The little white lies I tell my children

I would love to be able to say that I’m the type of mother who always tells my daughters the truth, but that would be a lie. Like so many other mothers that I know, I sometimes end up using a little white lie to avoid long and logical explanations that my child won’t be able to understand.

In case you need some inspiration for your next white lie, or you simply want to shake your head while dwelling in my bad parenting, here’s a small list of the little white lies I tell my children.

– I can’t lay in your bed until you sleep tonight, because I have to go vacuum the whole apartment, but as soon as you’re asleep I’ll come in and lay next to you.

– If you pick up the pigeons feather from the ground, the pigeon will come after you, and try and hit you with a bird poop.

– When you’re asleep, the only thing mums and dads ever do, is to clean up and fold clothes.

– All the hot pink clothes are sold out in your size, and so are the blinking shoes.

– The toilet monster is really thirsty and hungry. Hurry out and feed him.

– The iPad has run out of battery and the charger won’t work until after dinner.

– The tooth fairy ran out of coins and instead she transferred the money to your bank account.

– If you don’t brush your teeth, they’ll fall out and you’ll have to live from boring things like soup and water the rest of you life.

– I never lie to you, so you would never lie to me, right?

School clothes

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We’re 2 weeks into the new school year and autumn has arrived in New York. Light and breezy summer dresses and sandals are no longer enough to keep the kids warm. In my opinion, school clothes have to be comfortable and suitable for both sitting still in class and running around in the school yard, and for artistic expressions and paint splashes in art class. According to Eleanor, they just have to be cool and comfortable.

Here’s a small selection of cool, comfortable and practical school clothes for boys and girls.

1. Skirt / Christina Rohde & Socks / Popupshop 2. Dress / Zara 3. T-shirt / Popupshop 4. Jumpsuit / April Showers 5. Cap / Zara 6. Dress / ByClara 7. Scarf / Zara 8. Skirt / Tocoto vintage 9. Pants / Zara 10. Knit / Fub

10 things we love right now

A small list of 10 things we love right now:

– Hydrangeas. I remember the first time I saw this kind of flower as I child. I was seven and we were in France on vacation and I instantly fell in love with them. New York is full of them at the moment, and both the girls and I can’t stop admiring those big balls of tiny flowers.

– The girls’ new dresses. Because when dressed in these, they feel pretty and comfortable at the same time. Even when you’re little, you can appreciate the beauty in small details.

– Collecting leaves. They don’t get any prettier than they are right now.

– Ballet class. After a long break from taking ballet classes, my eldest daughter is once again dancing around in her little pink ballet shoes at the dance studio, in our living room, our hallway and at the playground.

– Indian summer. The leaves might be falling off the trees, but we’re still wearing our sandals and summer dresses.

– Chapter books. My eldest daughter has started reading one chapter in her book by herself every night. I love to see her discovering the magic of reading.

– Daniel Tiger. Because finally we have found a cartoon which both my girls like to watch and which teaches them a lot of great things, and gives them tools to handle difficult situations. Thanks to Daniel, We now have a Grown Ups Come Back song, a Sharing is Caring song and a Potty song.

– Not having to change diapers. My youngest daughter was potty trained in less than 2 weeks by her own initiative and so far we haven’t had a single accident. Seems like not pushing her worked out to our advantage.

– Homemade play dough. We have spent hours making play dough pizzas, play dough snowmen and play dough dinosaurs. And because it’s so easy and cheap to make, it’s okay to just throw it away when the colors get mixed up. See the recipe here.

– No more co-sleeping. After having had kids in our bed for the last 6 years, they’re now sleeping on their own, and I actually think we all like it.

How to make play dough

Because I just discovered how full of bad things the pre-made stuff is and because homemade stuff is always a little bit more fun, I decided to figure out how to make play dough out of normal kitchen ingredients like, salt, flour and water. And while the kids are busy making rainbow colored ponies and donuts with sprinkles I thought I could just as well make some good use of this time to share the recipe with you:

This is how to make play dough yourself:

Ingredients:

1 cup of flour

1 cup of warm water

1/2 cup of salt

1 tablespoon of vegetable oil

1 tablespoon of cream of tartar (optional for better elasticity) (if you’re danish and wonder what this is, you can read about here)

Food coloring

Scented oils (optional)

Mix all ingredients except for the food coloring in a saucepan and stir over low heat. The dough will begin to thicken until it will start looking like mashed potatoes. When the dough starts to clump up in the middle of the pan, or when it no longer sticks to the spoon or your finger, turn off the heat and let the dough cool down.

If the dough is still sticky just keep cooking and stirring until the dough is dry and feels like play dough.

Pour the dough out on a clean surface and knead until it becomes silky smooth. Divide the dough into small balls for coloring. Drop a tiny bit of food coloring into a divot in the dough and work the food coloring into the dough. Be aware to keep the raw dye away from your skin or the table as this will otherwise leave color. You can work the food coloring into the dough while the dough is in a plastic bag, if you want to make sure the color doesn’t stain anything it’s not supposed to. Only the concentrated color will color your skin or the table, so as soon as it is worked into the dough, it will be fine.

To keep the play dough from drying out, keep it in an air tight container or a zip-lock bag.

Make sure the dough is completely cold before storing it.

If you want to make hard dough figures or ornaments for Halloween or Christmas, you can even bake the play dough in the oven.

Play hard!

Learning to count

In exactly one year, my youngest daughter Alma, who just turned 3, will start school. It scares me to think of her academic life starting at such an early stage (in Denmark you wouldn’t start school before you turn 6), but at the same time I know that she will be at an amazing school with plenty of room to play and explore. Fun things like jumping in puddles, and making roasting food over a bonfire, as Eleanor used to do in her Danish kindergarten, we’ll have to take care of ourselves during family time, but on the other hand, Alma will never be picked up later than 2:45, which is a lot earlier than many Danish children get to go home.
The first two years of school (pre-K & Kindergarten) are mostly play based, and the teaching at our school follows an Imaginative Learning concept, where the children are never told anything is right or wrong. Reading and writing is all based on their own imagination and how the individual child experiences a word and a sentence. This sometimes results in some funny written sentences, since words are being spelled out exactly how the child hears or feels them, and not according to the correct way of spelling. Most younger children don’t realize they’re learning to read, write or do math and the fact that they’re never told if things are right or wrong gives them great confidence.

Even though Alma won’t be doing much schoolwork for the first two years, the school still expects her to be able to do a bit of counting when she first starts. This means we need to do a bit of practicing, and with Alma being so excited about starting school, and Eleanor being so excited about Alma learning new things, it has become Eleanor’s little thing to make sure Alma is learning to count. At the moment they’re reading (or counting) a little counting book called Six with paintings by Katherine Bradford. I don’t know if it’s because of the paintings that are so far from anything you would normally see in a children’s book, or if it’s because the book is not structured from 1-10, but jumps around in the numbers. Anyhow, Alma has almost learned to count, and now counts to two every time she sees the Statue of Liberty, since that’s what you have to do in the book when a picture of a statue shows up on the page.

Re-decorating our children’s room

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It will soon be a year since we moved into our Brooklyn-home. During the first few months we were content with living in a minimal and almost empty apartment, with only the bare necessities. Now that we have decided to stay, I really feel like re-decorating the children’s room, turning it into a space that they not only sleep in, but will stimulate their imaginative play and bring peaceful nights sleep. When we moved to New York, we agreed on letting the girls’ decide where they wanted to sleep, and it came as no surprise that co-sleeping ended up as the solution. Moving and starting school in a new country seemed like such a major change, that we wanted them to feel completely safe and secure when in bed. But now that both girls see our apartment in the old Brooklyn brownstone house as their home, we all feel like making some changes. Here’s a little taste of my inspiration for the children’s room. I’ll share the final result with you in a few weeks, when it hopefully gets finished.

1. Bed / Oliver furniture 2. Wall Sticker / Ferm Living 3. Blankets & pillows / Camomile London 4. Bed with secret room / Oliver Furniture 5. Illustrations /Jennie Ekström 6. Toy sack / Tellkiddo 7. Lamp / Miffy 8. Bed sheets / Design Letters 9. Box / Luona shop 10. Flags / Fabelab 11. Chairs / Oeuf NYC 12. Bed / Flexa 13. Table / Oeuf NYC 14. Round carpet / Ferm Living 15. Beanbag / Nobodinoz

Super girl & going back to school

One week ago Eleanor went back to school. After two and a half months spent in quiet surroundings together with her closest family, she had to walk into a class room full of new classmates (and a few old ones) and a new teacher (who everybody says is amazing, and happens to be a real magician) and start a new chapter of her life.
When she turned around on that second day of 1st grade, waved to me and said “mum, you can go now”, I realized that she’s not my helpless little girl anymore. She is a little human who has just started a great journey of independence. Soon she’ll have her own opinions about more important things than what she wants for dinner or which colour is the prettiest.

As a parent I can just stand back, and hope, that we’re doing the right things and that she’ll turn out great. From now on I’ll have to watch her be happy, frustrated, angry and sad and have to let her fight her own battles and make her own decisions, without doing anything else than just being there to support her and helping her navigate through obstacles in her own life. It’s all I can do. That and making her a supergirl mask, that she can wear, when the butterflies in her stomach start speeding around a little too fast, or she just needs a little bit of extra power to get through the day. She says it gives her some extra strength when she has to do stuff like tiding up her room or make new friends at school.

Here’s how you make one for your child, should he or she also be in a bit of a need of some extra powers:

Cut out a paper mask-shape, and make sure the size and eye holes fit your child.

Pin the paper to a double layer of felt in your preferred color.

Cut out the two felt masks and either sew or glue them on top of each other.

Attach an elastic string to both sides of the mask. I sewed the elastic string to a thin piece of felt, but this is not necessary.

Illustrations by Emily Winfield Martin

Back home in New York

It’s exactly 2 weeks ago that we returned to New York after almost 2 months of vacation back in Denmark. During this time, we stayed at our old summer house, which is still as cosy and Scandinavian as before we moved to Brooklyn. We enjoyed great times with old friends and family, visited Copenhagen where we used to live and walked around our old neighborhood, dropped by our old local cafe, and my coffee was served by the same girl as a year ago. It’s as if nothing much has changed since we left.

For some reason, this made me nervous about going back to our new home. What if New York wouldn’t feel like a real home when we returned? What if we would all miss Denmark, our old home, old friends and old routines? Suddenly, for a few days before leaving, it felt like moving abroad once again, or at least until we packed down our stuff and said our goodbyes. As soon as we were on our way back to the airport, it was like we all knew we were going home to the daily routines that we have come to know and enjoy so much, and now that we’re back home, there’s no doubt that living here makes most sense for us right now. So here’s are a few points on why it feels good to be back at our new home.

10 good things about being back home in New York:

– In New York, we live the life we want to, without being concerned about what other people think. As soon as we got back to Denmark, we started thinking about other peoples opinions again. Back here, it just does’t really matter.

– The freshly made juice is so much better and cheaper.

– Our summerhouse is full of old stuff. Old toys, old clothes old books and papers. Our New York-home is minimalistic and empty, and we all love having room to think and play.

– In New York, we had to figure things out on our own. No help, no interference, no parents to call. Instead, it’s only us who need to make all the decisions. It can seem scary sometimes, but it makes me feel like a real adult for the first time in my life.

– People in New York are more spontaneous and that ends up making us more spontaneous. I always liked the idea of not having to plan everything in advance. Here, a playdate or a visit can be arranged 5 minutes before.

– The summer lasts longer. We still have warm summer days and have not yet worn a jacket or long pants. In Denmark, summer is long over.

.- Our bathroom is a lot bigger. With two young children, a bathtub is a luxury. I can’t remember the last time I saw one in an apartment in Denmark.

– The children feel at home here. This is where they have their friends and their daily routines. I’m still amazed at a child’s ability to adapt to new surroundings.

– We spend more time together as a family. Moving has broad us closer together, because for a while, we didn’t have many other people to rely on than our own little family. Now we have made new friends, but we still remain closer together.

– We get to live a slow life in one of the world’s busiest cities. Before it was the other way around, and I like this so much better.

Back to school stuff

Summer is officially over, and though the days are still hot, the nights are slowly starting to get chilly. It’s as if you can smell Autumn approaching closer every day. Eleanor is starting school tomorrow and in an attempt to get us all back into school-mode, I’ve been on a hunt for great back to school stuff, that will make the transition from holiday-life to getting-up-and-going-to-school a little easier.

1. T-shirt / Popupshop 2. Dress / Bobo Choses 3. Boots / Dr. Martens 4. Backpack / Fjällräven 5. Lunch box / Blafre 6. Lunch bag / Annabel Kern 7. Scarf / Bobo Choses 8.Keyring / Oyoy 9. Cardigan / FUB 10. Socks / Tiny Cottons 11. Skirt / Christina Rohde

Banana pancakes

My girls and I have a new favorite, banana pancakes with no sugar, no flour and no other unhealthy things added. The inspiration came to me a few weeks ago, when a dear friend of mine served me a homemade brunch, which she prepared while cradling her adorable six month old baby. Among freshly baked buns, fresh fruit and large cups of coffee were some small and tasty pancakes, made only of bananas and egg.

I knew straight away that this concept would be a success with my pancake-loving children, and in order to make them a bit more filling and kids-friendly, I have added a few things.

This is the recipe we use when making a stack of delicious banana pancakes:

2 ripe bananas
4 eggs
1 tablespoon of oats
1 tablespoon of shredded coconut
1/2 a teaspoon of vanilla powder
or
1/2 a teaspoon of cinnamon
Coconut oil or vegetable oil for frying

Using a fork, mash the banana until they are almost a smooth paste. Add all the eggs and whisk together. Add coconut and spices, and whisk it all together. The batter will be a bit thick and lumpy.
Heat a small amount of oil on a pan, and pour batter on the pan. Move the pan around until the pancake ends up round and thin, and let fry for a few minutes on each side until light brown.

Serve with fresh fruit or greek yogurt or fruit jam.

Tip: The banana pancakes also taste great when served cold, and will make a great snack for a lunchbox.

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