Tivoli, Fishing, Picnic

Ah, spring.

Finally time for the year’s first trip to Tivoli. The excitement was… muted.

…but only until we got our bracelets. Here is the first Tivoli ride of Maddie’s life.

I was fortunate enough to ride shotgun on her first Veteranbil drive.

And Molli Malou is now tall enough to ride the Karavanen kiddie roller coaster without any adult accompaniment!

(She chose not to avail herself of that liberty on this trip.)

Meanwhile, the Carousel elicited some of the strangest expressions…

Maddie’s expression below is bewildering to me. Is it horror? Shock? What?

And here it’s like she’s all, “Oh my god, can I tell anyone what I just saw?” while Molli Malou looks more jaded than I’ve ever seen her. (I’ve never seen her look at all jaded, so that’s not saying much.) Like, “You think I’m impressed? I can’t even measure how unimpressed I am.”

And with Maddie in the beloved green-and-yellow sundress, some visions just took me through a time warp that made me realize why Aunt Deb and Uncle Gene always catch their breath over certain photos of Molli Malou in this or that outfit: It’s Maddie, and she’s gorgeous, but it’s like a telescope looking back four years at Molli Malou… you half expect Liam to come waddling in from out of frame…

But Molli Malou is a big girl now.

Maddie enjoys the xylophones under Jørgen’s tutelage…

…and is comforted by mormor after tripping over her own two feet.

After all these months of trying to teach her to chew with her mouth closed, maybe I’m finally getting through to her…

The day ran longer than we’d planned, and we ended on the ride where you have to pedal to make it go up. I rode with Maddie and Molli Malou rode behind us, by herself.

Maddie wanted to go up and stay up, but this was the weekend my knee had gone out on me. Walking around had been hard enough, pedaling the damn thing was a special kind of torment. It was a long ride and my favorite moment was when it finally came to an end.

Except, of course, for the first time in the history of our visits to Tivoli, the line for the ride had tapered down to nothing, so as Maddie squealed “mere! mere!” and Molli Malou cried, “mere! mere!” and I whimpered, “make it stop,” the ride lurched back to life.

…And the funny thing is, the girls were having so much fun I suppose I didn’t mind shredding my knee for them. In fact, not long afterwards Molli Malou talked me into a tour on Karavanen with her (she’d already done it twice with Trine). Squeezing into the tiny roller coaster car was an altogether new way of wrenching my knee apart, but was also worth the sacrifice in the end.

Karavanen normally gives you four times around the track. The crowds had so thinned out that we were lucky enough to get eight.

After I peeled myself out of the ride, my knee went home without me.

A peacock walked by.

And of course, like a good day at Bakken, a good day at Tivoli ends with too much ice cream.

That was all late April. Now suddenly it’s May and the girls are waking up with the sun at like 5:30 on a Saturday morning — actually the sun’s been up for about an hour by then — and there’s nothing to be done but schlep down to the lake with them in the hopes of maybe just glimpsing a fish.

No fish (again), but Molli Malou caught here share of critters.

Back home…

Remember the tulips Molli Malou got at Tivoli Tulip day two years ago? They’re blooming.

Sunday we attended a campfire for Molli Malou’s school class. It was up behind the little development by the swimhall.

I love the green fields and blue sky as a backdrop so I tried to get the girls to pose together, but I’d already used up all their patience with cameras.

I love the next one: Molli Malou simply turns her back on me in rage and Maddie’s expression is like, “Come on, Daddy, I can watch Barney forty-seven times in a row and even I’ve had enough of the goddam pictures.”

So… Molli Malou… you gonna let me get at least one shot, or should we take that tv out of your room?

Hey Maddie… phhhhhhhlllllt! Fart! Burp! phlllllllt!

Molli Malou is in the walnut tree on the right, in the picture below, and Maddie is in the princess palace. And you can also see the Snow Cloud tree we planted a few weeks ago in between the walnut trees. Barely.

And now it’s late on a Wednesday night, so we’re done.