"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....

Getting up!

You may wonder what is so special about this picture. Tobias has been able to stand for quite some time now, right? Well, for the past two weeks or so, Tobias has been able to get up and stand by himself without us assisting him. Of course he still has to hold on to something, but oh well, fair enough... He usually sort of drags himself up although he is getting better an faster every day. Anyway, whenever he gets up like this he starts giggling. Apparently he likes his newly acquired point of view. Until last thursday, whenever he did this I never had the camera close at hand, and by the time I got it the opportunity was already gone. Fortunately he can stand like this a lot longer now and that's what enabled me to take this picture. As you can see he is really enjoying it. Here he is using the couch to hold on to, but he also uses the chair, the play pen, his daddy, and basically anything else that will allow him to do so :-).

Here comes Tobias...

Tobias LOVES taking a bath. He has one of those seats that stick to the bottom and he really enjoys using that. We have all the other stuff too, you know, a tummy tub, a baby bath, a stand for both, but so far we mostly put him in the regular bath and one of us is in there with him. In this case mommy who I discretely left out of this picture. She was having some fun with Tobias as you can see. I heard lots of laughter as I was making Tobias a bottle and I thought I'd go check out what was going on. I found this little man with foam hair and beard..... As you can see Tobias was lauging as well!