USA, The Video

At long last, the video of our American vacation.

I used snippets of almost every piece of video I recorded, but was shocked to see how little I have of most adults. I myself appear in only one shot, although there’s a partial of my face in another. It is mostly Molli Malou, Hannah, and Sophie. I guess I opted for still shots with the adults and videos with the kids. Maybe it’s sublimated vanity: we’re all getting older, and video ain’t as easy to photoshop…

Anyway, it’s under twenty megs (<20MB) and runs well over five minutes. I may have to post the Lobster Race video separately: it runs two minutes in its entirety and is fine without edits. Let me know if you'd like to see it and I'll post it. (Remember, left click on it to play in Windows Media Player straight off the server, probably with delays, or right click and “Save” to save it to your hard drive, then watch it. I recommend the latter.)

Our camera isn’t dead, after all—it was just a case of our charger being dead but acting alive, so batteries I thought were freshly charged were in fact completely dead. So there’ll be more pictures in the near future.

Molli Malou is rocketing along on her usual trajectory. She is close to being able to sing the whole alphabet song in English. Several times in the past week or two she has actually consciously translated whole sentences for me and Trine… I can’t recall the specifics, but basically she’d run over to me and say something like, “Daddy, Molli hungry, want oatmeal with milk,” then gallop over to Trine and say, “Mor, Molli sulten, gerne ha’ havrgryn med mælk.” Again, I just made that example up, but they were sentences just as complex and translated just as directly. And the other day, walking home from vuggestue, we passed a woman walking a small dog. The dog was sniffing at and trying to eat an old candy wrapper.

The woman told the dog, in Danish, Don’t eat that!

A moment later Molli looked up at me and said, in English, “Little dog, don’t eat it!”

Maybe that seems trite. I think it’s stunning. I don’t think she was translating for me: I think she just wanted to talk about it, to share the observation, and knew to address me in English rather than Danish.

On the other hand, I was driving her to vuggestue one morning when a woman cut me off and nearly ran over a kid crossing the street. I issued a stream of sailorly language that was immediately repeated to me in a little high-pitched squeal. Yuck.

Enjoy the video!