Summer fun (and 10 months old)!

Here's a recap of the past few weeks, showing a bit of what we've been up to since getting back from Paris. Unfortunately Béla came down with a bit of a cold a couple days after we got back, nothing serious, but with enough of a cough that we all had a few nights with very little sleep. I stopped counting one night after I'd been up with him 8 times. In one night. Of course he wants to be nursed every time, even if it's just for the comfort, since there can't possibly be any milk left at that point. And then I got up and went to work. Unsurprisingly, I got a bit of his cold, which morphed into a sinus infection, but which finally went away on its own after a week of suffering.

But his cold didn't stop us from doing things, such as attending my institute's summer party. It was a beautiful day for it, and the turn-out was good, and we had some good BBQ outside on the grass around the building where I work. Jeremi and Béla came up for the party, and he impressed everyone with his walking, and he had lots of fun picking up rocks, sucking on them, and trying to shove them through holes in a grate. Unfortunately his cough was getting worse as the evening went on, so we didn't stay too late. We also forgot to take pictures the whole time, despite having our camera with us, so Jeremi took this picture while we were walking home.

The following weekend was Calin and Susanne's going-away party! After three and a half years here, they headed back to Copenhagen. Susanne's thesis isn't quite done yet, but she's working on writing it up this summer, while Calin is busy fixing up their condo there and looking for work. They'll be missed, that's for sure!

The going-away party was lots of fun, and there were many babies there. Here Béla is playing with Alexandra and her son Konstantin, who's about three months younger than Béla. (They were actually one of the families at the prenatal class that I translated for my colleague's wife last fall.)
Calin at the party, after receiving his chocolate Dutch World Cup as a going-away present from some of his colleagues. (Perhaps he'll get a real one soon enough...)
The day after the going-away party was Fathers' Day! (The North American version.) Jeremi was really spoiled this year, getting cards and packages from Canada, as well as gifts from Béla and me. Here Béla is helping him unwrap the present from me: Vietnamese coffee filters (or hats), along with Vietnamese coffee and evaporated milk, so we can have delicious Vietnamese coffees at home. Béla very much enjoyed unwrapping the individual boxes.
And here he is playing with one of the gifts he gave Jeremi: some new English children's books, including such classics as "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see?", among others. (Okay, so not directly a present for Jeremi, but having some fresh material makes being a Papa easier, so everybody wins.)

Later that afternoon we headed over to Bakr and Dai's for a wonderful BBQ, with more food than we could have possibly eaten. Bakr works with me, and his wife, Dai, who is Egyptian-Canadian, had a baby boy, Eiad, about four months after I had Béla. My colleague Christian (at left) was also there. Unfortunately we didn't get the camera out until late in the evening, when Dai was inside trying to get Eiad to sleep, so neither of them made it into the picture. We had lots of fun eating and grilling outside, and Béla really enjoyed all of the gravel for sucking on.

This picture was snapped a moment too late, because Jeremi was trying to get him all the way in the cupboard, with only his feet hanging out. Rather than putting on locks, Jeremi has rearranged the cupboards such that there's nothing too dangerous or fragile in the ones he can reach. He has great fun unpacking our spice cabinet, and pulling various things out onto the kitchen floor. Certain items are favourites though, and we can find them later in various places throughout the apartment. Favourite storage places are inside the washing machine (it's a front loader), inside the laundry hamper, in his car seat (which is in the corner of our bedroom at the moment), and on the balcony, after being dropped through the bars of the safety gate. I can't believe that in his nine-month post I wrote about him not really getting the idea of putting blocks back into the bucket - now it's all he wants to do! He's really taken with the idea of inside-outside in any context, and can repeat a given exercise many, many times. (A favourite is dropping a block into Jeremi's stainless steel water bottle, with or without water in it, which has a neck just big enough for Béla's hand to pass through. This makes it tricky to get the block out, which requires sometimes dozens of attempts. Once successful, he drops it in again, and repeats.)

(I also like the above picture because it somehow makes him look like a newborn again, though I'm not sure why.)

One fun item he found while rummaging in our bedroom this month was a boomerang that we were sent by friends in Jena after they moved back to Australia. He set off right away to hunt some wombats.
He decided that the wombats must be in the laundry hamper, and actually opened the lid and looked in with the boomerang held aloft. Alas, I got pictures immediately before and after, but didn't get one of the hunter at work.
One more, just to show you how pretty the other side of the boomerang is. (You can also see how scraped up his nose was - the right side is from the gravel at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and the left side is from a tumble at my institute's summer party. Our little bruiser!)
There has also been much BBQing this summer, which is great. It's been really hot here, so much so that we didn't want to cook for a full week, so pretty well everything went on the grill. (This requires a certain amount of patience though, as it's only charcoal here.) We had a nice supper with our friends Grit and Ekarat, before Ekarat headed back to Thailand for good, after finishing his PhD. Alas, we didn't get any pictures of this, or of the supper we had with them in town either. They were among the first non-work-related people we met in Jena, through the German-language Stammtisch that Grit organized. She's now teaching at Cornell, but is back to visit for the summer. Hopfully we'll get to see her some more this month.

We did, however, get some pictures when we were in the backyard grilling with two other families from our building. Here Jeremi got a nice picture from our kitchen window, while he was up getting something from upstairs.
And here, a wider view, where you can see Béla sleeping on the trampoline. He'd fallen asleep on my lap upstairs, and I didn't want to be stuck up there waiting for him to wake up, so I came down with him, thinking he could finish his nap on my lap while I chatted with the neighbours. They suggested I put him on the trampoline instead, and it was perfect! Not to worry, we were watching the whole time to see if he stirred, but he was really in a deep sleep, and he doesn't really go straight from sleep to running anyhow.

To give you an idea of how deep the sleep was, the two six-year-old boys of the neighbours chased each other around the trampoline with sticks for quite a while, and he didn't budge.
And a close-up. I love this picture, because somehow the perspective makes it seem like he's a giant, fully half the width of the trampoline, which is clearly not true. I think his feet sticking out from the quilt makes him look taller too...
Eventually he did wake up, and came to eat a delicious meal with the rest of us. After supper he went back on the trampoline to play with Jeremi. The game basically involves Jeremi running around the trampoline, trying to catch Béla, while Béla, on the surface of the trampoline, giggles like mad while trying to "run away". He always starts running or crawling from where Jeremi last caught him, but then goes in a nearly straight line the other way, only to find that Jeremi's there waiting for him! Then he changes course a little, but it always ends by being caught by his papa. And repeat. He really, really loves this game. It was already late when I started to take pictures of it, so they didn't come out well, but here are a couple representative pics: Pure joy!


Out of focus, but showing the unstable walking/running. The fact that it's on a trampoline makes the walking a bit harder, and when he gets going he even bounces a little, which usually results in a fall. But of course it's not so hard a landing...
Finally, after much running around, getting off. It was already after 10:00 at this point, but he was still raring to go. Crazy baby!
Here he is surveying the view from his prison cell, or perhaps looking at the latest objects to get dropped through the gate and out of reach. Jeremi's cell phone has ended up out there, as has one of my nipple shields. (Another lost one was found a couple days later in a pot on the shelf, with its lid back on.) Here he's wearing his little bathing suit outfit that Betty Ann bought him while we in Canada, in preparation for a trip to the beach (fake lake, with nice wading pool).
We've brought him swimming twice now, which actually went really well and was tonnes of fun! I thought he might hate it, given his uncertainty about the bath, but he was really excited to get in the water and splash around a bit, especially after seeing all the bigger kids doing it. And of course, it being (the former East) Germany, all the kids are naked. Not just little babies like Béla, but kids up to about 10 years old are regularly naked. So far we've gone swimming in the evening, so sun exposure really isn't a concern then, so he got to wear his bathing suit there only to be stripped naked before going swimming. (Diapers are off too.) I know in Canada babies are naked at the beach sometimes, but here it's really something different. Alas, we forgot the camera the first time, when he was happy as a clam and splashing about, and then he slept through our second trip, when we came armed with camera and videocamera. Third time's the charm? Let's hope so. (We were joking about writing a long post called "Béla's eighth time swimming!")

One more out of focus picture from that hot-hot day last week, just to illustrate something relatively new: He now regularly brings us books that he wants us to read to him, which is really cute, and really fun.

One other new thing this month is that we bought him a bike helmet! Now he can go out in the Chariot as a bike trailer instead of just as a jogging stroller. We have yet to try it though - perhaps this coming weekend. The manual officially says to wait until they're 12 months old, but that's for the average 12 month-old, and he's easily as big and robust as the average 12 month-old. Here he is, modelling the cool helmet with fishies all over it:
And, with a bit of help from me, actually showing off his face while wearing it.
In other general developmental news, he now says "cat", and repeats it quite excitedly as he abuses the cat. He really tries to pet her, but he's not so good with "gentle" just yet. And that swishing tail of hers is just too tempting not to grab. (At least he lays off the ears now.) She keeps coming back for more though, and will roll on her back for him, exposing her tender belly to his "petting". She has batted at him a couple of times when he hits her in the face too much, but without claws. Sadly, he doesn't get that this means she wants him to stop.

As mentioned above, he's the master of inside-outside now, and can spend much time playing with his stacking cups. When they're adjacent sizes it's still quite challenging, as he can't fit the little one in the big one if one of his chubby fingers is in the way, but if they're two sizes apart it's just fine. The square ones are also a bit tougher, but the round ones are no trouble at all.

He's not as excited about knocking down towers as he used to be, but he loves putting the blocks back in the bucket. In fact, he likes putting anything that will fit into the bucket. He has made a couple attempts at stacking too, though I don't think he's managed to make towers more than two blocks high (though Jeremi might be able to correct me on that).

He walks so much better than he did a month ago - it's good to have to video to remind us of this! Now he barely crawls at all, only sometimes to get over an obstacle he can't step over. He can climb up onto the lower of our two couches, and onto our bed. We're working on teaching him to get down feet first, as his instinct is to go down head first, which isn't so safe. Hopefully he learns this soon, as he requires more supervision now that he can climb up onto higher surfaces. In general, he's quite happy to wander around the apartment. In the evening if one of us is in the kitchen and one is in the living room he comes and checks on us, bringing objects back and forth to show us and to play with.

As for his stats, by our measurements he didn't grow as much as last month, which isn't surprising given that he was sick twice, which puts him off his food a little. He last weighed in at 11.4 kg (25 lb), and is about 76 cm tall (29.9"). He's going to the doctor for a check-up next week though, so we'll get the "official" figures then.

So there you have it, ten months old, and only about a week late, after all!