It’s been a long time since there’ve been any pictures, and there aren’t going to be any here, but I thought I could at least offer a verbal update and explain what’s been going on.
First of all, of course, there was our misfortune. I’m not going to get into any detail on that here, except to say — you know, no surprise we’re not taking a lot of pictures.
But the real problem has been our camera. It takes such crappy pictures and videos that there’s just no sense of urgency about sharing them. Most of the time when you turn it on you just get a blank display with intermittent purple streaks (which is what you would record if you snapped a picture), and the only way to get the display working is to whack the camera a couple of times — against your palm, your thigh, the nearest tabletop, whatever: standard RAPF (remedial application of percussive force, for those of you who never studied Physics for Brutes). The photos we do end up taking still end up streaky, staticky, “noisy,” blurry, and just generally awful.
So our birthday present to me was a new digital camera, a Canon Ixus 60, that should be arriving any day now. Apres ca, la deluge…
* * *
But you don’t read the Molliblog to get caught up on the state of technological affairs in our little lives. You read it to feel closer to Molli Malou.
It’s hard to know where to begin.
I know I’ve said “she’s finally conversational!” about a dozen times in this blog, and I meant it every time. But this time I mean it. This time I mean she’s finally conversational in the sense that you can have an actual discussion with her about things. Of course she still relies heavily on metaphors from Barney and Elmo and Cookie Monster, her vocabulary is limited, and she’s likely to abandon whatever you’re discussing at any moment to break into song or begin jumping up and down, but by and large you really can talk to her about a particular thing now, in ways that weren’t at all possible even just a month ago.
And we’ve got to be on our toes, because she’s now sharp enough that even when you think she’s talking nonsense, she’s actually making sense.
This morning, for example, I was up having breakfast when I heard her calling to me from bed.
By the time I got to her she was sitting up with woozy excitement, babbling something about how there was a big one, a big one like the giant in Barney, like the giant man who says, “Look at the little green bug,” and Baby Bop says, “I’m not a bug, I’m Baby Bop!”
“Is that what you dreamed?” I asked, wondering what big thing she’d dreamed about — clearly nothing scary.
By the time I had her out in the living room and had plopped her down on the couch, the way we normally begin our mornings, she was asking for her vitamin.
The vitamin is normally the last element of the morning routine — first wake-up, then breakfast, then bathroom, then getting dressed, then brushing hair and teeth, and then the fruity little vitamin tablet.
But no, she was very excited about it this morning. She wanted her vitamin right away.
I decided to give in because I’m evolving into the kind of father who sometimes doesn’t feel like a big fight.
So I went into the kitchen, got her vitamin, and brought it back out to — that is, I was about to bring it back out to her in the living room, except the tell-tale little patter of tiny feet in padded footsie pajamas told me I could expect her presence in the kitchen momentarily. Sure enough, there she was a half-second later.
“Vitamin, vitamin!” she hollered with glee.
I gave her the damn tablet.
She scrunched her little face up in an awful fury and hurled the thing across the kitchen.
“Not that vitamin!” she roared.
I felt like I’d walked into some kind of shaggy dog joke. I was too shocked by the reversal to take immediate offense at the outburst.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. (I actually ask her this a lot, to the extent that she will now sometimes ask the same of me: “What you’re talking about, daddy?”)
“I want the big vitamin!” she wailed.
“What big vitamin? I gave you your vitamin. There are no big vitamins, sweetie.”
“Want the BIG vitamin, from the store!”
And suddenly it occured to me that — well, there’s no way to prove I put it all together in my head before Trine suddenly arrived in the kitchen to tell me what she’d understood all along, so I’ll just say what she said.
She said: “The lady at the store gave her some big vitamins in a box yesterday and I told her she could have one this morning.”
Neither of them had said a word to me about any special vitamins the night before. Not a word. And yet Molli Malou had held all that excitement in over night and woke up bursting with it. And in retrospect, everything she had said to me made perfect sense. She’d even understood that Daddy doesn’t get it, and had tried to explain that there was a big one, today there was a big one, as big as the giant in Barney…
She learned long ago the game of asking one of us for something even after the other has said no, but she’s now beginning to make sophisticated tactical moves in that sphere. She won’t, as she used to, simply turn around from one parent to the other and ask out loud for the same thing that was just denied in earshot of the other. (Not as often, anyway.) This is a game she now plays more often when we’re in separate rooms. So, like all parents, we now have to ask the inevitable: “What did mor/daddy say?” — and fortunately she hasn’t yet learned to lie about that.
She’s taken a weird interest in Spanish. I was entertaining her with YouTube one night and we found some Barney and I played it for her without realizing it was Spanish. She stared at him with awe as he sang his rolling verses, mezmerized, and finally asked me:
“What he’s talking about, daddy?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s talking Spanish. Like daddy speaks English, and mor speaks Danish — Barney’s speaking Spanish.”
“Spanish!” Molli Malou exclaimed with wonder.
She watched a little more, giggling at the insanity of it.
“What he’s saying?” she laughed rhetorically.
The next time I loaded a Barney DVD for her, I remembered that all our Barney DVDs have a Spanish audio track. I asked if she wanted to see “The Land of Make-Believe” in Spanish. She did.
I expected her to ask me to switch it back to English after a few minutes, but she never did. For the past few days she’s been asking to see Barney in Spanish as often as English. She loves it. She can say “gracias” and “buenos noches,” but when you ask her to speak Spanish, she just smiles and goes, “lo lo lo la la bla bla bla!”
She can get in and out of her pajamas entirely by herself now, though she sometimes puts them on backwards before she gets them on right.
She memorizes the taglines of television commercials, and sings or hums along to a lot of jingles. She’s especially partial to the online poker ads — FullTiltPoker.com is apparently her particular favorite. (Though she calls it “FullTilt dot com!”)
She loves to sing and dance. Any music at all — a five-second burst from a television ad, or a car going by with a loud stereo playing, and she’s hopping and spinning around like crazy.
She’s now making unprotected leaps from the living room table onto the floor. No padding, no one to catch her, just “wheee!” and then thud! If you’re in the other room and you hear it, your heart rushes to your throat as you convince yourself that one of the bookshelves has fallen on top of her. You’ve never heard twenty-three pounds make such a thud in all your life. (At least, not since you had a 23-pound toddler of your own.)
I’m actually guessing… I have no idea what she weighs right now.
Most amazingly of all, though, and I think I’ve been holding back on this because I don’t want to acknowledge, even though I do, and I’m proud, but Molli Malou is on her way to Børnehaven in a little over a week. Kindergarten!
This girl, in kindergarten:
It defies belief, for me.
We’re actually very happy about it, because Molli Malou has become the Big Girl of vuggestue, and it will be good for her to be around older kids again, especially now that her time as Reigning Big Kid has probably helped her build up the confidence needed to go toe-to-toe with some of those kindergarten Giants.
(Giants, you know, like in Barney…)
She has memorized a song I made up for her about Russian salad and prods me to sing it to her sometimes, or will just randomly sing it herself (to the tune of Frere Jacques):
Russian salad, Russian salad,
it’s so purple! It’s so purple!
Put it on some rye bread, put it on some rye bread,
Eat it up (Yum!), eat it up (Yum!)…
She has a terrific sense of humor, and floored both her parents last night by making some kind of outrageous statement, then responding to our slack-jawed shock by announcing,
“Just kidding.”
“Did you say ‘just kidding’?” I asked to confirm.
“Yeah. Silly Molli Malou, just kidding.”
She actually pedaled a real little girl’s bike (with training wheels, obviously) in the courtyard the other day. Inconsistently, haltingly, agonizingly, but with moments of real biking.
Her letters and numbers have gotten no better, and may even have regressed a little. She counts objects very well up to three, but beyond that she just starts throwing out crazy numbers.
-How many ears you got there, Molli Malou?
-One, two.
-How many feet?
-One, two feet.
-How many noses on your face?
-One!
-How many fingers is daddy holding up?
-Three.
-How many chairs do you see in the room?
-One, two, three, ten! Seven! Four! One two three five ten!
She can sing the alphabet song as well as ever, but still only recognizes about five or six letters reliably. Her boyfriend Liam is reading and playing computer games and solving Fermat’s Last Theorem, and Molli Malou still can’t tell a G from a Q.
It’s later that I wanted to be awake, so I’ll wrap it up now. There will be pictures galore once that camera shows up, and videos too, so fasten those seatbelts!
