Daddy's Crib

As I told you before, Tobias spends one night a week with my parents. Sometimes a little more, when my parents allow us to go on a long weekend :-), but the regular schedule is one night a week, which is wednesday nights these days. My parents have a big attic and on that attic they store a lot of stuff. Most of it is stuff that has been in several attics through several moves but has not been touched (other than for the purpose of moving) in years. Well, now that there is a grandchild some of that stuff is allowed a second life, like some of my old toys. I think I have put some pictures with some of my old toys on before.

Anyway, on that attic they also found my crib and some baby blankets. That is what Tobias is sitting in and on in this picture. Nice huh? My son is sleeping in my crib :-).

Kissing

Tobias now seems to understand the word Kiss.... at least that's what we think or hope or something like that. Anyway, his kisses sort of constitute licking really. But, it is cute. Here we both had to laugh so hard that in mid-kiss Tobias started laughing too. Not only that, but he made it really hard to capture one of his kisses. And sometimes he confuses "Tobias, give me a kiss" with "Tobias, lick and bite my nose". He does this because we made a game out of that. He sort of bites your nose and then expects you to rub it on his tummy. For some reason that is loads of fun because he laughs and laughs whenever we do that. Great fun for us too by the way, although it may sound a bit disgusting, but hey, he's our kid you know :-).

Anyway, in this picture you can sort of see how it works an how much the participants enjoy it.

"Reading" the paper

Tobias loves reading, or should I say that he loves tearing apart the paper, magazines or anything else made out of paper that he can get his hands on. Here he is "reading" the newspaper with his greatgrandmother. Her house was the destination of one of his biking trips with my parents. My parents house is only 6 miles from her house, so that was a nice trip for them. My greatgrandmother also loves seeing him and as she does not see him as often she is always very surprised and amazed by how fast he grows and develops. I hope that she will be around long enough for Tobias to remember her. For now she is doing fine and she really enjoys when we visit with Tobias.

Well, those were some of the pictures my parents took during the past few weeks. It is nice for us to see how he spends his time when we are not around.... :-)

Tobias Biking

For the Dutch biking is pretty much as natural as walking. I think I mentioned before that biking is "poured into us with a porridge spoon" as we say, meaning that we start young. Moreso, we do not only bike for pleasure or sports, biking to us is also a very important mode of transport. For example, we don't really have a schoolbus, we ride our bike to school. To give you an idea of how important biking is in the Netherlands: there are more bikes than people in our country.

So, I guess my parents thought that Tobias should also start young.... My aunt gave my mom this bike (if you can call it that) for Tobias to use. I think he is a bit to young for it though, hence grandma's helping hand, but it is a good start! And it looks like he is liking it too, or not?

Biking with Opa

My parents also love to go biking with Tobias. They courteously waited until I had biked with him first, but then they took him out as well. As you can see Tobias is loving it and so is Opa. And Tobias has his own little steer, which he doesn't when he rides with me.... My parents live near a sugar beet factory and hence pretty much in beet country. That is what you see in the background, a mound of beets.

That brings me to an (maybe not so) interesting fact about the Netherlands: we eat beet sugar, as apposed to cane sugar eaten by most of the rest of the world as far as I know. At least I am sure about the Americans because I could only find cane sugar when I was there.

Anyway, this picture was taken not too far from my parents house.

Drinking without hands...

I think I have written about Tobias' weekly schedule. So, as you know, one day of that schedule (currently friday) is spent with Opa and Oma de Pee. This is great for Tobias, because he really gets to know and love his grandparents, for Opa and Oma because they really enjoy being grandparents, but also for us, primarily because of the advantages described above...

At Opa and Oma's Tobias also has a playpen. My dad likes to play around with him as he did here. He stuck the bottle between the bars where it would be stuck enabling Tobias to drink without hands. Some, or maybe even most of the toys in there belonged to me when I was a baby. I don't quite remember that, but there is one wooden rattle that he absolutely loves. That is probably his very favorite toy and according to my parents I also loved that thing.... Interesting huh.... I'll see if I can find a nice picture with Tobias playing with it.

By the way, the pictures I am posting today are taken by my mom and dad on the days Tobias spent with them. I just got them recently. This was taken about a month ago.

Higher grounds

Ever since Tobias started crawling around he has really been noticing the cats. But not only that, he has also been trying to get them or catch them or grab them or pet them or whatever it is he is trying to do but never succeeds at... His ability to get up and stand up, in addition to his ever increasing crawling speed gets him closer and closer to his goal, or so it seems.... The scratching post was always a safe haven for the cats. They would lie on that thing and observe Tobias from higher grounds. Well, those days are over.... Tobias is now able to reach those higher grounds as you can see in this picture. As you can see, Jip is not amused and getting the hell out of there. I guess the window sill is next....