Béla is one year old

That's right, as of Monday, Béla is one year old. And what a year it's been! He's more than tripled his birth weight, and has grown a whole foot in length. He's been to eight different countries (plus an additional four in utero), and three different continents. He's learned how to walk, climb, and play, and he makes us laugh continually. He's really a happy baby, and generally pretty easy going. At the last immunization appointment he was 11.4 kg (over 25 lb) and 79 cm tall, and he's got all eight of his incisors now. After flirting with green, his eyes are now decidedly brown.

This past month was a month of travelling, which we'll blog about soon enough, but he still managed to learn a few things along the way. He started walking backwards, which delights him to no end, even though it results in banging into something from time to time. His stacking skills have improved, with three objects being common now, and I've seen four on at least one occasion. He can scribble with a pen or crayon now (see video in birthday party post), and is pretty good at it even. Interestingly, he does it preferentially with his right hand, contrary to how he earlier ate with mostly his left. He has a little riding car that he's just figured out how to propel forward, which is quite exciting. He still loves opening and closing, and putting things in and out. Light switches are also much loved these days. He also really likes negotiating ridiculously large and heavy objects. The packages that came with his gifts meant that there were lots of big boxes that could be pushed around, lifted (even when barely possible), and climbed on. A current favourite toy is the broom, which he gets from behind the bathroom door and carries around the apartment, carefully negotiating it through doorways. He doesn't like being read to as much as he used to - he seems to lack the patience now. He still brings us books to read to him, and is quite happy for about the first four pages, but then he wants to get a new one.

The biggest news this month though is that he's started daycare! Here there are two basic styles of state-supported daycare, one in big centres (called Kindergarten), and the other only for kids under three, which has one caregiver for up to five children. It's like an in-home daycare, except that they're usually not in a home, but rather in a separate flat or business place (at least the ones that we've seen). He's going to the latter kind, which is usually called the Tagesmutter (which literally means "day mother", which I hate, because I'm still his mother during the day, even if I'm at work, although there is one Tagesvater ("day father") in Jena, and all the official documents call them the Tagespfleger ("day carer")). After much stress and searching and a Tagesmutter who decided to stop being a Tagesmutter after we'd settled upon her, we ended up with a spot in a newly opened place only six doors away on our street with the Tagesmutter Susi. She's great, and the location couldn't be better.

Here they have a really good structured introduction phase of two weeks before you go back to work where the child visits for a little longer each day. First he went for one hour at the end of the day and Jeremi stayed with him, then it was an hour at the start, and then Jeremi left during an hour and a half. By the end of last week he was staying for a whole morning by himself, and yesterday he stayed for naptime too, and Jeremi picked him up only an hour early. So far it's gone really well, and he hasn't cried at all when being dropped off. In fact, he's thrilled to get to play with the other kids, particularly one older boy, Bruno. Today is his first full day. We were worried about shifting his schedule to the timetable of the Tagesmutter, with drop-off at 8:00, when he was usually up at least until 10:00 pm and sleeping until around 9:00, but it's been okay. (He did have a couple nights when he crashed early and hard though, falling asleep in the high chair during supper.)

Here he is going out on his first day of daycare:
He was ready to go! Papa wanted to stop him from running down the stairs himself, mind you.
And so they decided to go together.

And here he is trying on all his new raingear, which we had to get so he could go out to the playground with the others, even if it's raining:
Check out all his reflective stripes!

How cute is that? (There's a little red sou'wester coming soon from the same company, but they were sold out and had to ship it a bit later.) His red rubber boots are also really sweet, but he can't walk in them properly yet. I'm sure he'll figure it out soon enough.