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! 

Ice-cream

Tobias' first word, other than papa and mama, was probably "IJs"... That is Dutch for "Ice-cream"... Tobias is talking more and more now and he has been for the past couple of weeks. It is hard to say if his first word actually was "IJs", but it was the first time he spoke with intention. It was at my mom's birthday and we were having desert, ice-cream. He wanted some and he said "IJs" pointing at our ice cream. He had heard that word before and he actually had ice-cream before, but he had never said it before. Needless to say we were pretty surprised and needless to say that he had some ice-cream :-).

His vocabulary is increasing daily. He now says many words, like blue, green, yellow, bear, ball, bye, hi, wall, trash, red, and quite some more actually. I think it is hard to keep a list of his vocabulary because it is growing so rapidly! That is great to see and it is amazing how many words have been stored in his head and how well he can apply them. For example the colors that he uses, he applies them to other objects than the initial ones he identified first as being blue or yellow or green. They now apply to trees, balloons, cars, etc. He also knows a lot of letters. He has a letter toy that seems to work really well. Whenever he sees letters, like on a t-shirt or a store window or something, he will point to one and make its sound. He knows d, e, f, h, i, k, l, m, o, p, s, t, w, z. He knows some others as well, but he can't say them yet.

The most amazing thing with his language to me is the fact that not only does he know all these words, he knows some of them in both our languages!..... AND he will use the Dutch word when talking to me and the English one when talking to Lisa! AMAZING! To me it is anyway... The other night I was reading one book to him in Dutch and one in English. Both books feature a blue butterfly. While reading the Dutch book the butterfly was "blauw" (or "bauw" as he says it), while reading the English book the butterfly was "blue" (or "bue" as he says it). So he distinguishes between mommy and daddy as well as between daddy reading Dutch and daddy reading English! Once again: AMAZING!!!

Mama....

I believe this is my first post without a picture. I know that sometimes a picture says more than a thousand words, but this time words will have to do because
- first of all I did not have my camera at the time of the event I am about to describe
- second, I would have needed video in order to show what happened, and
- third, I had to laugh so hard that I would not have been able to capture the event anyway....

Ok, what happened? Well, let me begin by telling you that twe weeks ago Lisa bought Tobias a barn with barn animals. There are three kinds of animals: horses, sheep and cows. Each animal comes in a mother and a baby size. So, Tobias goes "mama, mama, beebee, beebee" when he is playing with them. Of course we ask questions like "Where is the baby horse?" and "Where is the mama cow?".

Another thing I should tell is that Tobias is very much into trashcans of all kinds. Whenever he sees one he point at it and says something like "da da". We are supposed to respond by saying "Trashcan!" and he will go "Ja.". He has proven to be a very good trashcan spotter. As we were biking this past weekend he would go "da da" pretty much every 5 minutes. A lot of times we didn't even see a trashcan, but at closer inspection there always was one, or just a tiny part of one visible somewhere...

Ok, here's the story... As you know we bought a new house. Currently we are looking for a new kitchen, bathroom, floor and such. So, the other day we were looking at bathroom stuff in a lowe's like place. As we were walking the various aisles we came across a tiny trashcan. The kind that has a footpedal operated lid and shines and everything. Well, needless to say it caught Tobias' attention. He walked towards it and started to thump on it an raising the lid, all the while going "da da". So, I responded "Trashcan!". Tobias went "Ja." and kept playing with it. At one point we wanted to go on so, I asked Tobias "Where is mama?" expecting him to go to mama so that we would be able to continue our tour through the store. Well, guess what happened.... he went to the bigger version of the trashcan, the "mama trashcan", instead!

I hope this story is as funny in writing as it was in the person, because I just couldn't stop laughing.... but then I guess a picture does say more than a thousand words sometimes. Well, I just know that as I re-read this in the future I will remember... and laugh...

Cleaning

Ok, I am back in order. I have decided to just skip some of the pictures I intended to put online when I took them. Due to vacation and other stuff I just got too far behind to catch up.... I don't think it would be appropriate to put a picture of Tobias with the Dutch flag painted on his face, because the Dutch soccer team was playing, online now, almost two months after the World Championships... :-) Other than that there were no super-milestones or anything like that, just some pictures taken on my daddy-days. I will try not to get that far behind again. For now I will continue after our vacation...

For some reason Tobias is into cleaning stuff. He loves taking a broom and a dust pan and walk around the house cleaning everything. He will clean the couch, the armchair, the desk, Jip, Janneke, the carpet and, as you can see in this picture, the floor. Quite funny to look at and hopefully he will still like it this much when he is older, although I guess I should not count on that too much....

He also likes brushing things, like his hair, daddy's hair, Jip, Janneke, the carpet, the bed and such. He also likes to stick mommy's make-up brushes in his ears.... a bit disturbing, but it makes for some great pictures (taken during our vacation...):

Eh... strange bird...?

The order got a little messed up here because I wanted to post pictures from our vacation first. Well, I did and now we're back to the week before our vacation. We bought a baby toilet seat in the shape of a bird and put Tobias on it... without much, although a little bit of, success.

At first he was not at all happy to be sitting on it, but as soon as we started reading to him his smile returned. As you can see in this picture he is still somewhat hesitant... Of course I can agree with him on the weirdness of sitting on a bird... especially when mom and dad are telling you to take a dump on it...

Well... we put him on that thing somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes at a time and read to him. He has done a poo and a wee (combined) two times now... Of course we have not been too good at putting him on there, but I guess we have to start somewhere. Hopefully it won't take him too long to get used to it... :-) 

One more from Italy...

Well, actually this picture was taken in Monaco, so I guess the title should be more like "One more from the vacation". Just because it is such a cool picture. Of course we have loads of cool picture from our vacation, but I chose this one because I remember so well how much fun we had sitting out there, despite the unbelievable heat. Tobias was laughing, looking around and kind of goofing off, as were we. It was a very nice day out there. I guess Tobias is flagging a waiter here because he wants more juice of some kind (who wouldn't with 100 degree weather!?).

Well, like I said, that was it for our vacation....