Easter, and our growing baby

One exciting bit of news over the past week was the arrival of Béla's Certificate of Canadian Citizenship. Because he was born in Germany, he doesn't have a Canadian Birth Certificate, which is most often used in Canada to prove citizenship. They gave him a passport in the meantime because he had to travel, but it's only good for two years, because he was lacking this most official of documents, which proves that he's a citizen. Here he is, checking it out.
Yup, that's right, the document that he'll have to use for his entire life to prove his citizenship has a picture of him when he was three days old, and states for all posterity that he's 49 cm tall and has blue eyes, neither of which is quite true any more. Hmm... All that writing on the back does look official...


And it smells like the real thing...



Now there's only one test left to see if it's legit...



Yup, just like a gold coin, it stands up to the bite test.


Note that throughout all this he's wearing a cute little outfit from Aunt Gail and Uncle Gilbert, sized for 9 months. We've been exploring a lot of his bigger clothes lately, as he suddenly seems to be getting too big for a lot of the 6 month items (but more on that later). This outfit is totally cute, and has a picture of a motorcycle on the shirt, with the year 1979, and the text "vintage ride". Seeing as I was born in 1979, Jeremi is quite amused by the idea of me as a "vintage ride".

For the Easter weekend we opted to stay home, which made for a relaxing four days of good food. We're leaving for Canada so soon that another last-minute trip somewhere just didn't make sense, so instead we just hung around here, cooking, among other things, homemade bagels with cream cheese and smoked salmon, Bavarian breakfast (homemade pretzels with Weißwurst (a kind of sausage), sweet mustard, and wheat beer), a Middle Eastern feast, broccoli and shiitake mushroom stir fry, and, the main event, a gigot de sept heures, a leg of lamb slow cooked in the oven with wine, vegetables, and herbs, for seven hours, until you can cut it with a spoon. We didn't get pictures of most of it, but here's the lamb, being actively cut with a spoon:

And the whole spread, with roasted rosemary potatoes, and (green!) asparagus. Because of the sauciness of the dish, it would have been better served with something that better absorbed the juices, like couscous, rice, or polenta, but we really love these potatoes, so we didn't mind sopping up the juices with the bagels left over from breakfast.

And of course, the requisite picture of Béla enjoying it all. He really does well with slow-cooked meat, which makes the whole absence of molars a non-issue.

We also dressed him up for Easter in this cute little outfit that makes him look like a little Easter Egg (or so I think at least), playing with his maraca that also looks like an Easter Egg. I had visions of taking this picture on his spring-like activity mat on a patch of grass near here that's completely covered with crocuses in the spring, but (a) the crocuses were already dead by the time Easter came, and (b) Easter weekend wasn't as warm as the days before or after, so I didn't want him out in public half-naked.

In this picture he's not really smiling, and he's not even holding the maraca anymore, but I think he just looks too sweet, so I'm including it all the same.

In other news, we were at the doctor yesterday for the last of his shots for a while, and it seems that over the past four weeks he's gained a whopping 920 g (over two pounds), and grown 3 cm. This has moved him from below to well above the 75th percentile for both height and weight, breaking what seemed to be reasonably steady trends. Yup, he really had a growth spurt, which I suspected based on the clothes he was outgrowing, and the truly prodigious amounts of food he was eating, seemingly without nursing any less. It seems he's starting to grow into those giant hands and feet of his!

And here's some evidence: Check out how he fills out this cute 12 month sleeper that Melanie and Ruthanne got him? All stretched out...

...and all curled up too.

And finally, because it's hard to see in that picture, here's photo evidence of his first visible bruise, after a worse-than-usual head bonking while attempting to pull himself up on the coffee table. It took two days to show up, and is already almost yellow, so it really isn't so bad. (It's probably hard to see in the smaller format on the blog, but it's on the upper right hand side of his forehead in this picture - actually his left hand side.) I'm sure it's the first of many. I'm just impressed that we've made it more than seven months without any visible bruises so far!
And, for those of you who know him, how much does Béla look like Jer's cousin David in this picture?!?