play

today was henry's first official play date.  

he was nervous before we left, he was shy when he got there, but pretty soon he just had a lot of fun... 

and the moms got to sit out in the sun for a long while as they played contentedly.

and william was so happy to have him out of the house for a few hours so he and a neighbor friend could play uninterrupted.

and greg cleaned out our shed.

so pretty much there was good in this day for all of us (assuming greg likes cleaning out sheds).

peddling downhill

a busy day.  a fun day.  a friday.  

i had my goals today.  make dinner ahead of time, get us to the grocery store (even if that meant the old french fry-falafel trick), pick up william right after school and get us to a reception for the mom of one of william's best friends.  she is a doctor and just recently bought her own practice (which is how family docs do it here.  and there are only a certain number of license numbers in each area, so you buy from someone retiring who's giving up a number).  

in between playing with cars and playing with trains, henry and i worked on prepping the night's meal... 

and the french fry-falafel trick worked... (i'm not sure who was tricking whom)...

and the day was beautiful, but it was cold and it was windy.  mostly it was windy.  if it hadn't been windy, it wouldn't have been cold.

and though the wind compelled us to peddle even on certain downhills (which feels a little like paying for something that's usually free), we made it to the reception, the boys played and ate candy and hot dogs, and by the time the soup we'd prepped that morning was on the table, henry was looking like he might fall asleep in it... and it seemed like it would be an early night for them... and then... suddenly, the wind changed direction, it's after 9 o'clock and "bedtime" has been going on since 7:30 and henry is somehow more awake than ever before... and that also feels like... why did we ever allow ourselves to think we might be able to coast tonight?

well, you just never know.

green forest on the ceiling

do you see that small break in the clouds?  

i went to the dentist today.  my first time at a danish dentist. it was much like going to the dentist in the u.s., with the following exceptions: 1) at 4:45 p.m., i was the only one there (i can't say this is necessarily different than the u.s. as i always used to go in the mornings); 2) i immediately met with the dentist-- this is similar to going to the doctor in denmark-- the doctor comes out to the waiting room to get you and you don't meet with any nurses or techs beforehand (the one exception to this being the three or so meetings i had with my surgeon (there, the nurse (the same nurse from diagnosis through post-surgery) would come out to the waiting room to get us and we'd meet the surgeon right outside the door to the examining room-- so no wait time once inside the examining room)); 3) the dentist does the cleaning (though a tech does the polishing); 4) the chair gives you a massage during the cleaning.  even if you're not into chair massages (and i'm not sure i am), it's at least distracting.  she also had a nice large picture of a green forest on the ceiling, but i think that sort of thing is probably not unheard of in the u.s.

9:25.  i'm so behind on my '30 days of yoga.' i suppose i should go take advantage of the fact that i'm not completely falling over in exhaustion.

i am not a cloud expert

when i dropped henry off at school this morning it was, from what i recall, overcast and beginning to drizzle.  when i went to pick the boys up this afternoon, it looked like this outside...

so nice in fact, that i dared take off my winter hat halfway through my ride.  but what you might not notice from this picture, unless maybe you're a cloud expert (and even then, i don't know if it shows it because i am not a cloud expert), is the wind.  strongly pushing everyone along, often in the wrong direction, but what did it care?  and after i got to henry's school i put my hat back on.  my ears just cannot handle that kind of wind, no matter how warm.

today was greg's day to help cook the dinner (and wash the dishes) but unfortunately (due to the small inconvenience that the meal involved baby animals) we did not eat it.  i figured i'd pull out a jar of frozen beans and do some rice and beans and vegetables (basically our old classic: mushpot davy).  it wasn't until 4 o'clock or so that i realized we had no more beans.  oh, how i appreciate these common meals we get four days a week.  it turned out okay in the end.  it's 9 o'clock now and everyone got fed, basically with a hodgepodge of eggs cooked to various degrees of doneness depending on preference, quinoa salad, avocado, orange slices, and sautéed cabbage.  i think we hit most of the important food groups.

(and the gnomes are still on our porch.)

three-ring cirkus

when i opened my computer this morning there was a message saying 'federal tax return rejected-- action needed!'

oh sheesh.

the email itself contained a whole lot of computer jargon explaining why it was rejected.  and when i say jargon, i mean computer coding language (is that a real phrase?).  i used my awesome computer skills (that is, copying and pasting random parts of the computer coding language into google search and looking for the most laymen's explanation possible) to try to make sense of what i'd done wrong.

seriously, i'm going to admit something now-- danish taxes are easy-- i mean, absolutely nothing compared to u.s. taxes-- and still (here's the admission), i messed mine up somehow and got a letter from the danish taxman telling me so.  (i blame the inadequacy of my danish language skills in technical areas like taxation (...without representation??))... anyway, my point being... if there's somebody like me (a foreigner) over in the u.s. trying to file a u.s. tax return, it's all around probably a hundred times harder.  maybe our u.s. taxes are just complicated by the fact that we have to file extra 'living outside the country' forms and decide e.g., which one's best and figure out how many days we were back in the country last year and how many of those days were business-related and go through the motions of the child tax credit and figure out we can't get it (but can get the additional child tax credit) and is it because we didn't choose the best 'living outside the country' form and do we want to start over (because one form affects another) filling out the other one instead to see if that makes a difference, and then wake up and get a bunch of computer jargon in place of an explanation in plain english, telling us where we went wrong... but we figured it out.  don't ever type the wrong thing in box c of line 44.

i resubmitted it and got an email right away telling me it was accepted.  later in the day i got an email telling me it was submitted and i would get an email within 24 to 48 hours telling me whether it was accepted or rejected.  okay...

after that i spent the rest of the day doing some proofreading for a new english-language magazine in denmark.  which is probably scary for those of you who notice my ambivalence toward commas and how forgiving i am with incomplete sentences, while doing nothing whatsoever to protect the endangered capital letter on this site (just a few of my offenses), but you can be sure i try to get it right when it really counts.

and it was just as well that i sat inside all day, as the day outside was just a steady rain blown against the windows by a steady wind.  not exactly like the summery day we had just this weekend.

then i went to cook again for the night's dinner.  (my two shifts for the month now being over.)

and so this time i didn't take even a single picture.  but then i did take one, just so you'd have something to look at.  i picked these up this morning for a circus show/summer fest at henry's preschool later in the month.  our tickets to get in and our popcorn vouchers.

(billet = ticket; barn = child; voksen = adult)

the cuteness speaks for itself.

taxing ingredient gnomes

those taxes i started doing way back when?  today was finally my day to work on them again, and if we can do whatever it is one needs to do to electronically sign, then tonight we can submit them as well.  just in time too, though i guess we get an automatic 2-month extension being out of the country.

and then i went straight to helping in the common house kitchen for tonight's meal.  and then spent too long talking to neighbors (while greg washed dishes and the boys ran around) to find that the boys had not spent the entire time running around, but had instead been inside helping themselves to "ingredients"-- a term of art in this household.  it means they were rooting through the fridge and the spice drawer to make whatever combination of things they could get away with.  henry first started making "ingredients", and his specialty tends to be milk combined with cinnamon and vanilla.  his brother has also taken to making ingredients and when i came in tonight he'd made me something i "could put on [my] oats tomorrow morning."  i asked him what was in it (it seemed to be festering) and sure enough, it involved baking soda and also lemon "hide".  (there was, in fact, a lemon sitting on the table missing most of its 'hide'.)

so i only got one photo today.

of this, when i walked back home tonight...

they certainly don't belong to us, but no one (i.e. neither of my boys) claims any responsibility for their travels to our porch.  hopefully somebody will claim them.

okay, to file (tonight) or not to file (until tomorrow morning).  that is the spørgsmål.  (there!  you just learned a danish word!)

one elbow on the table

"every mouse thinks he can fit into the smallest spaces."

william tests the hypothesis...

henry helps out... 

success?

we walked to the grocery store later in the day.  it was wiiiiiinnnndy.  it was windy last night and it never stopped being windy.  we had our window open last night for sleeping but the way it opens is that it swings open from the bottom and it doesn't really lock into place, so it kept banging, and eventually we had to close it and sweat it out for the rest of the night (well, at least i did, as hot flashes are my specialty these days).

today's walk...

community gardens at co-housing.  just like 'home'...

 cows on the bike path...

from a different angle...

and on the way home, we find them resting after their meal...

and the baby lambs and the big sheep, who were mostly resting when we walked past them on the way to the store, were now up and grazing...

lambs!

this mother sheep was on her guard...  "it's okay," i tell her.  "i'm just taking pictures of you guys because i think you're so cute!"

later we had our good manners dinner.  william put on a nice shirt and tie ("mom," he whispered partway through dinner. "my tie fell off.").  henry kept trying to remember to use his fork and asking if it was okay to have one elbow on the table.  it wasn't perfect by any stretch, but for this house, it was a major step forward into the land of kings and queens, u.s. presidents, grandparents, restaurants, and that sort of thing.