Two kilometers

FCC regulations require equal time:



Check out that Dialekt at the end!

Sorry it's sideways again. Now that I know I can't rotate videos I'll stop taking them in the vertical format.

A rose

I took this with the point-and-shoot - imagine if I'd had the Nikon with me!

Scary monster Christian

Press play and if you have volume you should turn it on. Enjoy! (Sorry it's sideways, I haven't figured out how to rotate yet.)

Nine months

Christian, on his nine-month birthday, started to crawl. Yesterday, in the afternoon, he covered the short distance from the playmat to the couch - a little under a meter. Slow, uncertain but determined, his hands slapping down hard on the floor and his knees skittering unsteadily. Just a short time later I was upstairs with the boys in their joint room (when they play together upstairs I always open the sliding wall between their rooms to make a larger playing space) and had to quickly go to another room. A minute later I heard Alex call me: "He toppled over! Christian toppled over!" Then a pause. "He's crawling! He's crawling!" By the time I got to the room, Christian had made it from his half of the room to the playspace underneath Alex's bunk-bed-without-a-bottom-bunk. Two meters, easily. Christian officially crawls.

Nothing is safe.

He's curious, so curious, and wants everything. He cries in frustration when we take things out of his hands. He sees something on the floor, over there, and off he goes with a slap-slap-skitter, slap-slap-skitter. We are going to have to baby-proof the apartment far more thoroughly than we ever had to with Alex - for Christian, and I say this with a smile in my voice, is a menace.

Christian has six teeth and is getting two more. He loves his food, Pasta Bambini is his favorite, and he likes to try to pick up grain of rice. He needs his own spoon when I'm feeding him and if Alex is playing near-by while Christian is trying to eat (they eat breakfast, lunch, and usually dinner at the same time but have different snack times) I don't have a chance. All he wants to do is watch Alex and what he's doing and get out of the chair and play with Alex. Alex is his hero. Christian's face lights up when he hears Alex's voice. When Alex comes home after his day with his grandparents (he spends Wednesdays at the farm) Christian is out of his head with excitement, pumping his little legs with glee that his brother is home again.

I am so glad of this, and long may it last, this love between these brothers.

Just give me the passport now

... for I have become Swiss. I regularly sweep the front walk.

Overheard at our house

Reto: "Hm. I don't know what to wear tomorrow. We're going shooting in the morning and then I have a meeting."

Jen: "Oh! Can I blog that?"

Case in point

A while ago I put up some pictures of Alex and Christian together and wrote something about Christian's budding hero-worship of his big brother. It has, if anything, only grown as Christian has grown. And Alex, for his part, seems to love his little brohter. There is jealousy and "don't touch that" and "that's mine" but he loves his little brother. Cases in point:

Overheard at our place

Alex: "Mama, look what I did give Christian!"

Me: "Wow! Three dogs and a bear!"

Alex: "That makes four things."

We have been working on numbers but not on math.