Vacation Days / Ferie Dage

As already mentioned, the first half of our summer vacation was spent up at morfar’s house in Værløse, where we mostly did nothing. It’s worth noting that when we arrived, Molli was still very much in her crawling phase. She’d begun seriously walking on July 11th, and her progress had been consistent, but crawling remained her default mode of transportation. She loved crawling up and down the long central hallway of the house.

Molli always seems to learn quicker when she’s away from home, so Trine set her up with her own spoon at mealtime one night. While she’s almost entirely unaware of the location of her mouth when wielding a spoon, she does sometimes find it by pure random chance.

There aren’t that many pictures of the week up there, because, for the last time, mostly we did nothing and nothing isn’t very photogenic. On Saturday morning we drove up north to the summerhouse where the non-family part of Trine’s family was staying. That means Uffe and Jesper and Jacob and Joachim and Nikolai and Christian and Marie—the group usually referred to as “the cousins”—along with their mothers (Lise, Susanne, and Anne), significant others, and children.

The house belonged to the three sisters’ mother, and was an important part of all the cousins’ childhoods. I’ve heard stories about the place for years. It was mentioned repeatedly at the grandmother’s funeral earlier this year.

It doesn’t actually look like much when you get there (this is a shot from the back yard):

…but what it looks like has nothing to do with its importance. What matters are all the memories everyone has of the place, which seem to be the kind of memories this next generation will begin cranking out in the relatively near future:

(That’s Molli in the wagon with Nikolai’s daughter Emilie in pink and Jacob’s daughter Anna in white.)

The girls were wonderful to Molli and Molli loved every minute of it (although she sometimes looked more stupefied than excited).

There was military discipline at the summerhouse, as there would have to be to ensure the meals and chores were taken care of for 30-some people of virtually every age group. There was a chart on the porch wall in which every chore was assigned. We no sooner arrived than Trine was inked in for potato peeling and I was assigned to the grill barricades. It took a lot of grills to prepare the meet for 30 people to eat at once.

After the meal the girls resumed their games. I’ve already identified all of them but Sofie, Emilie’s little sister (squatting to the left of Molli). It’s interesting to note that “the cousins” consist of six boys and one girl… and so far their offspring consist of three girls and one boy.

Molli was all cranked up that night, and gave no sign of tiring. Here she is about nine o’clock, an hour after her normal bed-time, looking around for the next big adventure (the damp spot on her sweatshirt is sheer drool, believe it or not).

To try and conk her out a little Trine and I took her for a stroll through the dirt roads around the area.

We walked her and walked her and walked her, but she was uninterested in even trying to sleep. She was practically doing somersaults in the pram. Finally we gave up. We parked her by the side of the house thinking we’d just join everyone else enjoying drinks and coffee and candy and playing poker and board games by candlelight in the backyard, and that Molli would eventually fall asleep on her own. Sure enough, after a few minutes she seemed to have quieted down. We tiptoed around the corner of the house expecting to find her dozing happily in her pram.

Here’s what we saw.

She was sitting bolt upright, sucking her sut and peering into the darkness waiting eagerly for some new adventure to befall her, much too excited to sleep.

She did fall asleep eventually, though, and not long after 11 we loaded her into the car and began the drive back. She woke up around halfway through the one-hour trip and chattered happily in the back seat the rest of the way back to morfar’s. Mercifully she finally gave in to slumber once we loaded her into the portacrib in the house.

Naturally after all that excitement she had to see her boyfriend and tell him all about it, so up came Liam (and family) the next afternoon.

There’s a hilarious video of Molli stealing a rice cake from him, taunting him with it, then eating it, but it’s very long and I have other videos to post tonight anyway. You’ll have to wait for your next box set to see that one.

Tuesday morning we came back to our own home. Molli was ecstatic to be home. And it was only when we got home that we realized, as I think I said in an earlier post, that she had changed dramatically. When we left, she was a crawler. But she came back a walker.

(And sometimes a squatter.)

One of the disadvantages of her walking I hadn’t fully thought through was the increased availability of her hands. She can now very, very quickly wander off into another room, get her hands on something she shouldn’t, and begin eating or smashing it. One of her favorite targets is the kitchen cupboard in which we store all the pots and pans—and her cereal boxes. It’s latched, but she figured out how to work the latch ages ago. Now you can be sitting with her in the living room, and in mere seconds she can rumble into the kitchen, pop the latch, seize the powdered potatoes, and begin her wild rumpus. Here she is—busted.

You’ll notice the three cases of beer (left over from her birthday) stacked up behind her. You may recall her fondness for beer, which was evident as early as last Christmas season. You think we like beer? Wait til you download this video and see what determination really means (3.5 MB)!

I also thought I should include a little clip of Molli just toddling along as she always does these days. It’s nothing special, but it’s small and gives you a chance to see our toddlin’ Molli in action. She still walks like a drunk, but she no longer stumbles as often as one (1.5 MB).

That’s all…