Archive for October, 2009

Halloween. It’s tomorrow. I hear that Danes are warming up to this most excellent holiday, but it’s still nothing like in the States. At least there’s a resource for Danes wanting to go all out. I’m pretty sure there won’t be any trick or treating in my neighborhood though. We didn’t get any last year.

So…I’ve kinda got to go out of my way to celebrate it. D.L. and I are going to a Halloween party on Sunday, so there will be people who get to admire her cute costume, and hopefully she’s old enough to have some fun too.

Perhaps due to the lack of outward enthusiasm in this country about the holiday, it kinda snuck up on me. I realized I needed a costume for Bean-Bean, and that ready-made, store-bought costumes for babies are totally unavailable here. I’d have to (dun dun DUNNNN) get creative myself. So I started to brainstorm.

1. Get white/light clothes and draw on a costume, e.g. cow spots?
2. Get a cardboard box, cut out arm holes, and decorate it like a robot?
3. Get solid-color footed PJs, attach a tail, and put ears on a matching hat?
4. Get all black clothes and fashion together some felt throwing stars and nunchucks?
5. Get a grocery bag, cut out leg and arm holes, and tie it around her neck?

In case you think I’m crazy for that last one, I won a prize when I was 4 or 5 for being a Hefty bag. I decided to leave that for a last-minute “oh crap!” option, and work on #4. I headed out into the shopping center and looked for black baby clothes. Other than a black button-up, I couldn’t find anything in solid black. Plenty of stripes and whatnot, but a striped ninja? Bitch, pleeeeease.

Plan B: #3. It turns out black is not the only color you can’t get in solids around here. Pretty much nothing comes in solids. I found a teddy bear snowsuit outfit, but it didn’t come in sizes larger than 6 months. I found Superman footed jam-jams, which got brief consideration, but I wasn’t very inspired. I also found a set of tuxedo jam-jams, but, try as I might, I couldn’t get into the idea.

Plan C: Can we get a cardboard box? I send Thomas an SMS but don’t get a response while I’m wandering around the shops. I don’t want to bank on a box I might not be able to get.

While wandering around to see if I could get a response from T, I went into the toy store and looked at the store-bought costumes. They don’t have any for the under-3 or 4 set, but I thought I might get some ideas. They sell a set of wings and a wand. Hmmm. I could put that on Bean-Bean’s clothes, regardless of her tiny size. It warned about small parts and not giving to children under three. I wasn’t sure what small parts they meant, but took it to mean that it might fall apart too easily and create small parts, or something. Anyway, I didn’t want to chance it. But it gave me an idea.

I guess you might think it’s funny that in all this brainstorming and searching, it never occurred to me to make her into a fairy or a princess. I was never a fairy or princess for Halloween, but once the thought came to me, it seemed pretty unoriginal. Still, it seemed accessible to me, and that’s what I needed.

I headed to H&M and found a tutu. It’s made for older girls, so let’s just say that the elastic does not stretch. No problem. I’ll pin it to her shirt or something. She already has wings from her Fastelavn outfit earlier this year, so I just needed a way to attach them to her. I went back to the toy store and looked for some finishing touches. I found a long, bendable, plush flower toy with no small parts. This can function as a wand! I considered a princess crown, but who am I kidding? She’d never keep that on her head.

I bought some elastic and safety pins, and after playing around last night, I think we’re there. She has a costume! Guess what you’ll see on Wednesday?

I thought about just posting this picture and letting your imaginations run wild about why this picture exists and what we’re doing, but my daughter is napping particularly close to me and I’m afraid if I do anything, it will wake her. So I’m kinda stuck on the computer anyway and I might as well type stuff. Does that make you feel special or what?

When my parents were visiting last month, we took them to Roskilde, because Roskilde has two popular tourist attractions. Denmark is well-known for having the world’s oldest still-going monarchy, and lots of dead monarchs are at Roskilde cathedral. Denmark is also well-known for being part of that whole Viking deal, and the Viking ship museum is in Roskilde. It’s such a quick train ride from Copenhagen that there’s really no excuse not to go if you’re in town for more than a couple days, so that’s what we did.
The Viking ship museum is pretty cool, and has lots of stuff relating to life in the time of the Vikings. There’s a nice, big room where kids can learn to write their name in runes, and dress like Vikings and run around a replica of a ship pretending to be Vikings. And when I say kids, I mean me and my husband. Dagmar was less interested in dressing like a Viking, and spent a lot of effort trying to get out of her Viking clothes, so this is the only good picture we have despite several attempts to capture more.

Viking children did not wear pink leather shoes with silver polka dots, and Viking men did not wear red T-shirts and jeans, but I guess not everyone was committed to accuracy that day. Hrumpf! Then again, I’ve been using the word Viking to refer to medieval Scandinavian society, rather than just the warriors that went on overseas expeditions.
By the way, Scandinavia has an i after the d. For some reason, I keep seeing Scandanavia and it’s driving me crazy. I know that in American, you can put any vowel there and you’re still going to say it “Scan-duh-nay-vee-yuh” but it’s not an optional i. There’s only one way to spell it correctly.

So, finally.

I can’t really remember why I resisted giving D.L. a sippy cup. I guess someone at some point told me I shouldn’t, or something. But for whatever reason, it wasn’t until she was 10 or 11 months old that I thought, “this is stupid, I should give her a sippy cup.”

I went to find one, but I’d never actually seen one before, and I certainly didn’t know what they were called in Danish. I bought something at Føtex and when I got it home, I was disappointed to find it didn’t actually stop liquid from gushing out of it when turned over. Might as well give her a cup, then. I mean, that’s what was already happening. She can drink out of a cup, but in the process, most of it ends up on her clothes and the floor as well. And if we’re going to be holding the cup for her, we want to be able to see how much liquid is in there, but this fake sippy was totally opaque. Laaaame.

I must have mentioned my frustration to my mother during a Skype session, because she brought a real sippy cup with her when my parents flew over for D.L.’s birthday party. It took about 5 seconds for this sippy cup to rock my world.

You might notice in the second picture there that her mouth is full of milk (or mælk in Danish, in case you were wondering what that’s about) and she is letting it flow out and go all over everything. Yeah, at first, she was so excited about getting milk out of it that she would smile huge and get milk all over everything. Less milk than with a regular cup, but still, it wasn’t so awesome. But it didn’t take her long to figure out not to do that, so all was right in the world quite quickly.

This is why, when Thomas and I were at Babymessen, and I spotted a big banner reading NUBY I was ten kinds of excited to run over there and snag more sippy cups. What kind of a mom would I be if I didn’t have one each in red, green, and purple anyway?

I decided to write a poem for you.

This happened last Friday, after my FFF post for the day. As soon as it happened, I thought, “dang! This would have been a perfect FFF!” So I’ve been waiting a whole week just to post it. (Or I scheduled this post ahead of time. *cough*)

He emerged a few minutes later with a bag that seemed like it couldn’t possibly hold two bagel sandwiches. “Are they both in there?” He said they were. Weird. I opened the bag and pulled out something that was much too hoagie-shaped to be a bagel sandwich. Um, what? “I thought it would be a bagel?” Thomas said he did too. Apparently this is what Denmark thinks is a bagel.

Several days ago, I was sitting in the fun room, emailing Friend Due on Monday about the little Santa baby Christmas dress I would be giving her for her soon-to-be-born little girl. We arranged that I would bring it to a meeting where I would also see Friend Due on Friday, so I thought about whether I had anything to bring for her as well. FDoF had not announced the sex, however, and I thought to myself, “We don’t really have any gender-neutral clothes.”

I’m starting to wonder if I haven’t moved my blog enough times and should move to WordPress. Well, I’d be moving it to be hosted with the rest of my stuff, running WordPress. Blogger is starting to annoy me. Maybe I’m just impossible to please. You’d never know I’m such a happy person, would you?

Yesterday was a very full day for D.L. and me. Bright and early, we headed to IKEA with our friends Kim and Idunn. As you may know, IKEA offers cheap breakfast if you get there early. In the U.S., it’s a 99¢ deal with eggs, bacon, potatoes, and coffee. I remember very clearly coming to IKEA in Denmark and seeing their breakfast offer for 15 kroner. I remember thinking, “wow, that’s a good deal!” and only several minutes later realizing that that’s three times as much as it is in the States. I was finally thinking in kroner.

Today I’m trying to make up for all the housework I didn’t do yesterday, but I’m pretty sure yesterday will still end up being more fun.

The day after my parents left Denmark, I realized with a mild shock that they left without the packages to mail to my blog contest winners. Once their visit was in the foreseeable future, I thought I’d save a bunch of money on shipping by having them do it. Oops.

This is not related to the rest of my post in any way, but I have to say it:
WHEN WILL THE BLOODY CONSTRUCTION BLOODY END ALREADY? I am NOT thankful for buying this bloody flat, with the stupid bloody sitting tub, and the bloody penthouses they bloody built on top of us and all the bloody noise they continue to make for well over a bloody year during which time I’m either bloody pregnant or I have a bloody baby that needs to nap. Every negative thought I’ve ever had in my life is directed to YOU, CONSTRUCTION PEOPLE!
So, with that out of the way, what am I thankful for? Well, I’m bending the rules again, but they are still my rules, so I can do that. My fantastic in-laws transferred the money to us, so that makes it a gift, but on the other hand, the money was in our account when we spent it, and we got to pick what we wanted to do with it, so I’m counting it as a Money Monday. Besides, I know at least a few people are looking for updates after Friday’s post, so here we go.
On Saturday, we went to the Baby Expo, which was worthwhile, but not as good as the one in the spring. I was a little disappointed. I was hoping to load up on Kroko books, but there were no book dealers at all this time.I could do a future MM on Kroko books, but not today. We did get to buy some sippy cups. Oh, there’s another MM idea! Um, wait, back to task. So, yeah, the selection of strollers was not that great. Well, there were lots of prams, but not many pushchairs. I hope my American readers can figure out what I mean. Hey, while I’m all tangent-happy anyway, I’ll talk some more about the expo. We really lucked out, actually. First, we ordered tickets for cheap ahead of time, and they ended up costing less than we were originally told, which was already cheap, so score there.
Then, we went in, and I swear, I was shoving the tickets in this guy’s face. I was really, REALLY trying to give them to the guy, but he was so flustered over the fact that the goodie bags weren’t coming fast enough, that we entered without anyone taking our tickets. Anyway, we found the sippy cup people and I started grabbing all the stuff I wanted to buy, but we found out they didn’t take debit or credit cards. And there’s no ATM in the expo. *NOOOOO!* But hey, I still have our tickets! So we left, went to an ATM, and came back in. They took our tickets the second time.
The first time in, we only got one goodie bag, because apparently some people have a philosophy of giving one per person OR couple, but personally I think it should be one per ticket, because we paid twice as much as the people that came by themselves. I made a comment about it, but it wasn’t a big deal, especially considering the fact that they didn’t pre-stuff the bags this time and that guy was really flustered. Also, the goodie bags weren’t as good this time. I was hoping for free prune juice again, but no. Still, my sense of fairness kicked in, and when we went in the second time, we hid the goodie bag in the hopes of getting another. The goodie bag people were still running behind, so the woman said we could get one when we were on the way out. On the way out, we got two, because she was more sensible than the first guy. So we ended up with three in total. That kinda makes up for them not being as awesome as before.
Insert segue here and I’m back on track. We left the expo and headed to Malmö in our search for a stroller. When I was scouring the internet for stroller reviews and info, I learned that the prices on strollers are much the same in Sweden and Denmark. At least, the numbers are the same. But Swedish kronar are less than Danish kroner, and when you’re talking about as many of them as you need to buy a stroller, that means CHA-CHING. So we decided we should go to Sweden. Also in my internet scourings, I had come across this.

You don’t have to speak any Swedish to see that they’re saying, “We have a metric crapton of strollers!” So that’s where we went. Malmö is a 35-minute train ride from Copenhagen, and it cost us about 200 kroner round-trip. (We saved about an order of magnitude more than that, so it worked out well.)
I was glad that I had read so much online, because it’s pretty overwhelming to walk in to that many strollers. We went straight to the Emmaljungas and started playing around. We pressed all the buttons we could find, pushed it around the store, and did pretty much everything but wake up D.L. to pose her in it. I went over to the Stokke Xplory for a bit too, to make sure I didn’t think it would be worth it to pay the difference. I really, truly prefer the Emmaljunga, much to my own surprise. I like how high the Xplory is, but it just doesn’t handle as well or have many other innovative features besides being up high. So we were both sold. A sales guy answered some questions, made some suggestions, and was generally helpful, and next thing you know, we’re paying for our Limited Edition Happy Sheep City Cerox 360 and matching foot muff. Another helpful Swede helped us install the foot muff so we could put D.L. in the warmer stroller right away. She woke up just at the right time.

So… why do we like it?1) I’m a color freak. I love color. I love my things to be in color. But color in a stroller can mean it looks dirty 5 minutes after you clean it. I love that it’s a practical grey, but with the fun sheep and colored flowers.
2) The handle height adjusts easily, so both Thomas and I are comfortable. He’s only a few inches taller than me, but what a big difference it makes to adjust the handle ever so slightly!
3) Hand brake! I actually read a review where someone said they preferred a foot brake. I don’t get it. The hand brake is so much easier. Most reviews agreed with me. I love the hand brake.
4) Front swivel wheels. This thing turns on a dime. I feel totally spoiled after the umbrella stroller and the big honking pram.
5) It can face either direction. And by that I mean that you can remove the base from the chassis and position it the other way, but you can also just flip the handle to the other side on the fly. Neeeat. I’d seen this before but now I own it. So. Cool.
6) Storage under the seat. I know, this is pretty standard, but we didn’t have it with the umbrella.
7) The hood goes all the way up and down. All. The. Way. We could totally encapsulate D.L. if we wanted to.
The back goes all the way up and down. She can lay totally flat for a nap, or totally upright, or anything in between. A lot of other ones I’ve seen are pretty recliney even in the most upright setting, but this one has a proper upright.
9) The insect net is built into the hood. Just unzip, unroll, and hook at the bottom. This is fab for people who lose things. Not that I know any people like that.
10) The rain cover stows in a tiny bag that velcros to the chassis, and was included in the already low, Swedish price.
11) Super nifty, puncture-proof wheels.
12) If we want to, we can buy a carry cot for baby #2 and use the same chassis. Which means we don’t need our pram anymore. Would anyone like to buy a pram?
13) Why, yes, we DID find a place to hang the name plate, thanks for asking.

Interested in a side-by-side comparison? No? Well, here’s one anyway.
There is one downside, though. D.L. really enjoys making an “aaaaah” sound when we go on cobblestone, to hear her voice get broken up with the bumps. Now the ride is far too smooth. Sorry D.L.!