book list for children

we skyped tonight with greg's brother who asked what we'd done today and it quickly became apparent our day was not that exciting.  exciting for william because he got to go to a birthday party dressed as a ninja to battle pirates and monsters.  a bit less exciting for the other three-fourths of the family who went grocery shopping.

but tonight, greg took henry on another run while william and i read the exciting (as in, william was on the edge of his seat) climax to 'peter pan and wendy' which we got back from the library awhile back.  it is such a cool book-- so clever, so well written that even if you don't have a kid to read it to, you should read it.  and this got me thinking that since the day's events could be told in a paragraph (as above), perhaps instead i would share the list of books we've read with william in the last two years (not counting picture books and not counting the ones we tried but didn't work from the start or tried and just sputtered out before the last page), because we would have liked a list like this (and maybe someone else will too), for a boy who loves hearing about adventures and has a high tolerance for sitting still apparently...

here it is, i think mostly complete, in roughly the order we read them:

Fantastic Mr. Fox - Roald Dahl

George's Marvelous Medicine - Roald Dahl

Little House in the Big Woods - Laura Ingalls Wilder

Farmer Boy - Laura Ingalls Wilder

On the Banks of Plum Creek - Laura Ingalls Wilder

By the Shores of Silver Lake - Laura Ingalls Wilder

The Long Winter - Laura Ingalls Wilder

Little Town on the Prairie - Laura Ingalls Wilder

These Happy Golden Years - Laura Ingalls Wilder

The First Four Years - Laura Ingalls Wilder

The Mouse and the Motorcycle - Beverly Cleary

The Boxcar Children - Gertrude Chandler Warner

The Boxcar Children, Surprise Island - Gertrude Chandler Warner

The Boxcar Children, The Yellow House Mystery - Gertrude Chandler Warner

The Bobbsey Twins' Adventure in the Country - Laura Lee Hope

Charlotte's Web - E.B. White

Indian in the Cupboard - Lynn Reid Banks

Stuart Little - E.B. White

Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Return of the Indian - Lynne Reid Banks

adapted or abridged versions of The Voyages of Dr. Doolittle, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and Robinson Crusoe

Ramona the Pest - Beverly Cleary

Winnie-the-Pooh - A.A. Milne

House at Pooh Corner - A.A. Milne

The World of Christopher Robin - A.A. Milne

Island of the Blue Dolphin - Scott O'Dell

Runaway Ralph - Beverly Cleary

My Side of the Mountain - Jean Craighead George

The Door in the Wall - Marguerite de Angeli

The Cricket in Times Square - George Selden

Ben and Me: An Astonishing Life of Benjamin Franklin by His Good Mouse Amos - Robert Lawson

Peter Pan and Wendy (finishing up the last couple chapters soon) - J.M. Barrie

saturday

waiting for movie night to begin...

we tried this one other time when he was around two and a half and made the mistake of choosing 'ratatouille' which we had both seen pre-children and remembered as being a cute, innocent movie (which it mostly is), forgetting the part about the shotgun (what's the deal disney pixar???), which he anxiously focused on for days, maybe weeks afterward.  

but tonight we have an animated pirate movie that greg pre-screened (post-children) on a flight to mexico, and a nearly five year old now, so we should be alright.  

greg took henry on a burley run tonight.  it was an easy way for greg to run (he is hoping to do the copenhagen marathon) while also getting henry to bed (who napped for about three minutes today when we went to town).  so now we have a little sleeper, greg and william just finished a toothbrush race, so i need to publish this blog post as william just sat down beside me.

william says: this is a picture of me playing with legos after i put my jammies on.  and then i built a lego machine while i was playing with legos and henry and dada went on a run through the neighborhood in the night time and when they came back henry was asleep and then we put him into his crib and dada helped me build a lego machine.  that's all. 

day's bread

i see a little, tiny postette in my immediate future.  eleven o'clock.  a long but fun day.  class-- which isn't not fun.  but no math.  that's only twice a week.  then home... lunch, cleaning up, peeling beets, making pumpkin pie filling.  then the little guys and a trip to the super best bakery for a loaf of 'the day's' bread... it's the 20 kroner special.  then home, waiting for greg and company to arrive, picking the crumbs up from the day's bread that henry insisted we not wait for dinner to dig into.  we had one of greg's co-workers and his wife over for dinner.  he is danish.  she is spanish.  an interesting and, as i said, fun time, comparing three cultures, three economies, three political systems.  then a late bedtime for both guys, dishes, toys, and now chatting with greg in between sentences, and it is already 11:31 now, so here is the little, tiny postette i predicted.  happy friday!

goodnight! 

the weather

i'm wondering if it's possible to type a blogpost in under an hour if only one hand comes out from under the blanket i find to be a necessity right now.  the weather turned cold, and, for a brief moment today, sunny.

the clouds began to part on my way home from the grocery store this morning and the rays of sun looked novel on this twelfth century church you must know well by now...

and at the end of our block...

here it is again (along with beautiful flowers... a thank you gift... in a lantern created by william) providing natural light in our living room an hour or two later...

but what i don't necessarily enjoy is that sunlight must come with cold temperatures... or rather, cold temperatures must come with the sun.  you might call me a winter grinch when i say this, but i would take a cloudy winter day over a sunny winter day for the entire season if it meant not facing freezing temperatures.  i don't know that i've been overly blogging about the gray days we've been having for the last month or so (save for a very sunny day in copenhagen, and maybe bits and pieces of sunny days scattered throughout), but it's been gray, and for the past week or so, in the low 40's.  the lack of sun has not gotten me down so far like i thought it might.  what we have coming though, might just be the kicker-- temperatures back down to 0 (that's celcius, so wisconsin folks, just go ahead and skip this part as i see you're scheduled to go down to 20 fahrenheit in a couple days).  i think 40 is my limit.  40 is pleasant when you have a nice big blue down jacket on... i know, i know, that's like shorts weather in wisconsin, but i prefer to be overly cautious.  being too cold is just about my least favorite thing to be.  and so i was relishing every overcast day, knowing it meant relative warmth, and wondering if we could just eke out enough of them to get us to spring.

but we can't.  it's winter again.  at least for as long as they're willing to forecast.

rain, snack, friends

today was the first day i've had to wear my rain pants in i don't know how long.  but it's not like denmark has been going through some kind of dry spell.  it's just that it tends to rain at night, often the middle of the night, or early morning, so that you might hear rain drops fall on the bathroom skylight when you go to brush your teeth before bed, or get up to take a shower.  the morning started out dry as far as i can remember... no rain pants needed that is.  we went to the dentist.  henry on the verge of cavities is no worse off than he was when he first went some six months ago, so that means we're doing a good job and they don't need to remove all his teeth as i feared in my worst-case scenario vision of today's visit.  then we got to school in time for william's class's bike day.  all the kids brought their bikes and they rode around the playground, stopping at stop signs, sponging them down at a little bike wash station.  he was very proud to show me his bike license laminated and affixed to the front of his bike when i picked them up this afternoon.  that is when i had my rain pants on.  not a downpour by any means, just drizzlyplus, and falling in the afternoon.  

henry, as usual, helped with the dinner preparation.  he's getting more and more cozy up there on his little perch, with a snack and some writing material... 

and william got a sweet letter in the mail from an old friend in wisconsin.  they go way back...

then at bedtime, grappling perhaps with the entire idea of moving and leaving friends behind, william asked if we will be able to visit denmark when we move back to the u.s., because, he told me, he is going to miss his danish friends.  he said this blinking away tears, knowing what to anticipate only because he first learned what good friends are, back in wisconsin.

liberating beets

here is why today was a pretty good day...

day two of danish lessons and danish math lessons and i have to say, day two went a lot better than day one.  not that day one went so horribly-- it didn't.  but today was one of those rare days of at least some degree of inexplicable lucidity, which is only to say i got the gist of what my teachers were saying a little more often than usual.

during lunch and after class i sat in the room and did my homework so i wouldn't have a night like last night where i was working on it at 10 o'clock.  then i picked up the guys, we went to the grocery store, and it was sometime during dinner prep that i realized, i don't have school tomorrow, or the next day... and my homework's already done!  (well, not my math class homework, but still, i unintentionally did not procrastinate!)

i peeled and cut up a bunch of beets to roast for dinner, and then remembered we were out of olive oil.  we have duck fat... loads of it.  who would have known?  is it well known that if you cook a duck you can expect to get over three peanut butter jars worth of fat?  but, okay, never mind the duck fat because i am not going to use it to roast beets in.  it's just not that kind of vegetable.  so instead i discovered this vegan site which told me how to roast beets without oil-- which is to wrap them up in foil-- and they were delicious!  thanks post punk kitchen! (oh, and you didn't hear anything about duck fat from me!)

the laundry is still sitting on the couch, but i've lost any illusions that it's going to get folded before tomorrow-- it's very zen.

oh, and i've been on 'facebook-lite' mode and really liking it.  liberating.

so, a pretty good day!  perhaps yours was as well.

plowman

you really don't want to see a picture of our dinner, especially as it does not look very appetizing in photos, but it's all i've got.  today felt nearly like a workday, or, perhaps more accurately said, like a schoolday.  but sitting in a chair for too long on danish overload, it was not like the schooldays of 2012... that bygone era of two and a half hour long class days.  today our math class began, and somehow i did not remember it being also two and half hours long when i signed up for it, so that today, with a half hour lunch break in between, i'm (along with most of my other classmates) in school for five and a half hours.  and something about packing up a lunch this morning, and going directly to pick up the guys after it was all said (in danish) and done, coming home with them and finding their half-eaten bowls of oatmeal still sitting on the dining room table (which admittedly says more about our morning, than my now full schedule), reminded me, somehow of a workday.  with no pay.  just maybe a bit more danish under my belt.  like i can tell you they use the division sign for minus.  the ratio symbol for division.  an older generation might refer to the 500 kroner bill as a plovmand (a plowman) because one used to be drawn on that note walking behind his horse and plow.  trivia.

what matters is that the laundry on the orange couch is only half folded, i had not a minute to do my homework, and there was no time to go to the grocery store today, so dinner was what was in the fridge.  but does that really matter?  i guess not.  what matters is that i picked up the guys a little earlier than usual today and they were both happy to see me and i didn't interfere with afternoon snack time (which matters a lot when you're four and a half)...

and that we got dinner on the table, which henry helped me to make. (his contribution was the jerusalem artichokes)...

onto homework now...