Photographing Cars

Don’t ask me why, but when we were done with the arts and crafts today Tobias wanted to take pictures. I asked what he wanted to take pictures of he replied: “The cars outside…”. So, that’s what he did… and then Gijs came by, and then they were both staring outside and taking turns photographing a passing car. Interesting…. so, I thought I’d take a picture myself .

Arts and Crafts

Today was “Juffenfeest” (teacher’s party). Some of the teacher’s birthdays are quite close together and the Juffenfeest was a celebration of a couple of them. The children got to wear dress up clothes to school. Tobias wore his knight suit and sword, and was quite excited about it…

Also, they each made a flower for their teacher. Tobias had done that yesterday with Lisa. Apparently he enjoyed it so much that he wanted to do some Arts and Crafts today as well. Usually he does such things in his room at his desk, but today he wanted to do it together at the dinner table. He went up and got his arts and crafts box. We were busy for quite some time. He made a flower, a man on a gate, some men in cars (a ball on a piece of paper… might just as well have been an eye…). I made a flower and a swing set. Together we made a car, for Opa, so he can put it up in his office .

It is so much fun to watch him working on something like that. He gets so into it and so concentrated. I love it.

PS: That IS a perfume bottle in the picture, we sprayed it on pretty much everything, including the flower for the teacher…

Puppet Show

This may seem like an odd picture, but it is not as odd as it seems. What is going on here is that I am taking this picture from my seat in Tobias’ Puppet Theater… We were hanging out together on my daddy day and he suddenly said: “Papa, you sit there, I am going to get my puppets, I want to do a puppet show for you…” And, up he went, and down he came with his hand puppets. I had to sit in the chair on one side of the table and he was on the other side lying down sticking his hand puppets just over the edge of the table. Soooooo cute .

He has four puppets, a knight, a pirate, a witch, and a dragon. Here, the knight and the dragon are engaged in a fight. Later, in the next show, the witch and the pirate were playing jokes on each other.

It had been a while since he played with these puppets, so, it was nice to watch the show .

Growling Bear

At the end of this month Tobias will have his annual school play. He is going to be a bear. He took the costume home today to try it on. Well, as you can see it fits . He is quite excited about it, because he is not going to be just a bear, he is going to be a growling bear. They are going to sing a song and when they sing about the bear growling Tobias gets to growl. I am already looking forward to the play… . Doesn’t he look cute? Not much like a growling bear at all, if you ask me…

Note: Notice the resemblence to Flip…?

Flip de Beer (again)

Yep, we had a visitor… Flip de Beer spent the weekend at our house… again. I guess I don’t have to explain who Flip is and why he comes over, because I wrote about that before… Let me tell you then what happened in this picture. Tobias got a knight suit this weekend, including shield, sword and everything. Of course he wanted to play with that and he pretended Flip was the enemy. Well, Flip got hurt in that game, he hurt his leg. Fortunately, Tobias also has Doctor’s stuff, so, here he is playing doctor. He is taking notes as you can see. Flip got a bandage around his leg, an injection and his temperature taken. So, he got the full treatment and felt much better after that .

Flip is going back to school tomorrow, but, despite this little incident, he had a nice weekend…

Mario Bros.

Tobias got a Wii game, Super Mario Bros. Wii, from Sinterklaas, you might remember my post about the gift in the shoe. Anyway, it is pretty much his favorite thing to do these days. That is not so much the problem, the problem is that he wants to do it with me (I am (still) better at it than he is, so I can unlock new levels…) all the time. We have played a lot together, especially during the holidays and stuff, but currently I am refusing to play with him all the time, much to his dismay.

Recently we have found a solution where he has to play by himself for a while (usually an hour to an hour and a half) and than we can play together for another hour or so. I expect that’s what we will do when he gets home from school today. Another solution is to play with Gijs, who is also kind of hooked to the game…

We’ll see what happens later today, maybe Gijs will drop by , but then again, even though it is not my favorite game, I just love playing with my boy and he is sooooooo enthusiastic when we play, so, that makes it enjoyable for me too…

Piano

It is not very often, but every once in a while Tobias sits down at the piano and plays. The interesting part is that what he plays seems to be getting more coherent and sometimes even sounds like a song .

As I have told you (many times) before, I would love for Tobias to play an instrument. I am still convinced that he will like it too at some point. Recently he has been talking about playing the (electric) guitar. It has been quite consistent too, so, who knows. I’d gladly get him one. Right now the status is that he wants to start guitar lessons when he is in group 3 at school, which means next school year. I hope that sticks, but we’ll see. I guess it will be a hard sell that in order to play electric guitar you have to start acoustic…