Unexpected Initiative...

One of my previous post concerned me putting Tobias in my shoes and taking a picture... A rather staged, but at the same time quite funny picture. This time I am posting a picture of Tobias in Lisa's shoes. This time it is not staged at all, but entirely spontaneous....

We were all sort of hanging out in our bedroom. I read Tobias some books, but he had enough of that. He was just playing around on the floor a little and Lisa and I were just cuddling and being lazy. We weren't paying much attention to what Tobias was doing, except for the occasional laugh about him chatting away to himself. Suddenly we hear him saying: "Walking Mommy Shoes!". We look, and there he was, walking around the bed in mommies shoes! Sooooooo funny, even moreso because he had them on the wrong foot....

So, I dashed downstairs, got the camera and shot this picture! 

Sinterklaas

As you probably know, in the Netherlands we kind of have 2 Santas.... One comes on December 5th on a white horse, accompanied by "Zwarte Pieten", rides on the rooftops and throws gifts into the chimnee... The other one is just like the American one, except generally he is not our primary gift giver....

Needless to say that we were celebrated Sinterklaas... I guess Tobias is a lucky dude because he gets to celebrate both... Anyway, like I said, we celebrated Sinterklaas. He usually puts his gift in a sack ("De zak van Sinterklaas"), probably to protect the from all the soot in the chimnee... Well, Tobias was ready for gifts this time! As you can see in this picture he practically disappeared in the sack getting all the gifts. The cute thing was that his primary reaction was to hand the gifts out to other people, although, once he got the first one of his own he was less inclined to hand the gifts over....

One of the funniest and most unexpected moments was when he pulled out a gift from my parents, a Bob the Builder Lego set, shook it (unopened) and exclaimed "Lego!"... We all had to laugh...

Note: he already had some lego's and plays with them frequently. I guess he recognized the sound they make... 

Play House

Tobias and I have this new game: Playing House. Thas does not mean playing house like a mommy and a daddy and a child, no, we build a house. Tobias sits on the couch and I use the pillows to build a little house around him. He absolutely loves it. The best thing is when I put the roof on and he sticks his head out and I go "Peek-a-boo"! He can't get enough of it and laughs like crazy, literally to the point of burping/throwing up... (I admit, that was a bit disgusting...).

Anyway, I started this game with him this past tuesday and he remembers stuff now, so sure enough, the next day he was walking around saying "Papa, build, ouse" over and over. Since Tobias has so much fun playing the game, I enjoy it too. He runs to the couch, throws the pillows off and sits in the corner. Then I build the house around him which he then tears apart while we are both saying "Peek-a-boo". Then we rebuild the house, and so on.

Doesn't that sound like fun? In this picture Tobias is sitting in his house getting ready for the "peek-a-boo"-moment. Like I said, Tobias can't seem to get enough of it so I am expecting a lot of playing house for the weeks to come... :-).

Loads of Fun in a Car...

This is probably the trillionth time I am telling this, but I still love my daddy days. Unfortunately there is only one every two weeks, but fortunately there is one every two weeks. Like two weeks ago, when this picture was taken. I usually take my time getting up and getting ready. Most of the times I take Tobias to my bed and we cuddle for a while, or I read him some books, or we listen to some music. Then we have breakfast together, both of us still in our PJ's and sometimes we spend half the day like that...

That was also the case on this daddy day. We were just goofing off and Lisa had put out this push cart for him the day before. Well, he likes to push Mr. Potato Head (Tato..... Ead) around in it, or tinky winky, or elmo, but he also likes to be pushed around in it. He calls it a car and he askes me "ide, Tadas ide!" (Tadas is what he calls himself these days...). Of course I am a willing daddy and I race him around the house....

Tobias can have loads of fun like that in his "car", and of course daddy does too!

The Wrong Shoes...

Some frustrating misfortunes with blogger were my part earlier this week when I tried to post this picture. I'll try to rewrite the story I had typed up to go along with it....

Tobias loves his shoes. He has a whole ritual for putting them on and taking them off, especially taking them off. We take them off since he is not able to do that himself yet. Then he walks to the back door and bangs them together. Then he walks to the front door and he puts them away. All these actions are accompanied by exclamations like "Oes Off", "Nean Oes", "Oes Away"...

He also likes our shoes, particularly mine. They are too heavy to "Ean" them, but he can bring them to me one by one and he can clean them away one by one. He can also put them on and walk on them.... like in this picture. He was actually able to take a few steps in them :-) As you can see he is enjoying it!

The Giraffe (Waf...)

Two weeks ago we went to the Zoo. It was the first time we took Tobias to the Zoo. We went to Rotterdam, to Blijdorp Zoo. It was a nice day and Tobias had some good fun (we think :-)).

In the weeks preceding this visit he had been playing with a train with animals as passengers. One of the passengers is a tiger (who, according to Tobias, says: whroah!), another one is a giraffe (which Tobias calls a: Waf). What I find quite amazing is that for the longest time a giraffe (or a tiger, or any of the other animals) to him was that little figure that he played with. They don't even look like a real animal really, they are sort of cartoonish... Yet, when he saw one in real life he recognized it right away! Apparently the figures have sufficient resemblence to the real animal for him to do that...

We were in the zoo for about half a day and only saw the main attractions, the big animals like the lions, the tigers, the elephants, the gorilla's, and... the giraffes. The main problem we had was getting Tobias to switch animals... he would get so much into one animal that he would not want to leave. When we just took him to the next one it took some crying before he would start laughing again and getting enthralled with the next animal...

His favorite animal was probably the ostrich, because that one was sort of bopping his head up and down, switching between looking over and looking through the fence. Tobias interpreted this as the ostrich playing peek-a-boo with him and he could not stop laughing!

In short: a nice picture to remember a nice day! 

Difficult food

Man, time goes by fast! I realized that it has already been three weeks since my previous post. So, time to go through the pictures of the past three weeks and select the most interesting/cutest ones...

Well, here's one. For quite some time now Tobias has been eating what we are eating. This sometimes poses a problem because he does not always like what we are eating, but I guess that generally speaking it is going OK that way. I can't even remember the last time I fed him baby food from a jar.

Most of the times when Tobias eats what we eats he eats a cut up version of what we eat really. Of course Tobias is always more interested in what we are eating, especially when things on our plate really look different, or in this case, are different.

He seemed to really want the corn so, we gave it to him. I guess in this picture it looks like he is really eating it, but he was mainly licking/kissing it... Well, it makes for a nice picture!