Alright, Greg: whirlwind April trip to New York plus shiny new amazing camera with hypercapacious memory card equals… nothing? Not even a single post since before the trip? Six days and five nights of highlife in the city of cities, a toddler galloping through her first weeks of kindergarten and toward her third birthday, the blossoming of spring in Wonderful Copenhagen, job change, and yet … nothing? No pictures or posts at all?
No.
No pictures.
The shiny new amazing camera and its memory card full of memories, many of which I can’t even remember without said card, unfortunately chose to stay in New York. We will not speak of that again. (Except as part of an ongoing dialogue with my travel insurance agent.)
But I can’t keep letting the blog just lie here and rust while Molli Malou continues to evolve in strange and mysterious and mostly wonderful ways. My prolonged silence might otherwise be interpreted by Grownup Molli Malou as a source for concern. (“My God, dad, what happened to me in April and May of 2007? Did I break out in hideous boils? What?”)
No, my delightfully demented daughter, you did not break out in boils. Silly Daddy just kept hoping he’d get his hands on a camera again quickly enough to resume the blog without dwelling on the loss of the shiny new amazing camera. (Which camera will seem to you, by the time you read this, a quaint piece of antique machinery about as shiny and amazing as… as Pop-Pop’s reel-to-reel tape recorder seemed to me? Seriously, Molli. It only had 6 Megapixels, which is less-than-awesome even today, but that 2GB flash still seems like unthinkable storage capacity to me. By the time you’re reading and understanding this, that’s going to seem about as capacious as 640K floppy disk seems to us now. I hope. I mean, I hope the future doesn’t pan out like one of those Mad Max movies or something. But never mind…)
But let me tell you and your family a little more about yourself in these days, at this time. And let me stop talking to grown-up-you, because you’ll be teen-you long before you’re grown up, and teen-you is going to hate that I do this.
So.
Molli Malou finally understands quite clearly that the way Daddy talks is English/Engelsk/Ingalish/Inlish and the way Mor talks is Danish/Dansk. The following representative anecdotes will have to serve in place of pictures or video.
ITEM: I am putting Molli to bed. I ask what book she’d like me to read. She asks for Ælling gik en tur (Duckling Went for a Walk). I had tried reading it to her once before and translating on the fly, but she had hated it and made me get Trine to read it to her properly. So this time I jumped right into Danish. After about two sentences she giggled.
MM: Why’re you talking Danish, Daddy?
Me: It’s a Danish book, sweetie.
MM: That’s silly.
Me: (Resume reading in Danish. Mispronounce a word.)
MM: No, Daddy! Kåde!
Me: Kothe.
MM: Kåde, Daddy! Say å!
Me: O.
MM: Å, å, å!
Me: (Rising) Trine…!
But it’s not all bad news for me.
ITEM: We’re having a quiet evening one night. Trine and Molli Malou were having a little talk about something in Danish and I jumped in with a comment of my own, also in Danish.
MM: Don’t talk Danish, Daddy.
Me: I can’t talk Danish?
MM: Daddy talks Ingalish. Mor talks Danish.
Me: That’s right, honey. What do PopPop and Nana speak?
MM: Ingalish.
Me: English, right. And Hannah and Sophie?
MM: Inlish!
Me: English, that’s right! And what about… Mormor?
MM: Danish!
Me: Good! But Daddy actually can speak Danish, can’t he?
MM: (Long pause.) Yesssss…
I cut her off before she could supply the imminent “but.”
And the other night as we were having dinner at Mormor & Jørgen’s on their terrace, Molli Malou informed Jørgen and Mormor that they could not speak English. So it’s clearly not just some campaign against me and English.
Now I have to change categories, slightly, just because I remembered something I want to record before I forget. It’s the longest non-redundant, coherent monlogue I think she’s ever spontaneously delivered to me.
ITEM: It’s one of our 630am weekday breakfasts. Trine is sleeping. Molli Malou is eating her breakfast and watching a Sesame Street alphabet DVD while I read the paper. Suddenly she becomes very excited.
MM: It’s Kermit, Daddy, it’s Kermit the Frog, and he’s going to make an M. M is for Molli Malou, and it’s hard, Daddy, it’s very hard to make an M, and Kermit the Frog is going to make one! He’s a frog. Like Kaj.
(I think I’ve already told you about Kaj & Andrea).
We have been very busy during this blogless period, with Trine preparing for her exams and some serious turbulence at Berlingske—to the extent that, as most of you know, I’ll be leaving my job as Database Administrator in the Marketing department on June 1, and starting my new job as Database Architect in the Business Intelligence department on June 4. (I’ll have a new work email address and phone number too, for those of you who use them.) All of this has had us scrambling to hold things together, and we’ve been very fortunate that Mormor has been able to help out a lot, especially by coming by in the morning and taking Molli Malou off to kindergarten. (I’m calling it kindergarten because that’s the “English” word for børnehave that I’ve been using with Molli Malou… and it literally is the same thing, meaning “kiddie garden” in both languages. Well, all three, I guess…)
Molli Malou continues to mystify with her tastes. She is still eating caviar by the spoonful, but I wouldn’t yet say she has “caviar tastes” (an American idiom meaning snobby taste) because she also eats sweet mustard by the spoonful. Honestly. Pours it on her plate and eats it straight. She enjoyed her sausage this evening, but mostly because she was convinced it was “flamingo spøgepølse,” or “flamingo sausage.” We did not relieve her of that misapprehension (wherever it came from) — partly because it was actually “pistachio sausage.” (Tasted like normal Italian Sausage, but with pistachios ground up into the meat.)
She is addicted to Monsters, Inc., and Madagascar, both of which movies are now watched about three times a week in our household. (Monsters, Inc, she knows by name, but Madagascar is still just, “Silly Zebra!”) She also sometimes begins dancing and singing “I like to move it, move it!”
She is a little fixated on biology these days, with a particular fixation on who has a tissekone and who has a tissemand. She likes to run off the roster of who has what, and rest assured that virtually all of you are included. “Daddy has a tissemand,” she will say, a propos of nothing. “Molli has no tissemand. Molli has tissekone. Mor also has a tissekone.” Thus it begins, and then the names and fixtures of everyone she knows are rattled off with accuracy and speed.
I finally dug the old camera out earlier this week and have persuaded it through kicks and whacks to take a few pictures and videos, and will try to get them posted over the weekend. They’re not good because the old camera really is a piece of crap, but they’re better than nothing.
That’ll be it for now. Hope this helped compensate for the void of the last 6-7 weeks…
