halloween

halloween.  one of my best memories as a kid was my mom bringing her sewing machine into the living room and making my halloween costume each year.  i can still picture her tailoring a pair of my stepdad's old pants so i could have my wish of being a "nerdy boy" in the third grade.  before that, it was a clown and a witch.  after, it was a 50s sock hop girl.  somewhere in between it was baby freddy krueger-- (she may not have had a lot to do with that one).

me-- i have totally failed in the homemade halloween costume department.  william was a bat the first two years of his life thanks to gifted costumes from neighbors, and for the last three he's been a ninja with the magically-fitting-for-three-years-in-a-row ninja costume we got at, i think, a thrift store the first year we were here.   this year, i took them to the toy store on the day they got haircuts and they each picked out a costume.  

william chose this spooky guy... 

and henry chose a werewolf costume, which he has not allowed us to photograph.  here he is, without the mask (truly the best part and quite endearing), when asked to stand nicely for a photo, just one photo... 

and i can't help but post this picture because it makes me laugh.  my friend, her son, and me, and our reaction to henry's dramatic response to being asked to take a picture.  i believe her son is thinking, "listen bucko, you're ruining my halloween." ah, but they had plenty of fun after the photo shoot.  

(new addition to my standard uniform: an awesome cowl another friend of mine made for me.  you're going to be seeing an awful lot of it for the next few months!)

 look here, i tried to sneak a photo, and it didn't really work...

after trick-or-treating our community had a halloween dinner.  here's the dining room all laid out...

and there was a delicious salad with something that translated to 'sea herb' which i find being called 'samphire', 'sea beans', 'glasswort', 'pickleweed' and 'salicornia'.  i had never encountered it before.  it has a salty flavor and is apparently a coastal herb.  has anyone tried this?  if not, keep your eye out.  looks like it's big in england right now.

well, it's once again quite late (for someone mid-thirties, two children, that sort of thing).  so, i will say happy halloween and see you in november!

happy halloween!  see you in november!

before halloween

i got a couple pictures of william in his halloween costume today but they're on my phone and we only uploaded the photos from greg's taken during a 'low-light' evening at the library (meaning my camera wasn't going to cut it).  

but even greg's phone had trouble capturing the stealthiness with which i sneaked some chips for the boys before the buffet officially opened up... 

outside the library.  roskilde was also having a 'light party' tonight and the library was one of the locations on the map...

just behind the library... coupled with the telling of some spooky story i couldn't quite catch...

we timed our buses poorly both getting there and going home.  here we are waiting for the bus home.  we walked down about four bus stops before finally coming to a stop and waiting another ten minutes.  during that wait, around 9:30 at night, many more people passed us on bicycles and on foot than they did in cars on this main road.

the boys went almost immediately to sleep when we got home, after william saved a slug who was waiting at our doorstep and henry fretted over its safety.

and now it's 11, so it's our bedtime too.

catch your eye, leave you befuddled

today... 

i was watching a little puppy for a neighbor.  just dropping in on her.  i tried taking her for a walk mid-morning but she didn't want to walk much.  i could get her to run though... until something, unapparent to me, caught her nose or her eyes or her curiosity and she'd stop again.  so in the early afternoon when i came back to check on her we just sat out on her lawn.  when you're sitting and petting a very small puppy you start talking to them and singing songs about them.  that is inevitable. we were very low to the ground because she is so very small.  i was noticing the clover and telling her that i have never found a four-leaf clover, despite all the time i spent looking for one (especially as a kid), wondering aloud if i would ever find one.  "lulu belle, oh lulu belle"... and then something, unapparent to her, caught my eye.  a couple tattered leaves where something very, very small had taken some bites from it, but there were four, plain as day, and, without comprehending what exactly it all meant that i had found it then and there, i claimed it as mine...

and proclaimed lulu a good luck dog right there on the spot.

later, the boys and i played by building a flat roofed house with citi blocks.  henry built the back porch.

my camera says we did this in low light.

and even later, in even lower light, william found a hyggelig spot on the stairs to read his book.

not less than a few magical moments today, for sure.

windsday

a picture from mid-morning... 

the third sunny day in a row (at least this is the number i realize i've been carrying around in my head today, because i guess i keep count), though today was significantly windier than the previous couple of days, and colder too-- most likely due to the wind.  but in general, we're in a very steady period of fall.  low- to mid-fifties for the next six days, at least, with a little sun nearly everyday.  the sun bit is the most significant part of the forecast.  by now i know well that it will not play a large role in the next four to five months, and that what we're seeing now we will probably not see again until sometime in spring.  it behooves us to take notice.

and when it turns dark, we can try out our newest candle holder experiment-- the old red wine vinegar jar...

and eat potato soup.

little post about a little light

this was taken around 4:45 p.m. today.  

the time change really helps speed that wintertime darkness along in the evening.  

the best laid schemes

the temperature outside began this morning at 1 degree celsius.  we can remember that 0 is freezing, so when henry jumped at the chance to have greg take him to school and my friend sent me a message saying she couldn't make it to our planned meeting at the gym, i immediately started plotting in my head the ways in which i could justifiably stay indoors this morning.  it wasn't easy planning-- we needed groceries and too, i'd previously committed to exercising.  because my friend wasn't going, did that get me off the hook as well?  

but... i could do some yoga at home.  i would make the time for that.  yes, of course i would!  or, i could go to the gym in the afternoon and pick the boys up on my way home (when the temperature would surely be higher than a single lowly digit).  and i could make bread.  i didn't exactly have the means or the sole ingredient necessary to make peanut butter though.  could i make some sort of delectable bean paste spread instead??? no, that would take the boys months, if not years to accept, no matter how benign the flavor.  i scratched that idea.  i still didn't have things completely worked out when, nearing 9 a.m., i suddenly noticed henry's "mappe" sitting on the bookshelf.  his mappe is his binder where they put in photos and drawings and other memorabilia from his classroom, and on friday i wrote on my hand: 'mappe' so that i wouldn't forget to bring it on monday because they were going to do something with them today.  and of course-- i forgot.  well, that settled it.  the thought of henry sitting in a big circle with his class and being told he didn't have his mappe while all the other 3 & 4 year olds (with much more responsible parents) happily worked on theirs, was too much.  i threw my gym clothes and the grocery list (and the mappe) into my bag and headed out into the cold.  though even by then it had warmed up plenty.   i dropped off henry's mappe.  i went to the gym and did my workout, and after that, i biked to the grocery store and bought the bread and peanut butter (and the olives and olive oil, and the greens for tomorrow's dinner, and the bland, crunchy crackers i've tricked henry into thinking are a delicious treat, and also the milk, because we always need another liter of milk, and the apples and carrots and bananas, and the mangos i can't quit buying, and the pomegranate because they don't usually carry those and today they did).  

and by the time i fit all that into the bike basket and rode home, the weather was so nice i didn't even need to have my sweatshirt and purple raincoat zipped up... 

i got home.  finished cleaning up wherever i'd left off when i discovered the mappe, finished my unfinished coffee, too and ate lunch, proofread a few articles, and by that point, it was time to do my little pep talk as i put on my shoes to pick up the boys (you're about to embark on one of your most important parenting jobs of the day-- to get the boys home.  and you have to do it well.  'well' does not necessarily mean 'efficiently' (my default desire), it means 'with love'.  it doesn't matter if it takes 2 hours to get them from point a to point b. (a very plausible scenario that occasionally drives me crazy-- hence the pep talk).  and if you need to use an incentive to push them a little, there's a package waiting for them at home (from their grandpa, it had arrived around lunchtime), and if you need an incentive to slow down, just remember that you don't have to rush home to make dinner tonight (we were eating the community dinner)).    and you know what?  it worked!  and it didn't even take us two hours to get home.  and henry only took a crazy spill on his bike once (which is about average, though this particular spill's craziness was on the high end of his typical crashes).  and on our way i asked henry if he did anything with his mappe today.  "ummm... nope."  well, oh well.

but what a beautiful day a single degree can lead to...

and somehow i had such an abundance of energy today (which doesn't always happen).  (and that's good because at 9:45, greg is still at work, so i wouldn't have had his help if i hadn't had enough energy to get two little ones to sleep.)

when we got home, they worked hard at opening the package...

and in it found eyeball bouncy balls...

and plastic cockroaches...

for halloween.  they're still hoping to frighten their dad with them.

time change

greg got a new phone through work and was playing around the camera this morning.  this might have been around the time we realized it was only 7:30 because the time (unbeknownst to us) changed.  that was a super happy realization.  it's only 7:30! it's only 7:30!  and i'm showered, and we've made breakfast!  woot!

henry was playing around with faces while greg was playing around with the camera... 

                                

later in the day, we had friends over for dinner and carved pumpkins (sharing an american tradition with our cuban-belgian friends... incidentally, there were no less than four languages spoken around our dinner table tonight (and i give their family the lion's share of the credit for that number)).  here's william showing off the jack-o-lanterns and here's greg's camera showing off in the dark...

william's pumpkin... 

henry's pumpkin, which, frighteningly enough, he carved basically by himself... 

now it's 9:30 feeling like 10:30.  goodnight! 

haphazard

what do we have here today?  

sheep too busy with lunch to look up for the camera... 

the barren field with a grouping of trees huddled together in the middle of it...

henry picking dried grasses because he wanted to grow oats.  he gave up the idea before we were back home...

all on a trip to and from the grocery store...

a cool day, but the nights don't feel much cooler.  i wore my winter hat out on the walk, but now i'm in a t-shirt with the window open right next to me.  the boys are listening to peter pan and hopefully falling asleep.  tomorrow we will carve pumpkins.

wednesday (april 11, 2012)

having taken no pictures today i feel like i've got a blank canvas to talk about anything i want.  but it's late.  i considered saying something about cancer as it's breast cancer awareness month, but i don't want to be a downer and i think that's how a BC awareness month post from me would come off.  of my 610 threeyearsindenmark blog posts, 7 are drafts that were never published.  one was completely blank.  of the six remaining, a full three were posts having to do with cancer that i never published.  one had a ton of pictures on it and no text, but i think i must have published all or most of those photos in other posts.  one was me complaining about my struggles with the language, and the last one was this, which was titled 'wednesday', which i'll share now... maybe it actually did get published in some copy and paste scenario.  otherwise, i'm not sure why it remained a draft.  it's from wednesday, april 11, 2012.  back when we had been here for less than two months.  it's surreal to imagine back to that time, to think about everything that's happened since then, to imagine henry as a baby (well, a one-year-old baby) that might fall asleep in my arms.  aww.

without further ado, i give you my thoughts as they appeared on wednesday, april 11, 2012...

it's hard to put down your reflections of the day with just one hand to type with, and yet that is what henry is requiring that i do.  ever since the sickness, and today being the least sickly of them all, henry has been difficult to put into his bed. i hope it's just a temporary "shift" in the bedtime routine.  he's always been so easy to put down (once he's fallen asleep mind you) in comparison to his brother, who was always difficult to put down (even after falling asleep).  it suffices to say that these boys have never been "easy" to get to sleep, the way that some babies (all danish babies-- just kidding) are, so this one-handed typing thing isn't outside the bounds of normal nighttime parenting for us.

okay, now that i've spent fifteen minutes typing out the preface, let's move on to the substance of the day.  my great-aunt, evna (a.k.a. lennie), died yesterday, which i learned of this morning.  she was 97.  i guess your age, any age, becomes one of your defining "traits" (?) once you die-- well, okay, when you're alive too.  anyway, hers was a "respectable" age to end on.  she has an older sister, still living, who is 101.  no one's going to say they didn't stick it out for the long haul.  they were/are my grandmother's sisters. i like what my own sister said, "i hope she is sharing a Blatz beer with grandma somewhere now!"

also, we went back to school today-- henry's--  and i missed my first day-- an excused absence-- of danish lessons (which i mistakenly put on the calendar as "first day of english classes!"  which, though a foolish mistake, is surely much better than writing something like, "first day of dutch lessons!").  we have homework already that one of greg's co-workers brought back to us.  i'm a little excited to have homework again-- and you can choose to emphasize either little or excited and both would be correct.  i hope it's not too much.  i haven't had to do the homework thing and the kid thing before and i like it that way (despite daydreams of going back to school while i'm here, since it will probably take me two and a half years to find a job and i might as well make myself useful-- but alas, i don't think the free tuition perk applies to residents).

things went relatively smoothly at henry's school today.  except he kept pulling off one kid's glasses.  a kid older than henry, but still much too young to defend himself and probably much too young to realize he's even wearing glasses, except whenever henry ripped them off his face.  my son, the unwitting bully.

good news! the super best had maple syrup today and coconut oil-- the newest cooking fad, which i am embracing.  if nothing else, it has a pleasant smell.

i think that's all the news here.  goodnight! 

oh, here's a picture of the fjord from this evening...

decorating for fall

spinning

on a walk today... 

the sky wasn't quite what it was yesterday, but it wasn't completely washed in gray either.

and, perhaps the most telling sign (in these parts anyway) that we are knee-deep in fall...

though a harvested field doesn't do a bad job either...

later, after getting the boys, we stopped at the playground...

went home, had dinner (greg helped cook the community meal and did dishes (things which i did yesterday)), had a spinning party (if you don't know what that is, it's because i made it up this morning in an attempt to reward henry for what i hoped would be a day of laudable behavior) (so after some accidentally-kick-your-brother-in-the-face raucous rounds of ring around the rosie, they spun around in circles to music), then a little bit of kid yoga, a little bedtime reading, and now i'm tired myself so this will be the last sentence of today's post!

never saw the sun shining so bright

i took this picture in a town north of copenhagen today as i was walking to the train station after an appointment.  i pulled out my camera figuring it might be the best one i'd get on yet another cloudy day (which, i will say, doesn't get me down nearly as much as a streak of them would have in the u.s. or as much as they did when we first moved here).  

but then, on the train, nearing home, the cloud cover began to break and i was looking at blue sky once again.  it is such a very lovely sight to see a blue sky and sun when they've been shut out by a curtain of clouds for so long that you start thinking the sun has actually snuck out like some rebellious teenager, only it won't be back until spring.  well, today was a reminder that it is actually up there, all the time, and it's the clouds, who are illusionists, supplying the real deception...

so now, brace yourself for superfluous pictures of a blue sky that may disappear at any moment...

may tomorrow hold the same magical potential.

collecting evidence

pictures taken this morning after dropping henry off at school.

more evidence fall knows how to be fall

of water suspended in air

of wind

that cows don't take mondays off

that crows attempt to communicate with cows