Goofy Goofy

Sometimes I like to just goof off a little bit. On our Christmas vacation in the US I bought a new camera, a Panasonic DMC-FZ18. It is an SLR like camera with ultra zoom. I didn't use zoom in this picture, but I was just trying some of the settings. Well, it is harder to get Tobias to sit still for one second than it is to use this portrait setting mode. I particularly like this result. I took many more than just this one to get this result though. Thank god for digital photography :-)!

Ice Skating

Past Sunday a friend of ours (they were at Tobias' party as well) celebrated his birthday. The party was on an ice skating rink in Amsterdam and we had some drinks there afterwards. That was nice, but Tobias' favorite part was the ice skating rink.

I was unable to find my skates which initially didn't bother me that much, because it was way to warm outside to skate, it wasn't even freezing. So, the ice was watery and wet... But, Tobias got lucky and was able to use Jelte's skates! At first he was pushed around by our friend while he was holding on to the back of a chair (the traditional way to learn how to ice-skate...) while Jelte was sitting on the chair. That was loads of fun and it took a chocolate milk bribe to get him off the ice after that. Then I got lucky being able to use our friend's skates. So, Tobias and I both got onto the ice, this time without the chair. Tobias was doing great! He was moving his feet in the skating motion and every once in a while he would let himself glide a little. I was so proud, can you tell? :-)

Oh, and doesn't he look cute with his Texas cowboy boots and his Dutch double glider ice-skates?

Happy Birthday!

Tobias turned 3 last friday. Unbelievable!!! We celebrated twice: On his actual birthday we had my parents, my brother and some close friends over. The next day, last saturday, we had some friends with their children over. Both parties were nice and Tobias was spoiled to death!

First of all he had a cake on both parties. On friday I took half a day of and picked him up early from the daycare. That was nice and we spent the afternoon together baking an apple pie. In this picture he has a hat on that was made for him at the daycare. And as you can see he is sitting close to the kitchen scale because he wanted to weigh everything... It was quite funny because he started telling me about what the daycare teacher had told him and he was saying "I don't fit in this scale!". Apparently he had talked about the scale at the daycare and they must have thought he was talking about a bathroom scale... :-).

Oh, I have to tell you this anecdote...: Tobias pees on the toilet these days, but he has been pretty persistent in refusing to do No. 2 on the toilet. He kept telling us "When I am three I will go poo-poo on the toilet." Well, a couple of days before his birthday he received some cards with the number three on it. So, I tried to convince him to go no. 2 on the toilet because he was almost three, and while telling him that I referred to the cards with the number three on it. Well, that strategy blew up in my face on his actual birthday because I told him in the morning: "You are three now Tobias, are you going to go poo-poo on the toilet now?", to which he thought for a little bit and then replied: "Papa, I am still a liiiiiiiiittle bit two." :-) Brilliant?! Not? (By the way, he did go poo-poo on the toilet yesterday...)

Anyway, on his actual birthday we had a nice dinner (that I cooked) and a nice party. He got a typical Dutch gift from my parents: a "Sjoelbak", a game where you have to slide wooden discs into holes. Lots of fun. We gave him a scooter.

The next day we had lots of children in the house which was fun too, and messy :-). Lisa made a chocolate cake this time and once again he got quite some gifts. His favorite was probably an airplane that makes a take-off and landing noise when you push the button. He also got some playmobil, games, books and such.

It was a good birthday, but I can't believe my son is already three years old!!!

Playing with Nonny and Granddaddy

Since we spent Christmas and New Years at Nonny and Granddaddy's Tobias had a lot of opportunity to play with them. Well, he did. Nonny did a lot of reading and playing Play-Doh. Granddaddy got to do a lot of imaginary play and some language lessons. Granddaddy tried to say "Olifant" (the Dutch word for "Elephant") to Tobias but he merely replied by saying "No Granddaddy, it's Elephant..." :-).

This is one of my favorite pictures though. It is taken in the Corpus Christi Aquarium Playground where they had a play-store as you can see. Here Tobias is selling Granddaddy an imaginary cup of coffee for an imaginary four dollars (I have a feeling he might make a good entrepreneur one of these days... :-)).

It was good to see Tobias interact and play with Nonny and Granddaddy. We are really hoping they will make the trip over to the Netherlands sometime this summer!

Christmas

We spent Christmas and New Years in the US this year. We went to visit Nonny and Granddaddy and spent two full weeks there. We had a stressful start to our vacation because Lisa's purse got stolen on the airport before we left. Fortunately I had the passports and tickets, but the purse containing all sorts of cards, ID's, keys etc was a goner! Bigtime Bummer!

We eventually got to the US in a somewhat stressed state of mind and it took a couple of days to get over our jetlag and stress, but we had a good time altogether. We were well taken care of and Santa took good care of us too, especially Tobias! There were tons of gifts for him and he was a happy camper as you can see in this picture.

We also went down to Corpus Christi for a couple of days and spent some time at the beach. It was kind of chilly there, but we had a good time anyway and Tobias loved playing with his sand toys. We also played some soccer on the beach. The hotel we stayed at had a heated pool which was probably Tobias' favorite. We spent quite some time in that too.

At the house Tobias and I spent quite some time in the hot tub! That was lots of fun. And of course we played with all his christmas gifts. Probrably the car carrier he got was his favorite one... We had to ship a lot of it home, so we are still waiting for some to arrive in the Netherlands :-). We had a good time!

Lollipop

No, this is not a photo-shopped picture. Yes, Tobias' tongue is green here...

The day I took this picture was a daddy-day. When Tobias woke up and I went to get him he said that he wanted to go into town with me. He was even more specific than that, he wanted to go to the blue chairs, no, even more specific: the light-blue chairs....

At first I had no idea what he meant with that. It took me a while but then I realized he meant the bagel place on the market square, a place we have been to before. On most of my daddy-days I take him into town. Sometimes we will just walk around, sometimes we'll bike around, a lot of times we will stop at some place to have a drink or lunch or something. One of those places is the bagel place. I guessed he must have remembered from a previous time we were there.

After we parked the bike in town he walked right in the direction of the bagel place. He looked into some windows to see if they had light blue chairs and we eventually ended up in the bagel place. We had some drinks and lunch and then, when we were paying and leaving the place I finally realized why he had been wanting to go there..... a lollipop!!!

Unbelievable that he remembered that because it had been quite a while since Lisa or I had taken him there. He picked a green one, hence the color of his tongue... :-)

Elmo

During our vacation we tried to get Tobias potty trained. We did not succeed although he is dry pretty much troughout the day. He just doesn't want to do Nr. 2 on the toilet. He did one time, but that was it. Any way, that is not the point of this post. What we tried is give hime some candy as a reward. This worked that one time but not after that. What was so funny is that one day we saw him acting out the entire routine with Elmo! We burst out laughing, it was soooooo cute. I guess he really wants some candy. Well, we hope that it will work someday soon...

Ever since that Elmo episode he has been lugging Elmo around everywhere we go. Like today, we went into town on the bike and Elmo had to come with us. Of course he could not just be in my coat pocket, no, he had to ride in the back with Tobias. As you can see he is securely buckled up :-).

What about his hat, mittens and scarf (not visible) :-)? Cute huh? We bought that during fall break. Oma had to complete the set by finding the matching scarf that we could not find at first.