Class Picture (and More!)

First, a movie. It’s an unedited .avi file, about 12MB. I’ll tell you all about it in a minute, but first start downloading.

Downloading it? Okay. Here’s the backstory.

For the past couple of weeks Molli Malou has been experimenting with balance. Those of you who’ve seen her in the apartment (in the flesh or via Skype) have seen her horsing around with my American football and various other bouncy and rolly things, balancing upon them in her bare feet, or on her stomach, or on her butt. She’s gotten quite good at balancing on what would appear to be really challenging surfaces. In particular, she likes trying to balance on the long mailing tube we used to use as a ramp for little balls.

Of course I have to secure it from rolling as she walks on it, so I used to just sit on one end to secure it while she held my hand and walked carefully up and down the length of the tube.

As an experiment one night, we angled the tube up a few degrees. It’s about a meter long and the “high” end was only six inches or so off the floor (propped up on my knee as I sat), so it was not a very challenging slope. She loved this. She would hold Trine’s hand and walk up the length of the tube without falling or slipping. We increased the angle and her competence was undiminished.

Well, too much is never enough for Molli Malou, so you can watch the video and see where all this has led. It’s kind of astonishing. You have no idea how little she’s depending on me: she’s just holding my index finger for insurance, I think.

Now to backtrack a little: Molli Malou’s favorite lunch is now Russisk Salat on rye bread. Russisk Salat (Russian Salad) is basically just beets in a thin cream sauce. She can get pretty enthusiastic about eating it.

I wanted everyone to see the spread we laid out for Molli Malou’s third Thanksgiving:

(That’d be a cheese pizza for Molli Malou, a “pizza sandwich” for Trine, and a Shwarma Durum Roll for me. And Coke Light all around.)

But I really only bothered to blog tonight because we got Molli Malou’s 2006-07 school picture today—and hallelujah, the pink cowboy boots didn’t make it!

(If you click on the picture you can download the full-size scan.)

That’s Anna Line in the middle, the only smiling child in the shot. Mikkel, the love of Molli Malou’s young life, is third from the left in the front row, wearing a red sweater with a blue reindeer pattern. The kids haven’t changed as much as it sometimes feels like they have: here’s last year’s picture again: