First, and perhaps most importantly, I'm going to be uncharacteristically silent on the internet from sometime Sunday, December 5, until... well, until the apparently overworked and underpaid folks at TDC manage to get the new apartment hooked up with broadband.

When I look back on my early adulthood, I remember being "cut off" for a few days during every move because there was inevitably a gap between the shut-off of the old phone and the turn-on of the new one. I remember having to make phone calls from nearby phone booths, bars, and laundromats. And when mobile telephony first appeared, I thought, "How cool! Now I'll never be cut off when I move!" But those were the days when the internet was, at most, a means by which I could communicate with my east coast family from my digs in L.A. via Prodigy. (Remember Prodigy? The online email service that actually charged you per email, and only allowed a certain number of characters per email?)

Now I practically live on the net. It's where I work, play, talk to my friends, taunt my enemies, and spend a godawful amount of my money. A 10-14 day interruption is horrifying, but there's no way around it.

So: no Almanac, no blog, no message board, no email, no nothing for a couple of weeks. Sorry about that.

Now, the good news... Earlier this week—Monday or Tuesday—Trine and I dragged ourselves home (where Molli was being tended by her mormor) from an exhausting afternoon of work on the new apartment to find one of those "sorry-we-missed-you" notices from the post office. They'd tried to deliver a package, etc, etc. They were going to hold it until we picked it up, etc, etc.

"Christmas stuff," we figured, and we shrugged it off. The move was what mattered. We'd pick the package up later, when we had some free time. After all, if it was really a Christmas package it wouldn't be opened until the 24th anyway. (Don't get me started on Christmas Eve's usurpation of Christmas in Denmark).

But Trine was walking right by the post office on an errand today and picked the package up. It was just a big envelope, but it was addressed in my own handwriting. Despite the approaching holidays, I'd only addressed one envelope to myself in the past few weeks, so I knew what I'd find inside: the U.S. Embassy's response to our application to have our daughter Americanized. Look what we got:



Look closer!



I'm no longer the only American I know in Frederiksberg! The famous Molli Malou is now officially an American citizen—her American passport came in the same envelope!

(I think I've used more exclamation points in the past few paragraphs than I have in the past few months.)

The only thing we seem to be missing is her social security number, which pretty much dashes my hopes of getting her to earn a little holiday money of her own.

Molli's started making the raspberry sound—which I guess I'd spell either "phhhlt" or "pffffft," depending. It's facilitated by the vast reserves of drool she's been summoning forth. She's still mostly making vowel sounds, but some of her gibberish actually resembles human conversation (in some semi-Hawaiian language) every day—that is, less screamy, more babbley. The other day while we were prepping her for her bath I could have sworn I heard her say, quite clearly, "I was John." I was stunned.

"Did you hear that?" I asked Trine.

"Yeah," Trine said, sounding a little less impressed. "She said, 'ya yaaa yaan.'"

* * *

Enjoy the season, and I'll be back in a couple of weeks!

This week is going to be a nightmare. Tomorrow morning we need to be at our new apartment by 8am to begin the unenviable task of ripping out and replacing the ceiling, a process which may well take us all week. That's on top of everything else we need to do, and is one of the reasons the Almanac is on hold this month. And then, of course, once we're done with that, I partake of the actual pleasure of my 17th move in 21 years, or whatever it is, and my first with an infant added into the equation.

HOWEVER, I did promise to try to keep a little action going over here on the Blog (and I have been keeping slightly active on the Moronic Underground), so I thought I'd take advantage of half-time in the Pats-Ravens game to share the big news from Friday: Molli did her first roll!

Tragically, Trine wasn't home. It was just me and Molli. I'd left Molli on her back for a while and had noticed she'd been trying to roll over. (Trine had been training her a lot recently.) But when I came over to her and tried to encourage her, she just got frustrated and gave up. So I flipped her onto her belly and she almost instantly looked up at me with a big smile and executed a perfect roll onto her back. It was extraordinary... so extraordinary I knew Trine would never believe me. I ran for the camera, set it to video, put Molli back on her belly, and begged her to do it again. She demurred a little, then began trying, and after about thirty-five seconds finally managed to swing herself over yet again. Here are screen grabs of the video (it looks like it's out of sequence, but it's not: she throws the one arm out first then swings it around for the momentum).

















Amazing. She hasn't repeated since, though not for lack of trying, but she's getting closer and closer to a back-to-belly flip. Very nearly did one tonight at her grandmother's birthday party.

Halftime's almost over now, so that's all.

Oh... and another thing... one of the dishes are host served at Thanksgiving was cranberries in whiskey. Best cranberry dish ever. I won't repeat his recipe, in case it's secret, but I'm sure you can improvise your own. Make cranberry jam, but add whiskey.

Mm.

The game's back on. Enjoy the week!