Lollipop

No, this is not a photo-shopped picture. Yes, Tobias' tongue is green here...

The day I took this picture was a daddy-day. When Tobias woke up and I went to get him he said that he wanted to go into town with me. He was even more specific than that, he wanted to go to the blue chairs, no, even more specific: the light-blue chairs....

At first I had no idea what he meant with that. It took me a while but then I realized he meant the bagel place on the market square, a place we have been to before. On most of my daddy-days I take him into town. Sometimes we will just walk around, sometimes we'll bike around, a lot of times we will stop at some place to have a drink or lunch or something. One of those places is the bagel place. I guessed he must have remembered from a previous time we were there.

After we parked the bike in town he walked right in the direction of the bagel place. He looked into some windows to see if they had light blue chairs and we eventually ended up in the bagel place. We had some drinks and lunch and then, when we were paying and leaving the place I finally realized why he had been wanting to go there..... a lollipop!!!

Unbelievable that he remembered that because it had been quite a while since Lisa or I had taken him there. He picked a green one, hence the color of his tongue... :-)

Elmo

During our vacation we tried to get Tobias potty trained. We did not succeed although he is dry pretty much troughout the day. He just doesn't want to do Nr. 2 on the toilet. He did one time, but that was it. Any way, that is not the point of this post. What we tried is give hime some candy as a reward. This worked that one time but not after that. What was so funny is that one day we saw him acting out the entire routine with Elmo! We burst out laughing, it was soooooo cute. I guess he really wants some candy. Well, we hope that it will work someday soon...

Ever since that Elmo episode he has been lugging Elmo around everywhere we go. Like today, we went into town on the bike and Elmo had to come with us. Of course he could not just be in my coat pocket, no, he had to ride in the back with Tobias. As you can see he is securely buckled up :-).

What about his hat, mittens and scarf (not visible) :-)? Cute huh? We bought that during fall break. Oma had to complete the set by finding the matching scarf that we could not find at first.

Vacation (Fall Break)

Two weeks ago we had fall break. Obviously Lisa had the week off, but I also took the week off. Initially, we thought about going somewhere, but we decided to stay home and enjoy our new house to the full extent. Well, that's exactly what we did and it was very nice.

We did go out a couple of times. We went to a big swimming pool with lots of big water slides. This was like heaven for Tobias. We also went somewhere for a walk. Well, actually we went somewhere to get a screen for our fire place and made the most of our day... but it was nice all the same. In this picture we are at the beach in Scheveningen. We first went to Sea World there and after that we took a little walk on the beach.

We also purchased two important new items for our house:
- A screen for the fire place
- A flat screen TV
And we used those items every day during our vacation. We watched quite some movies and we lit the fire place every single night. Lisa grew up with a fire place, but I didn't. We both really enjoyed it!

It was a very nice and cosy vacation during which the continuous dry and mild weather enabled us to take pictures like this one...

Goggles

A few weeks ago friends visited us and brought Tobias a gift, a new drill. He already had a drill, as you have seen from previous posts, but this one is much more powerfull! Not only that, it came with lots of other cool things. Especially cool are the goggles, as you can see in this picture. Like his first drill, he didn't play with much else the first week or two... I think if it were up to him he would wear his goggles to bed!

Anyway, it was a really nice gift and he likes it a lot. We also got a gift, a birdhouse and some winter bird food to hang on the trees (or, in our case, the rose bushes). Tobias was also rather fascinated by that. We hung the house last weekend and we also put out the winter food. He looks out the window a lot to check if the birds are eating. I haven't seen very many yet, but I hope there will be a nest in our house. That would be so nice... Well, we'll see.