Zero to Two, One Month at a Time

Maddie is two today.

That tiny defenseless little creature, who weighs less in that photograph (taken shortly after her arrival in this world) than many sandwiches I’ve eaten, has been around for two whole years.

Maddie was born into a different family than her sister was. The primary difference is that she was born into a family of three. Her development has therefore been less minutely chronicled in this blog than that of her sister. From time to time I feel compelled to attack the Maddie deficit, and this is one of those times.

Looking back over her development as I gathered the photos for this celebration, I’m struck by both the amazing similarities between her and her sister — but even moreso by the differences.

Maddie is a ferocious creature. She is just as stubborn as her sister, but plays out her demands with more sound and fury. At her worst, she can become a kind of cartoon, literally throwing herself to the ground on her belly, pounding the floor with her fists and feet, and wailing at the top of her lungs. At her best, she is a devastating charmer who can work a room with the smooth ease of a practiced political hand.

Maddie is a heady creature. She likes doing puzzles, stacking blocks, snapping “plus-plus” pieces together into colorful patterns. Her nature seems to compel her to create order where there is chaos — in this way, as in others, the perfect complement to Molli Malou.

She has a short temper, like her sister (but never her parents!), and gets frustrated quickly and violently. Her sudden storms are not always short.

She’s a very affectionate girl, very warm and loving. She’s also very reckless. She’s always overestimating her own strength, balance, and coordination, and has the bumps and bruises to prove it.

She is growing so quickly. Just last week she managed to climb up onto the kitchen counter — a real game-changer for us, since the back of the kitchen counter was one of the few places we had still been able to leave out knives, scissors, hot sauce, cups of coffee, and other toddler hazards.

On our way to Thanksgiving last week (yes, pictures will materialize eventually), she kept rolling her window down. That was irritating. Then she took it the extra distance and managed to open her door! As we drove 110 kph down the highway. Excitement! It didn’t swing wide open — the speed wouldn’t allow that — but it clicked open, the car filled with the sound of air rushing in, the dome light came on, and we all freaked out. She was so proud to have opened it (“Door open! Door open!”) and so very bewildered by our reactions (“MADDIE! Oh my god! Pull over, pull over!” “BAD Maddie!”).

And yes, we have now found the switch in the door that disengages her interior door handle altogether, so it can never happen again. No worries there.

Her conversation is flying along in both languages. Her favorite phrase right now is “hvad laver du?“, asked in an impossibly sweet and lilting tone. (It literally means, “What are you doing?”, but Maddie’s rarely as formal as that. I would translate her usage as, “Whatcha doin’?”) She will ask this of you no matter how blinkingly obvious it is what you are doing. I’ve taken to answer sarcastically: if I’m washing dishes and hear the familiar Hvad laver du, Daddy?, I’m as likely to answer that I’m dancing the Watusi or performing open-heart surgery as anything so banal as washing dishes. She’ll probably learn the snippy phrase “what does it look like I’m doing?” waaaay ahead of the curve.

She uses more and more little sentences (mostly in Danish): Dee-dee fell. Cat down. Food hot. Daddy book. Maddie bed. Drawing paper. Where is do-do?

When she wants to do something someone else is doing, she simply says, “Maddie’s turn.” If she wants me to do something, she’ll often say, “Daddy’s turn” — without telling me what it’s my turn to do.

She also says I love you, but in a weird amalgation of the languages: Yi LUV-a du. She has taught all the kids at her vuggestue to say “bye-bye” instead of “hej hej.” She has begun to describe her pacifier properly as a sut instead of a dee-dee.

She’s extremely ticklish. We’ve just learned she loves sledding.

Her favorite breakfast is hot oatmeal, her favorite foods are pasta, meat, and potatoes. She will eat any of those things in abundance. She also likes capers, grapes, nuts, and raisins. She loves clementines (very seasonal here right now), but she doesn’t actually eat them: she takes a segment in her mouth, chews it to a limp and pulpy mass, sucking out all the juice, then spits it out. She has an insatiable sweet tooth and when she knows where there’s candy stashed, it will become the focus of her existence until she gets some.

She still has a terrible sense of how much food she can fit in her mouth: if she’s enjoying her food, she’ll just keep cramming it into her mouth until she simply can’t fit any more in. Then she has too much to chew or swallow and ends up sitting there, breathing through her nose, trying to figure out what to do until eventually the food starts to plop out of her mouth. It’s all very attractive. It’s amazing she’s never choked (I swill watch her very carfully because it’s downright scary how much she can cram in at once).

She has moved on from the Teletubbies to Barney, partly because she was ready to and partly because the rest of us couldn’t stand the Teletubbies one more minute. She’s also intrigued by Elmo.

She likes to draw, but still can only scribble. She gets as much ink on her hands and face as she does on the paper. This morning Molli Malou taught her how to draw on a balloon with a marker. Maddie was delighted, but I saw the devilish light in her eye — she gets that from her mother — and think we’re going to regret that lesson eventually.

She also smashed our camera last night. It’s a good illustrative difference between the girls. Molli Malou always complains that I take too many pictures. Maddie doesn’t complain: she simply seizes the camera and smashes it. Although if memory serves, Molli Malou managed to destroy a camera or two in her terrible twos as well.

[The loss of the camera comes at a terrible time: today is obvioulsy Maddie’s birthday and on Sunday I am off to the US for a week in San Francisco. And the holidays have begun in earnest — we began the Christmas calendars last night, and I have my julefrokost Friday. But with both our phones, we should have things covered — just in lower resolution and on Facebook instead of here.]

One last thing about Maddie — probably my favorite thing about her right now. Whereas Molli Malou has reached the age where she is sometimes oblivious to her mother and me, and would (most of the time) rather play with her friends than with us, Maddie still honors us with the appropriate level of reverence every minute of every day. Every time I come home, whether it’s been 20 minutes or 2 days since I’ve seen her, I hear her squeal from wherever she is in the house, “Hi, DADDY!” — and she comes barreling full speed to the foyer, where she throws herself at me with affection. There have been some long days this fall, but none so long that I couldn’t appreciate those moments.

I could go on about her forever, but the pictures can do the talking from here. Here, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Maddie Marie Kammer Nagan, the first 24 months, one month at a time. (There are two from August of this year because I couldn’t choose just one.)

Happy birthday, Maddie!