the Weinmeile, 2010

Ah yes, another year, another Weinmeile! This was my third time at the wine festival that takes place in the wine region north of Jena every Pentacost, though last year I was pregnant, so it hardly counts. We went with our friends Calin and Susanne, who made the wise decision to start in Naumburg so that we were able to negotiate the walk from the train station to the first booth in daylight while completely sober, as it's along the side of a minor highway, which you have to cross without traffic lights.

The weather couldn't have been more perfect, and it was one of the nicest days we'd had yet that year, and there were lots of groups of people at the train station that morning, heading up for the day just like us. Here are Béla and I on the train.

This is from the first stop of the day, where they had this cute little paper garland of bunches of grapes.


Here Calin is practicing his high-five technique with Béla, which was a big hit.
There was a group at a nearby table who heard us speaking English, and I think assumed that we were tourists (which we were, sort of...). They all had the pottery snail shells that many people wear on strings around their necks, in order to drink wine from them. The woman had two spares this year (they're stamped with "Weinmeile 2010"), and she kindly gave them to us. Here you can see Béla checking it out.

Here we are at what I think was our second stop of the day, where Béla is enjoying the grape stuffed in his mouth. One of the common snacks sold at this event is skewers of alternating grapes and cubes of cheese, which are pretty well his two favourite things.
Enjoying the scenery, walking from winery to winery...
...and the view across the field of the city of Naumburg, with its famous cathedral clearly visible.

Ah, nap time!

It was hard to get a picture that did it justice, but the road was really packed with pedestrians. So many people out to enjoy the perfect weather and the lovely wine.
The next stop was winery Hey, which we hadn't visited in previous years, but which was recommended by our friend Barbara, who had worked there during the Weinmeile a couple of times. It was set back a bit from the main road, but worth the walk in...
Béla slept through the whole time at the Hey winery, which was a shame for him, as he missed the delicious pork picatta and asparagus!
Here's one of the funny-shaped barrels on display along the way, with the poster from this year's Weinmeile, complete with map, posted on it. The barrels are oval so that they can be rolled, but don't easily roll away.
Here we are just breaking out of the trees to go along the biggest section of vines, where the big "Saale Unstrut Wein" sign is, and where there are sample vines along the left of the different varieties of grapes grown in the region, which is fun when visiting in the fall, for grape-tasting.

Here you can see the sign in the upper right (like the "Hollywood" sign, but a bit smaller).
It being only May, the vines weren't so impressive yet, but in a couple of months (i.e. now, because I'm so late writing this), it's another story.

Later in the evening - Béla was asleep again, and the sky was growing darker. Here we're passing by the sign for Saalhäuser, so we were almost at the end. What we discovered was that although you can go either way on the Weinmeile, pretty well all the big late night parties are toward the other end, where we started, by Naumburg. It was okay that we missed the big parties this year though, as we really needed to catch the last train back, and Béla may not have been up to the big party.

We did manage to find one last place open in Bad Kösen though, so we were able to have one last bottle of wine on our way to the train station.
I like this picture because both of us are wearing shirts that match our eyes. (I think his eyes are a bit browner now, but still not fully determined.)
And finally, he was out for the night, clutching his shell to make sure it didn't get away. He was a champ - really, the easiest and happiest baby all day long. At each place we took him out of the stroller (when he was awake) to let him move around a little so he didn't feel like he was cooped up all day, and he really seemed to enjoy the whole day. In the end we were out with him for 14 hours, and it was a complete success. (Easiest baby ever!)
And us, at the end of a perfect day, being a bit silly while waiting for the train. As you might be able to guess, Susanne took most of the pictures, which is why she's not in so many of them. Thanks, Susanne! You're much better at documenting our lives than we are!
I'm already looking forward the the 2011 Weinmeile!

Weinmeile practice

A few weeks after Männertag comes Pentacost (or Pfingsten in German), which gives us a holiday on the Monday. It's also the weekend during which the annual wine festival in the region north of here takes place, the Saale-Unstrut Weinmeile. (You may remember blog posts from the first one, when I went with just Calin and Susanne as Jeremi was in Canada, and we got incredibly drunk and got into trouble on the train on the way home, or last year when I went with Jeremi and my friend from Belleville, Pam, when we got rained on and Pam drove her bike into mine, causing me to fall while six months pregnant. Always a good time!)

We were already looking forward to the Weinmeile this year, but I was a bit concerned, because it seems that I can no longer drink red wine. At Christmas I could, but sometime this spring something changed, such that when I have 1-2 glasses of red wine with supper, I wake up with a brutal hangover. I can still drink beer, but it's really not worth it to drink wine. I wasn't sure about white wine though, which is what we usually drink at the Weinmeile, because it's what they grow best in this region, so we thought it was best to do a practice run before drinking several glasses of wine and then wanting to die the next day.

We had just wanted to buy a bottle of wine the weekend before and have it with supper, but we forgot to add it to the grocery list, and it was Sunday so everything was closed. But bars and restaurants aren't closed, so we did our own little Jena pub crawl, going to a few different places over the afternoon and having some food and a glass of wine at each. It was so much fun, and Béla really enjoyed it too!

We only got pictures at one bar, the Grüne Tanne (which was described in the last post as well). Here he is, after crawling away, almost onto the road. (Not to worry, we were watching, and there's very little traffic on this street.
And a close-up, to show how darn cute he is. You can still see some of the bruise on his right cheek from the fall on Männertag.

Sitting at his papa's feet, which makes him look tiny (or perhaps makes Jeremi look like a giant?).
A good time was had by all. And best of all, I woke up Monday morning feeling fine. White wine is officially okay, and the Weinmeile was a go! (More on that shortly.)

Männertag

Ahh, Männertag. I was trying to get the blog up to date in chronological order, and was waiting for Jeremi to write this post, as he was actually there, but found that it was creating a bit of a bottleneck. As such, I've decided to go ahead and write the blog post for him, just so I can catch up a bit, and maybe be only one month behind...

Männertag means "men's day", and it's sometimes also called "Vatertag" (fathers' day) or Christi Himmelfahrt (the day of Christ's ascension). It's a holiday here, on the Thursday something like 40 days after Easter. It's a holiday in all of Germany I think (some are only for some states, mostly depending on whether the state is predominantly Catholic or Protestant), but in some regions (including ours, and I think mostly in the former East), it's celebrated in a peculiar way. Rather than being like a North American Father's Day, where dads spend time with their families, the men go hiking in the woods and get hammered. They sometimes bring along wagons filled with beer (mini-kegs are often on sale around then), and there are even special belts that hold a couple dozen mini bottles of Schnapps (which just mean booze here, nothing sweet).

Last year Jeremi stayed home with a pregnant wife, and we just hung out and had a lazy day. This year, he got to celebrate like a real Thüringer, going out with (from left to right) Christian, Calin, and Dennis, for a day of walking and drinking.
The other three got a lift up to Calin's place in the morning (at 10:15), where they had a giant brunch before setting out on their hiking and drinking. This shows the lazy foreign influence of the group (Calin is Dutch and Jeremi is Canadian), as often German men here meet up around 8:30 to start drinking for the day. I'm just inferring from the scenery (as I was at home with the baby), but this looks like they were still up in Cospeda, on the Windknollen, having one of the early beers of the day.
From there they must have walked to the next bar (these pictures may not be in chronological order - remember, I'm writing about something I didn't participate in). One nice thing about hiking around here is that there's a bar on the top of every other hill, so there's always a reward when you make it to the top. (Raw wilderness it's not.) On Männertag they're all open early, with the grills fired up, and often have specials like whole roasted pigs to feed the hungry and drunken men.
Here they're at the Papiermühle, the local brew pub, which is at the bottom of the hill leading to Cospeda. Shockingly, I see some women in the background of this photo!

That's more like it, this is mostly men (some with matching hats, probably to make it easier to find each other when they lose someone unconscious on the side of the trail later).
Prost! (Like "cheers" in German.)

I can't be sure, but based on the light fixture in this picture, I think they might be at the bar on top of Jenzig, the biggest hill in Jena, on the other side of the river.


Meanwhile, while they were out drinking, I was home with Béla, busy baking a cake and preparing a Greek salad in preparation for a BBQ that night. I went over to meet up with the other wives and girlfriends at Dennis and Jule's place around 5:00, while we waited for the men to show up. Around 6:00 they called and said they'd be half an hour, and an hour and a half later they actually arrived. The evening was lots of fun, though Béla had a pretty good fall onto a bookshelf and got a big bruise on his cheek. He was fine after a few minutes of crying, but it looked pretty bad.

Here they're at the Grüne Tanne, an old bar just on the East side of the Camsdorfer bridge in Jena. (It's the bar at which the first fraternity was formed, and it's still the official bar of this fraternity. On the weekends we sometimes see old men wearing the sashes and hats of the fraternity going in in the afternoon. Fraternities are something different here than in the US, and they sometimes involve sword fighting and initiation rites involving facial scars, which are officially banned, but still sometimes happen. Weird, in any case.)
Finally, a picture of all four of them!
I'm not sure what's going on here, but it looks like Jeremi is going for Dennis's nipple...
On to the next place?
Alas, we didn't get any pictures of the end of the evening, but we had a lot of fun. Christian and his girlfriend Carmen hadn't seen Béla since he was four weeks old, so they could hardly believe it was the same baby. Dennis and Jule have a little girl, Nele, who was just over 2, and who weighed the same amount as Béla. She's just on the smaller end of normal, and he's on the bigger end, but it was still pretty funny. (They also had the same size feet, but she's way taller than him.) I'm sorry we didn't get a picture of him coming home. It was a bit cool, and we hadn't brought a hat for him, so he borrowed Nele's hat, which is like a little pink raspberry. Super cute, but super girly. Alas, we didn't get a photo. Perhaps he'll thank us for that later.

Béla's first sip of beer

Our unplanned trip to Canada unfortunately coincided with our friend Valentina's week-long visit to Jena. She just finished her PhD in my group at work, and was back to finish up some work on a paper, and to take care of some details after moving away. We arrived on Thursday, and she was leaving on Saturday, so we were able to meet up for supper with the gang from the Spanish Stammtisch. (She's Italian, but speaks Spanish as well, and hung out a lot with this group. They also speak German and English in general, so we can hang out with them too...)
And of course this meant that Béla got to have another visit with his Zia Valentina!

Hmmm... Where's that hand going???
During supper (and the drinks beforehand) Béla was doing his damndest to get a sip of beer, and we kept trying to distract him. As some of you may recall, my nephew Owen had his first sip of beer at Oktoberfest while visiting us when he was around the same age, and my sister-in-law in Canada mentioned that Béla shouldn't miss out on this important milestone for too much longer. Combining that with the fact that a German who was out with us reassured us that most babies don't like beer, so once you give them a sip they'll stop asking for it, we decided to give in.

Here he is, fielding the first offer, but distracted by the novelty of Valentina.
Back to boring old mom for a second try...
And finally, success!
While the look on his face doesn't look like pleasure, he most certainly enjoyed it. (Babies make strange faces while eating sometimes, even when they keep coming back for more, and I think it might have been the carbonation that was surprising.) Alas, Ute's theory about most babies not wanting beer after a first taste seems to have found its exception in Béla, and he's still forever trying to get into our beer glasses and bottles. Not to worry, the sip was a one time thing.

Béla is 9 months old!!!

A short update about our boy - he turned 9 months old on Sunday!!! Here he is, walking across the room last night, something he can do incredibly well now.

Yup, after three weeks of practice, he can not only walk better, but he can stand up directly from the ground (without pulling up on anything), can walk while clapping, can walk over rough terrain (i.e. his activity mat, toys), can bend down from standing and pick up something (like a book) that's lying on the ground and stand back up, and can effortlessly drop from walking to crawling without missing a step. While crawling he can navigate over our legs and over pillows without any trouble now, and it's amazing to see how strong his arms are. And while we don't have any stairs, he gets to practice crawling in and out of his "castle", the playpen seen here, which he doesn't really like when it's closed, but loves when it's open.
Here he is with his new ball, which he can already palm. (It seems that rather than growing into his giant hands and feet, they're growing right along with him. In fact, he's already outgrown the Robeez that Karen got him when we left Canada just a month ago, which were already size 12-18 months. Maybe that's why he's so good at walking - it's easy to balance on feet that big!)

Ah yes, his first mouthful of dirt, which he seemed to quite enjoy. He fell asleep while we were coming home from shopping on Saturday afternoon, and we didn't want to wake him, so we thought we'd look for a nearby patio on which we could have a drink while he slept in the stroller. After we were let down by no less than four nearby bars (one was closed because the owners were on holiday, one was closed for a private event, one is apparently always closed on Saturdays, and one just didn't bother putting out their patio furniture on a sunny Saturday afternoon), we gave up and carried the stroller into our apartment and had a beer on our own balcony. Then he woke up and came out to hang out with us, and while we were being incredibly careful about keeping him away from the edges, he got a good handful of soil from our basil plant in his mouth. He didn't seem to mind it much though!
And while he doesn't have another doctor's appointment scheduled until July or August, we'll give you his stats based on measurement with our bathroom scale and a measuring tape.
Height: 74.5 cm, or 29.3 inches
Weight: 11.1 kg, or 24.3 pounds,

For those of you unfamiliar with baby stats, this means that he's giant. And not just heavy, also tall. Around the 90th percentile for both height and weight, in fact. But at least he's a healthy weight for his height!

In other, non-gross-motor skills, he's doing pretty well too. He's had the pincer grasp mastered for a while (I think any baby who feeds himself figures this one out early), and he can both clap and wave bye-bye (this latter one is brand new). He says "papa" to Jeremi (though sometimes it's "papapa"), and "mama" when he's really desperate for milk (which is sort of like calling for me). He's come close to saying "cat" when we talk about Aeris ("ka, ka"), and he has very clearly said "duckie" when we're lying in bed in the morning looking at the mobile, which we always refer to as the "duckies". He loves the mobile, and will point at it and grunt until we spin it, which makes him deliriously happy, at which point he says "duh-duh-duh..." and occasionally "duckie". What's sort of heartbreaking though is that if we say the word "duckie" in any other context (i.e. with a rubber duckie in the bathtub, while reading a book, while bragging about our baby who can say "duckie"), he looks at the ceiling in whatever room we're in, to look for the duckies. He also has six teeth now, two on the bottom and four on the top.  And one other cute thing that he's picked up over the past two weeks is squeezing his eyes shut before he either eats something (food or while nursing) or when he gets really excited while playing.  It's like he's overcome with anticipation, and he just has to shut his eyes.

Now for things he can't do: He loves to knock down towers of bricks or stacking cups, and to tip out buckets full of bricks, but hasn't even made the slightest effort at making his own stacks or putting anything back in the bucket. We've tried to get him to give us five, and he loves it when we hold his hand and make him do it (it gets a laugh every time), but he completely doesn't get that he could, of his own free will, hold his hand up for this to happen. He still loves books, but often lacks the patience for us to actually read what's on the page before turning to the next one, so books with fewer words are favourites right now. But he really does love the page turning part, and adores the "coucou" books he has where there are flaps to open with something hiding behind. He's really good at them, and will open and close the flap repeatedly (to which we say "coucou" every time, of course), before going on to the next page.

Also, though it's too early to tell for sure, we think he might be left handed. Most things are pretty well equal between the two hands (such as handling blocks and toys), and page-turning seems to be usually done with the right hand, but I think that has more to do with the direction books are read in English and French. But when it comes to fine motor skills, and particularly eating, he does at least 80% and more like 90% of it with his left hand. His right hand will grab a piece of something and then just sort of hold it, while his left hand puts piece after piece into his mouth. It may change, but it's been like this for the past two months at least. We're both right handed, so it's a bit surprising, but by no means unheard of.

So there you have it - Béla as of nine months. We've got some other posts to catch up on that happened before Sunday, so we'll be going back in time slightly, but I didn't want to wait and write about what he was doing at 9 months when he's already 10 months old...