Swimming

Friends of ours, Romke and Anouk, have a two year old son, Jelte, and just recently (well, about four months ago...) had their second baby, a girl, Kira. We have been in the US and so have they but last weekend we finally managed to meet and we went swimming. Well, that is The three of us, Romke and Jelte because both Kira and Anouk were sick... a cold.

We had a great time and afterwards we got to meet Kira because we had lunch at their place. She is a beautiful baby girl and soooooo small. Of course Tobias once was that small too, but that seems hard to imagine now, even though it is less than a year ago.... And in this picture you see how much smaller Tobias is than Jelte.... just a little over a year older. I have told you many times that Tobias' development and growth never cease to amaze me. Well, seeing the near future, embodied in Jelte, and the recent past, embodied in Kira, I don't think it ever will....

Oh, before I forget swimming was lots of fun. Tobias loved it and had no problem staying in the pool for something close to an hour.

PS: This picture was not posted until now because of the trouble I had posting the previous picture.... I guess you could say this picture was 'victimized' by my misfortune with blogger this past week. 

Candid Shot

This is the third time I am trying to publish this picture. The first time was last monday. I was really mad, frustrated and disappointed then when I found out that I had written like two pages and lost it all in the process of publishing.

The second time was just a minute ago, when I tried to copy it before publishing and while doing so lost the whole thing again, even before it was published....

So, as I am writing this I am VERY frustrated because of losing my story a second time. Everything I have written about this picture is lost, but the short summary is that it is hard to get Tobias in a candid shot because he is so aware of the camera.

In addition to that I wrote something about the value of pictures to Tobias, me and others, in comparison to the value of just a memory.... Maybe I'll get back to the subject later. Right now I am going to hit the publish button and hope that the (*&%^#$^@ thing will get it right this time..... :-) 

Yummy!

Tobias likes eating. He eats pretty much everything, which is easy for us. He now usually just eats a little bit of what we eat, and is fine with that. Of course we feed him, but I think I have already written about him eating a banana all by himself. Or maybe I haven't, anyway, he has been eating stuff by himself, for example, bananas.... :-). I am sure that way it tastes even better than when we feed him!

He has been doing this for a while now, I just never took a picture... Well, in this picture you can see him eating his bread all by himself. All I had to do was cutting it for him. He is so neat... he hardly makes a mess or spills anything. Also, he takes one piece and waits until he finishes that before he takes the next one.

Last week I wrote about Tobias drinking from a real cup, this week about eating his bread all by himself..... The way his table mannners are improving right now he will be five star restaurant material soon..... I guess the next step will be the utensils, maybe next week? 

My own Bath!

Playing in the bath is great fun, right? Well, Tobias would agree with that, especially now that he can have the bath all to himself. Well, actually he could have had that before, but I have always liked taking baths with him, and I still do. This past friday, it was my daddy day, I put him in bath by himself. The most pressing reason to do so is that his bath toys have been increasing in size and number. Add that to the increasing size of Tobias himself and there just isn't that much room left for me... :-) Another reason is that when I am alone with him it is kind of easy to be bathing him, rather than to be in the bath with him.

Anyway, here he is enjoying the bath all by himself, and his catamaran toy. As you can see his sitting stability is now such that he doesn't need his bath chair anymore. On this particular boat toy there is a little sailor puppet and he loves that thing. He puts it in the boat, then takes it out again and laughs in the process. The hardest part now is taking Tobias out of the bath. He has so much fun in there that he wants to stay in....

The good news for me is that when we are all together Lisa and I still take turns going in the bath with him. That is great fun for Tobias..... and for us! 

Drinking from a real cup!

For the longest time both Lisa and me took great joy in giving Tobias the bottle. Not only did we both take great joy from that, but Tobias also took great comfort from that, it was part of our bed-time ritual... But, after our last visit to the pediatrician, she advised us to change to regular milk instead of formula. Well, I guess Tobias decided that that is something that should not be consumed from a bottle, but from some other recepticle.... one that he has been using for quite some time as well: his sippy cup.

We have been using the sippy cup for juice and stuff ever since last summer I guess, or at least there about... All this time we had to help Tobias drinking from it. Soon enough he was able to hold the cup properly by its handles, but he had not yet figured out that he had to tilt his head in order to make the content come out and reach his mouth.

Well, just last week he did figure it out and he now enjoys drinking from his sippy cup all by himself (as do we :-)). In the meantime we have also been trying to have him drink from a regular glass os cup. It works but it is rather slow and sometimes messy. Now that he is able to drink from his sippy cup we thought we'd see what would happen if we gave him his regular cup. This was partly induced by the fact that we were proposing a toast to each other in his presence, which made him laugh, but also made him want to drink from one of our glasses... So, we filled up his pooh bear cup with some water and put it in front of him. Here is what happened... he drank! Cute huh? 

Climbing...

Tobias' growth and development never cease to amaze me. The other day he was standing next to Lisa and he looked so big. Ok, granted that Lisa is not the biggest person in the world, Tobias has grown way beyond the peanut he once was... He is no longer a peanut, a grape or a tad pole... he is a boy, he is my buddy boy!

In the previous posts you could see some of his mental developments and developments of his fine motor skills. In the mental development he is increasing his vocabulary, both spoken and understood. He now understands the word car and associates it with his car toy. He also understands that I make a car sound when I do, or at least associates it with his car toy. Other examples of such understood vocabulary, as I call it, include "mama", "papa", "elmo", "floep" (this is a word that does not mean, but that he associates with, a pop up toy), and some more.

His spoken vocabulary, previously consisting of sounds like "pa", "da", "ma", "wa", uttered one or more times in a row, has now been complemented with something sounding like "ti" or "si". He uses these sounds in combinations as well...

In this picture you can see some of his physical development. First of all he has grown a lot taller... he can now lean his body on the couch and the armchair. Also his strength has increased significantly. Before he could stand for only some seconds or maybe a minutes when holding on to the couch. He can now stand there pretty much however long he wants (or however long it takes him to convince one of us to pick him up :-)).

In this picture you can see him making an attempt to climb the armchair. He lacks just about half an inch of leg-length to do it entirely by himself. If we put a pillow in front of the chair he can climb up and down by himself. It does take some energy, but well, it is loads of fun, so who cares about that.

Another thing that he has been doing recently (but has not been registered on CCD yet) is standing up by himself, without a couch, chair, cabinet or parent to hold on to..... for about 10 seconds... :-). Even though it is only 10 seconds I am proud enough about it to mention it here because not only does he stand all by himself, he also has a very controlled way of getting into a sitting position. He does not just let his diaper absorb the blow, but he slowly bends his knees and sits down with the tiniest 'thud', which is something even I have trouble doing.... :-). Yet another illustration of his physical development and increasing strength. 

Purposeful Actions

The previous post as well as this one show the increased purpose in Tobias' actions. Browsing back into my archive I found a post where Tobias is playing with a train and he figured out that pushing a thing makes something happen. Well, he is far beyond that now. His actions are becoming much more refined and advanced. In the previous picture he was drawing with a pencil on paper. In this one he is playing with his "car races down and rings a bell" toy. I don't know how else to describe it and Lisa doesn't know what to call it either. You put the car on top and it will run down going back and forth and somewhere in the middle it hits a bell and in doing so rings it. Tobias loves the bell part. As you can see he grabs the car from right after the bell, even though it has one more slide to go...

Anyway, we were playing with it for a wile and I was putting it up there and letting it run down. Tobias would grab it mid-race and laugh and put the car back at the bell part. He would also grab the bell and try to pull it off. Well, after a while of playing that game, I thought I'd point my finger at the start of the race while Tobias had the car in his hand. Much to my surprise he put the car up there and let it race down himself! I have to tell you that is quite a skillful manouvre for his measures.

So, a lucky shot you say? Well, he did it more than once, sometimes failing, but sometimes succeeding as well. The best part of it was to see him enjoying it, because when he was doing it himself he was laughing even harder! I love his laugh...

Tobias van Gogh...

I have been bad bad bad at posting to this blog. Tobias is one year old now. This is the time where I should not let lame excuses such as work, home improvement projects, US TV shows, get in the way of posting to my blog. I have kept up a descent posting frequency for a whole year. If I let go now I might never get back to it! I know this blog is a great source of fun for some of my family and friends abroad (I even heard some people are checking in every day...), but it is also a very valuable record for myself, for Lisa, and who knows, maybe someday it will be for Tobias as well. So, today I will post a couple of pictures and I will try to get back into a minimum of one post a week!

This picture was taken a little over a week ago on my daddy day, which, as you know, is once every two weeks now. Tobias has been coming home from the day care with a piece of craftsmanship every once in a while. He played with paint, glue, paper and so on. So last friday I thought I'd let him play with some pencils and paper. Well, it was a success! He liked it a lot and really seemed to get into it. Here he is concentrating on his subject (I think, although he might also just be staring out of the window... who knows?). As you can (somewhay) see in this picture he has the Van Gogh style down. Well, sort of anyway, he drew all sorts of small streaks with the pencils.

Later that day we went out and got him some crayons. He likes those a lot too and he can draw even better with them. It seems he also figured out that crayons are to be used on paper, not as food, although he keeps trying to feed them to me.... What does that mean....? Ah well, maybe he just wants to share them with me so I just say "Thank you!" and return it to him saying "Here you go"..... he seems to like that game as well.