Vores Egne Rigtige Prinsesse

If you haven’t downloaded it yet, be sure to scroll down and get the movie I posted earlier today. It’s a three-minute flick, but at 12MB it’s going to take a while to download even on broadband.

I promised last week I would follow Trine and Molli to their swim class for some pictures. (And video, which you can see in the movie.) Here’s Molli in her swimsuit:

The kids get a few minutes to swim around and get comfortable in the water with their attending parent before the class itself begins. You can see how hard it is for Molli to “get comfortable” in the water:

They’ve been taking this class for 4-5 weeks now, and this was my first time there. I was astonished at how confident and happy Molli was, and at the things Trine let Molli do. In the next picture Trine’s not even touching Molli!

Although the look of determination in this next pic makes me wonder if she’s really as happy as she looks in the water—if she enjoys swimming so much, why does she look so desperate to get out?

And here’s a final picture of Trine guiding her along on a kickboard.

I don’t have many still pictures from the swim because I was mainly taking video. See the movie!

Sunday we took an impromptu trip to Tivoli. While we were waiting for the bus on Godthåbsvej we let Molli stagger around the cafe park by the bus stop. (It was a cool, windy day, so the outdoor cafes weren’t open.) I took more pictures than I should have, and none of them are especially interesting—but I thought I’d post this one because it gives a sense of just how tiny Molli really is.

And here’s a shot of Tivoli’s main entrance in real Danish weather—not some postcard-perfect sunny day.

We didn’t know it beforehand, but apparently Sundays this summer, at least this month, have been special at Tivoli: real princesses (“rigtige prinsesser”) are granted free admission! (We don’t pay for Molli anyway, so it wouldn’t have made a difference if we had known.)

What’s a real princess, you ask? Any little girl in pink clothes and a crown, apparently. The park was lousy with them. There was a brigade of bear soldiers flanking a bear princess near the entrance to greet the children as they arrived. It was, I think, Molli’s first interaction with the Diplomatic Animal Corps.

She was especially mesmerized by the princess bear:

But she was easily distracted by everything going on around her:

She didn’t distinguish between the right honorable Diplomatic Animal Corps and the “real princesses” — she walked up to one little girl after another and grabbed at her in admiration.

Or maybe it was just mockery. I mean, look at that expression:

Once we got through the gauntlet of oversized teddy bears and cooing little princesses, we hustled Molli over to the playground where we always play with her. She smiled the moment she saw the big air trampoline, and here she is within seconds of being plopped down on it:

* * *

I should (we all should) be calling her Molli Malou rather than just Molli now, I guess. They asked us what to call her at vuggestue and we said Molli Malou, so that’s what they’re calling her. It’s what Trine calls her almost all the time now, and I’m getting better at it. (Although I’m just as likely to call her cutey, sweetie, beautiful, sunshine, angel, princess, or Scooter MacGregor.)

She’s started kissing us, now, which is a lovely thing. In the old days if you tried to kiss her, she’d do one of two things: either turn her head away from you, or open her mouth all the way and thrust her tongue up at you. Now she kind of tilts her head toward you and lets you kiss her lips. She doesn’t pucker or kiss back, but she seems to understand the gesture and doesn’t open her mouth up very often any more.

She’s also finally started exhibiting some separation anxiety. She freaked out when I dropped her at vuggestue this morning. I mean, she freaked out. She ran to the window and pressed her hands and face against it and wailed at me. Turned my heart to ash, though about thirty seconds later she was apparently over it. But they say she’s fussy after her naps, she’s short with us sometimes, and she threw her first temper tantrum on Trine yesterday.

She’s obeyed (or at least tried to obey) some of our requests this week, which is really strange. Last night she was playing with some little blocks, and Trine picked up the box they go in and said, “Go and find all the little blocks for mommy and put them in the box.” And damned if she didn’t do just that! She’d stumble off after one, pick it up, stagger back to Trine, drop it in the box with a fanfare, then ramble off for the next one. Trine reinforced the behavior with tremendous encouragement. Molli was very proud of herself. When all the blocks were gathered, she kept gathering more and more stuff for Trine. A shoe. A stuffed animal. A chair.

This evening after dinner I was sitting at the dining room table and Molli was carousing around the room, having finished her own dinner a little earlier. She managed to grab a framed picture of herself off the windowsill on the far side of the room, stumbled over to me with it, and handed it to me saying, “Deh deh!” (“That’s me, isn’t it?”)

I admired the picture and told her how pretty I thought she was, then handed the picture back to her and asked her to return it to its proper place. She looked at me thoughtfully, accepted the picture, wandered halfway across the room toward the window, seemed confused, lurched leftward toward a nearer window sill, and struggled mightily (but eventually successfully) to get the frame back up on the sill. It was a brilliant moment.

Her fits of a week or so ago apparently were teething-related: there’s some kind of molar or something coming in way in the back, up top. It’s her ninth tooth. Its opposite hasn’t broken the skin yet.

And, lastly, she pushed herself around on a little plastic motorcycle for the first time this afternoon. Her legs barely reach the ground when she straddles the thing, and she just can’t seem to get any forward traction, so she just propelled herself backward about eight or nine feet before she collided with a wall and became too frustrated to continue. Anyway, it’s the first time she’s ever propelled herself on any kind of “transport” toy, so it’s progress. (Her use of her various walk-wagons as scooters doesn’t count, since they’re not intended for that kind of use and such usage is therefore illegal.)