’t dwell on any of those things. And we’ll skip right over a personal milestone that occurred this month because, well, it’s Daddy maintaining the blog and Daddy doesn’t think we need to do much more than say: yeah, so there was also that. Period.
(Ha ha ha, that’s how Daddy rolls.)
I had an abrupt, unplanned business trip to Stockholm to start the month. These are just little day-trips, like doing NY-Bos. You get up ungodly early, fly up, have a meeting, fly back, some home, and realize you burned a whole day for a three hour meeting.
But I felt optimistic in the morning. I actually get fast-tracked through security these days which gives me time to do things like lurk around the airport taking pictures.
I got a nice window seat and was able to get some cool pictures: in this first one you can see the teardrop of Amager hanging off the coast of Sjælland:
In this next one, a little farther north, I think you can clearly see Furesø — it’s the big lake about a quarter of the way in from the left and a quarter of the way down from the top. Then, just below and a little to the left of its “bottom,” I think you can see Søndersø. I could be wrong, but it seems about right:
Sweden actually looked attractive from the air. Amazing, considering what a foul and pestilential land it actually is.
Things went pear-shaped when I got a text from Norwegian on my from the office to Stockholm-Arlanda at about three in the afternoon, telling me that my flight was delayed 5 hours (!), but that I should probably report to the gate anyway, just in case. In the end, it amounted to an almost eight hour delay.
Here’s how that that “København Copenhagen” sign looked by the time I got back (about 17 hours after the morning picture):
Here’s how I started the next day at work:
The following morning while bringing Maddie to school I remembered that I had promised to get more pictures of the “everyday moments” into the blog, since those dull and repetitious moments of routine activity actually constitute the majority of our time at this point in life. (It was a promise more to myself than to anyone else.)
That weekend, the first in October, was Maddie’s first-ever “hyttetur” (literally “cottage trip”) with her class. Given the kids’ ages, at least one parent had to spend the night with their kid, and I was lucky enough to win the chance to spend a weekend with thirty-some 6- and 7-year-olds out in the woods. You all know how much I love camping, and being around huge crowds of kids, so you can only imagine my delight.
But you cannot imagine Maddie’s. Nor could I. Which sort of somehow ended up making the weekend not so bad after all. Also, after the kids went to bed pretty much all the parents hung out, cranked some music, and drank too much. Good times.
Here are the kids shortly after arrival being apprised of the weekend’s schedule (Maddie is kind of center front, in the blue jeans and blue shirt with her hands on her knees):
Aw, hell, let me zoom in a little.
Here she is at play in the woods om her own:
And here she is hard at work in the woods with, if I recall, Sara and Alma and maybe Josefine, and also possibly Andreas or Harald, where they set up a “business” because they all wanted “jobs.” It was an activity of their own design. I was kind of impressed, even though their business model was… well, it had something to do with sticks and ropes or something. I refrained from investing any serious capital.
Mika, right. The boy in the business was Mika. Harald and Andreas came in later as customers.
There was a big treasure hunt and all the parents had to man one station on the trail. My station required each team of four kids to carry a “heavy” log about 10 meters. It was such a stupid task I made them all make up a song to entertain me, and to throw in lots of yarghs! and yohohos! on pain of death. I have no pictures from my own station, since I was obviously too busy making threats, but here’s a shot of another one of the stations.
As evening began its approach I noticed a bunch of parents milling around at the edge of the property. Harald’s dad was handing out beers. I joined them. My optimism rose. While standing there drinking beer and reveling in our mutual misery — I mean, our joy and gladness — I got what I still think would have been a spectacular photo of the sun setting over “Kirkestien” (“the church path”).
Dinner was a simple affair.
And Maddie ate with all her best manners on display.
(That’s a cherry tomato in each cheek.)
Dusk was approaching, and a low mist rose up out of the fields around us.
We took a long walk with the kids to try and sap them of the last of their energy.
…Then entertained them with Up.
As I mentioned, once all the kids were asleep the parents had a grand old time. And then it was morning.
Here are Harald and Josefine on one of the swings, future Maddie:
And here’s Maddie seeing how high she dares to climb up a log.
At last it was snobrød time, but the boys were impatient for the fire to be ready for snobrød so they started impaling sticks with all kinds of stuff — apples, mushrooms, younger siblings — and roasting away.
And that was the end of Maddie’s first Hyttetur.
One one of our regular weekend visits to Hareskov (the darkness had not yet driven us out of the woods during the week, nor had she yet gone into heat), Didi was romping merrily around me when a fox suddenly darted into the path about 50 yards ahead of us. It stopped and stared. Genius Didi didn’t even notice. The fox kept staring. I was afraid Didi would notice, give chase, and disappear, so I just shouted some loud nonsense words and clapped my hands wildly. The fox fled. (And Didi steered a pretty wide berth around me the rest of the walk.)
Didi is not shy about running ahead of us — waaaaay ahead of us — to get her end-of-the-romp swim. She’s the speck of white in the center of the photo. Down to her left is the little pond she likes to flop around in after her romps — and since she’s usually filthy by then, so we let her. So she runs way ahead of you, but very often stops at that point right there until she sees you break the crest of the hill (from where I took this photo), at which point she goes galloping down the hill to her left and into the lake.
CLASS PICTURES!
Molli Malou, 5.b:
Maddie, 1.b:
Molli Malou, 5.b, age 11:
Maddie, 1.b, age 6:
October also saw “Søby” (“Lake City”) week… that’s when all the kids are assigned businesses of some kind or other and the whole school becomes a buzzing hive of entrepreneurs. They run their business in shifts, of course, so that on their “off” shifts the kids can run around spending their “Lake City cash” (a play currency, but pegged to the crown), and they learn some valuable lessons in supply and demand, economy, and so on.
Each business has an equal distribution of kids from each grade, and they all work really well together. Maddie worked at the Gallery and Molli Malou at the “Smuk og Dejlig” Salon. That’s Danish for “Beautiful and Lovely,” and is the name of an iconic Danish pop song that they played in a continuous loop in their “store.”
On the last day of Søby, parents are invited to attend, and can spend play and real money at all the businesses. (We bough quite a few bookmarks from Maddie’s gallery.)
Here’s Maddie in line to have her face painted at her own gallery.
And here’s Molli Malou consulting with a client at the salon. She’s helping her choose a color for her nails.
…and then applying the chosen polish.
Another picture from everyday life? Here’s how my bicycle seat has looked for the last, oh, I don’t know, two or three years? It got a little tear in it, once, which I patched with a little duct tape. Then it developed another. And another. And finally I decided that to stop them from spreading, I’d just quit pussyfooting around:
(“Fortunately” my handbrake stopped working earlier this fall, my chain had become rusty and slack, and my rear tire had an impossibly slow leak that wasn’t really a flat but was never, ever full; and so at one point this month I brought the bike into the shop and just asked the mechanic to make it all good again. It wasn’t cheap, but I have a seat without duct tape, a handbrake that works, a spiffy and shiny new chain, and nice tight fully-inflated tires. I honestly feel like I got a brand new bike. Whee!)
Trine sent me this picture from a goodbye party for one of her colleagues at work. So Daddy isn’t the only one whose colleagues get a little crazy sometimes….
Everyday moments…
By now we’re warming up for Halloween.
The next picture isn’t so interesting in itself:
…except that for some reason I had been browsing old pictures at some point and realized I had taken the pictures below exactly five years earlier (to the day), in exactly the same spot.
Halloween would just never arrive!…
Fall vacation came, as always, in October, and although we didn’t do much out of the ordinary (I actually worked all week), we did host Maggie for a few days.
AS SEEN ON FACEBOOK: walking Didi down Gyvelvej one day, we are both suddenly startled by the sound of a lot of birds cawing. We look up and see a kind of Ultimate Aerial Rorschach Test:
Everyday living…
This is Maddie getting ready for her first vlog. (She made two in October.) You can just see how proud and confident she is!
And here are links to both the vlogs:
(You can share those links, if you want… they’re just sitting on the Justmorons.com server, like all the pictures here.)
Everyday living, autumnal edition:
Everyday living, homework hygge edition:
Everyday living, “Can I just read myself and Wuffi to sleep with one of my old baby books?” edition:
October foliage in Hareskov: it’s nice, but it ain’t New England.
More homework hygge:
The Friday night of fall vacation we made our annual Halloween season visit to Tivoli. We’ve all been through this so many times you probably already know what pictures you’re going to see.
The next two shots are of Molli Malou and Maddie watching the mainstage showing of “Bloody Mary,” a frightful dance show that wasn’t really frightful and wasn’t very good dancing. The plot was a bunch of teenager’s wandering into the home of a woman who turns out to be a terrible witch with a houseful of monsters. Somehow this causes the teenagers, witch, and monsters to break out into dance numbers.
Meh.
The reaction shot of Molli Malou says it all.
Maddie performed a wedding ceremony for Wuffi and Kat.
How perfect is this moon a few nights before Halloween?
And how perfect are the girls’ pumpkins!
Molli Malou’s:
And Maddie’s:
Everyday living: this is Didi being left for the day during the work/school week. All the doors to the foyer and hallway are closed and she’s left with a big chew treat and told, “Pas på huset!” (Take care of the house!)
I mentioned in a chat with pop-pop that every Friday at Responsive the bar-cart rolled out around 3pm. He sounded skeptical so I sent him this picture, which could also be introduced as “Everyday living, Friday 15:00 edition.”
Look at this picture and see if you notice anything unusual.
You probably didn’t — it’s hard to tell — but that “crop top” is actually an old pair of Maddie’s pants that were too small, and when I said we should throw them out she said, “Why not just turn them into a crop top?” So Molli Malou helped her do precisely that.
Here’s the dorsal view:
Molli Malou fell in love with this big old eggshell-colored, leather easy chair at the Red Cross thrift store in Bymidten. It was only 800 kroner and she swore it was exactly what she’d wanted her whole life.
I said it would take up too much space in her room. Trine said it was too ugly. Behold the disappointment.
(But Molli was right about one thing: it was about the most comfortable thing I’d ever sat in.)
AS SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “How cool, Daddy! I never saw one of these before!” Yes, she actually said those exact words, even though I believe they were empirically false. (But from the perspective of her memory they were probably true.)
Halloween at last! Molli was… a rainbow-barfing zombie.
Maddie the witch/zombie with the twins (Sara on the left, Andrea on the right).
Maddie did her trick and treating with the twins and their father; Molli Malou went out with Josefine. Trine and I doled out candy to the kids who came to our door — not so many, this year, but enough that it’s clear Halloween is finally here to stay.
Everyday living, Didi the study in fine posture edition:
We’re not going to dwell on the end of October for reasons described up top. Let’s all focus on how much better November is going to be.
November, woo-hoo!
love the everyday shots!
Great post. Thanks.