Our latest trip to Canada

At long last, here's a report on our time in Canada.  There's quite a bit of introduction, followed by lots of pictures.  Feel free to skip ahead if you know the basic story already...

It was a fairly last-minute trip, as my Baba became quite ill rather quickly.  She was suddenly quite unsteady on her feet, and had increasingly severe headaches accompanied by nausea and vomiting.  When they brought her in to the hospital (expecting it to be food poisoning or something of the like), it was found that she had a large mass in her brain.  After a few more tests and treatment with steroids (to reduce the inflammation) and antibiotics (in case it was an abscess), it was determined that the mass was, in fact, cancer.  Given her age and the extent of the tumour, she wasn't a candidate for surgery, though she did undergo radiation treatments in an effort to reduce the swelling and make her more comfortable.  It became quite clear that she wasn't going to get better, and that she was likely not going to leave the hospital either.  It was estimated that she might live for a few more months at the outside, and family and friends were contacted to say their goodbyes.

We weren't sure how long she'd live (no one was), but we decided not to leave right away (just before Easter), partly because it just wasn't clear if now was the right time to come, or if we should wait a bit longer.  I was planning on going back to work at the beginning of May though, so I thought that it would be good if Béla and I could have a visit without worrying about taking vacation.  We'd already booked a week off at the end of April, as we were supposed to meet my mom and dad in Rome for a week for my mom's 60th birthday, as part of their dream vacation through Italy, weeks before my dad was going to have his prostate removed after it was found to be cancerous.  (Yes, my family has had a really rough few months.)  We decided that I'd go a few days earlier, and Jer would come for just over a week, using the same time that he'd already booked off as holiday.

Well, I came just in time.  After a surprisingly good trip alone with Béla (complete with a stop to visit our friend Jenny and her family in Frankfurt), I arrived in Canada on a Tuesday evening, April 13th.  The next Wednesday I visited Baba in the hospital, and she was awake for much of the visit, and quite lucid, sitting with her arm around Béla on the bed, and quite happy to see me.  After this visit, she was barely awake for the next ten days, until she died the morning of April 24th.  We were supposed to fly back that evening, but ended up buying new tickets and contacting Jer's bosses so that we could stay for the funeral, which was on the 27th.  I'm so glad we did, as it was a great chance to see lots of family and friends, and was honestly the most fun I've ever had at a funeral.  It was sad, of course, but it really was a celebration of her life.

We got back to Germany on April 29th, and I went back to work the following Monday, May 3rd, and Jer's on parental leave until September.  Needless to say, there have been lots of changes over the past month!  But more on that later.  In the meantime, here are some pics from our trip to Canada.  They're not in chronological order quite, and are all taken by either Chris and Karen or my mom and dad, as we managed not to take a single picture while we were there.  For the first few days it was understandable, as Béla was super clingy, and wouldn't leave my side (he was like that after Jer left during our Christmas visit as well - once his papa's gone he won't let me out of his sight, it seems!).  Here we are at Chris and Karen's either the first night or the second night, as my brother and I try on funny hats:



Another view of our handsome boy, all decked out in Canadian gear, working hard to take off his sock.


And a close-up, showing off his beautiful eyes of still indeterminate colour.

Storming the barricades of his uncle Chris...


And here's his younger cousin Gavin, trying out the Exersaucer, perhaps for the first time!


Here's a pic of him eating - there have been lots on the blog of course, but the whole baby-led-weaning approach of giving him regular food prompted much fascination in my family, which I understand.  It really is entertaining to watch him figure out how to eat things with limited teeth (only two when this was taken, though he now has 6!) and motor skills.  (As an aside, since we're back in Germany, he's begun to master the spoon.  We still let him feed himself, but just offer him loaded spoons full of food, as seen in an earlier video with yogurt.  He's now really good at it though, and a two-spoon system is a must, as he hands back the empty one as soon as it's left his mouth, and expects another to be waiting.)


The two grandmothers, my mom and Jer's mom Betty Ann.  For a while it was looking like Jeremi might not make it to Canada because of the volcanic ash, and I was getting a bit desperate with a baby that would not let me be more than a meter away at any point, and wouldn't think of letting anyone else take him.  We'd mentioned earlier that Jer's parents should come to meet up with us in Toronto, and they were thinking about it, but Betty Ann didn't want to intrude.  After being heartily reassured that she'd be doing us a favour, she got on a flight on Monday, April 12th, and made it to my parents' place before Jeremi.  (We still weren't sure if he was going to make it at all when she flew, or if he'd be stranded at the airport in Munich, where he spent the night.)  It was great to have her there, and she got to spend lots of time with not only Béla, but also Nic and Jeremi, her two boys.


A handsome family portrait, in which you can see a bit of the rash on his cheeks.  This finally cleared up once we got back to Germany, and my just have been caused by teething (his front top teeth cut through the day after we got back), exacerbated by a bout of impetigo which required a trip to a clinic and a tube of antibiotic cream while we were there.  He looks much better now, but there's still a bit of a mark left in the places where he had the impetigo blisters (around his left ear and on his left upper arm).


This was quite typical of Béla during the first few days - I had to put my shoes on, so I put him on the ground, and he sat there leaning against my lower leg to be sure that I didn't go anywhere.  It was quite sweet, but also quite tiring!  He's also got a big celery stick in his hand, which was quite helpful as he was teething up a storm, and he seems to like gnawing on them.  I'm not sure, but we may have been getting ready to walk to the hospital.  It's about 5.5 km from my parents' house, and I thought it would be a good way to get a walk in.  My mom came with me at least once (maybe twice?), and my cousin Jenn did as well, and I know I did it once with Betty Ann and Jeremi.  It was a nice way to get some fresh air, and to ensure that Béla was well-napped before having him cooped up in a hospital room for a few hours for a visit.



Here he is, standing on his chubby little legs.  He started crawling a couple weeks before we got there, and worked to improve his skills while we were there.  He was also able to pull himself up to standing on couches etc. already, but got way better and faster.  And, while we were there, he started standing unassisted for decent periods of time (like maybe 30 seconds), while everyone in the room held their breath.  He even shuffled his feet a bit, in first attempts at steps, but without great success.  This would have to wait until we got back to Germany (see video in preceding post).

This was the morning before Jeremi arrived, sitting in the backyard with Betty Ann and Béla.  She was so good with him - notice that he's sitting on her lap?!?  Here we were going through the Caillou song book they got us, which has lots of classic French songs that Jeremi has since taught me.  There's some pseudo-music in the book as well (notes to play along with a little electronic toy piano that came with it, but no timing), and we were discussing the differences between the melodies that they know and the melodies in the book, which are sometimes quite significant!  Regardless what the tune is, Béla loves this book, as every time he turns the page we sing him another song.  It almost always makes him happy, and happier than just singing the song without the book.  (A guy sitting near me on the plane called it a "karaoke book", as I sang along with it.)


And here we are, jumping ahead to my mom's birthday dinner on the Wednesday night (the day she turned 60!), where Owen is helping her open a present.


And here's Cathy, giving Béla a little cuddle.



Here my mom was opening the shawl I knit her, described in great detail two posts ago.  She wore it to the funeral, and looked fantastic.  Actually, we all looked fantastic, Jeremi in a new dark brown suit he bought for the occasion, me in the black maternity dress that I wore to Dina's wedding (it still fits although I'm far from pregnant-looking, as it's really stretchy), and Béla for the first time ever in real pants (with a fly) and a button-up shirt, complete with sweater vest!  (Béla's formalwear was provided by the stash in Chris and Karen's basement.)  Alas, I don't think that anyone got a photo of any of us, probably because it's sort done, taking pictures at a funeral.  It's too bad though, as we all looked great, and likely won't have a reason to dress up again for a while.

Béla and Papa playing...


Ah yes, the food!  Once Jer got there and Béla relaxed enough that I could put him down from time to time, I started cooking.  We'd even brought along an Italian cookbook that we use a lot, in the hopes that we could make mom and dad some nice Italian dinners to compensate for their cancelled vacation.  There was one huge and special meal for mom's birthday, but then there was another multi-course extravaganza the Friday after that, which she seemed to have taken some pictures of.  Here are some of the dishes...


...and the famous stuffed mushroom caps, which my family couldn't get enough of. 


Karen, having a little nursing break with Gavin.


One thing we learned while we were in Canada is that Béla's great at climbing stairs.  We don't have any in our apartment, and we hadn't let him play around in the stairwell yet, but he took to it like a pro.


Or like a little monkey, as per his pyjamas.  (We didn't realize that they were pyjamas, and Karen totally laughed at us for letting him wear them all day.  They looked like clothes to us!)



My mom and Nic, during the Friday night dinner (I think).

My dad playing with Béla.  By the end of the trip Béla and Grandpa were having lots of fun together!



Béla enjoying some BBQed bread with tzatziki - lots of tzatziki...

Now we're jumping back in time a bit, I think.  While the meal above was being prepared, Jer, my dad, and my uncle Jon went over to Chris and Karen's to help them move and/or set up an air hockey table and a fußball table in their basement.  After which, of course, they had to try them out, and drink a few beers.


Look at Owen's crazy concentration !

One night, while over at Chris and Karen's for supper, Karen suggested that, since Béla wanted to do pretty well anything that Owen was doing, he might enjoy the bath more if he took a bath with Owen.  And so we decided to try it.  Here Owen's already in the bathtub, while Béla is stripped and ready to go, but not quite sure yet.

Then he moved a little closer, surveying the scene.  He did make it into the tub for a little while with Owen, but then at the first hint of a splash he scaled up my arm to get out.  We ended up bathing him alone afterward, which still went better than usual.  And since coming back, every bath has gotten better!  He even plays a bit in the bath now, and has started looking at the bathtub and bath toys as if he might actually want a bath.  Hooray!


Supper on the Sunday night, the day after Baba had died.  Here you can only see part of the table, but from left are me, Jenn, Jer's friend Bea, Béla, Gloria, and Chris.  Also in attendance were Karen, Owen, Gavin, my uncle Jon and aunt Joan, and of course Mom and Dad.  Basically, there were about 12 people for every meal.  I know this because my mom had a lot on her plate with organizing the memorial service and the meal after, and my cousin Jenn and I took over her role in organizing all the food for the many people who were coming in and out of the house.  Every day there were nice brunches (that was all Jenn and Tim!), then lunches of nice cheese, cold cuts, bread, pickles, plus homemade soup, and then giant suppers.  There was lots of help, but we were pretty much the kitchen crew.  One of the things that my mom mentioned while we were at the hospital the morning that Baba died was that it was like she was "graduating" to the next generation - she was now the elder.  I really felt like Jenn and I graduated to the middle generation as we took over the kitchen, let me tell you!  It was really fun to spend the time with her doing it.


After supper one night, as Owen and Béla had had enough of sitting at the table, and their baba went to hang out with them for some quiet time in the living room.


Béla having a nap on the living room floor...


Béla playing with grandpa, as I drank yet another giant mug of tea.


Spending the extra few days in Canada also meant that we had more time to hang out with my brother and his family.  On the day before the funeral we were all having supper over at Chris and Karen's (lasagnes that I'd made up in advance, plus more stuffed mushrooms so Karen could seem me make them, and a giant tossed salad), and we were there in the afternoon ahead of time so we could go to the park with Owen and Chris.  Béla fell asleep in the stroller on the way there and slept through the whole park part of it, but Owen had lots of fun!  Here he is on the slide:


And here are the two of us, running up ahead, while Jer and Chris lag behind with the stroller.

The two handsome boys in the double "SUV" stroller that Chris and Karen have.  (Yes, he's pulled off one of his socks and his holding it in his hands.)

Owen and I, after mounting one of the rope-climbing toys.  (After this picture was taken, I climbed into the basket with Owen, and then we were joined by another little girl.  Luckily they make this stuff pretty strong.)




And finally, a picture with some family from up north who came down for the funeral (that's Jenn on the left, with my mom's cousins Diane and Lovey).  While we didn't take any pictures on the actual day of the memorial service, they came back the next morning for brunch, and this is from then.  They also came back to my parents' place after the dinner after the memorial service, and we had such a fun evening, sitting around talking and hearing crazy old family stories.  We managed to get Béla asleep and put the baby monitor on so we could come back down for a few more hours of drinking and talking, which was really fun for both Jer and me.  I'm so glad we were able to stay for longer!



So there you have it, our most recent trip to Canada. The circumstances were sad, but it was a really good chance to see everyone, and I'm so glad we could be there. It really seemed as if Baba stayed with us just long enough for me to come see her, and then it was okay to die. She is already greatly missed.

And in closing, a few pictures of my baba. One from when she was young:

And one of her and me at our wedding:

And finally, another picture from the wedding, formatted for the thank-you cards my mom got me to help her with. It really is a nice picture of her.

Psst! We're still here!

It's been a long while, I know, but after an extended trip to Canada, during which we didn't post at all, I went straight back to work, which hasn't left much time for posting. (This was exacerbated by the fact that we didn't actually take many pictures while in Canada, so we were waiting for some to come from my parents and brother. We have pictures now, and we'll blog about it soon, but in the meantime, here's a little video from last night, which should help start your week off on the right foot. While getting ready for bed, we discovered that Béla finds the sound "psst" inexplicably hysterical. Watch and see!


And since I was uploading that video anyhow, I thought I'd quickly post the video of Béla's first steps as well. That's right, he's (sort of) started walking. This is from last Tuesday, when he was 8 months and 11 days old, and he took his first real independent steps. The lighting sucks a bit, and you can't actually see his feet, but Jer was doing his best to tape it while I was at work, while still ensuring that Béla didn't brain himself. You have to be a bit patient - his better attempts come toward the end of the video. And rest assured, he's improving every day!

The Shawl

A heads up: this is a long post about fibre craft. If it's not your thing, feel free to skip it, or just jump ahead to a couple pictures of Béla and the cat that I snuck in.

This year my mom's turning 60, and I thought it would be nice to knit her something interesting. I was pretty taken by the knitpicks pattern for the Chinook Shawl, which I suggested to her, to see if she liked it, and if so, which colourway she'd like it to be knit in. This was back in August, before Béla was born, and while I had some time off. My plan was to ship the kit to them in Canada, and they could bring it with them when the came to visit in September. She loved it, and opted for the Riverstone colourway, all natural whites, greys, and browns. And so I ordered it, and waited impatiently for it to come.

And I waited and waited and waited. It didn't come before my parents left for Germany, but we figured that Chris and Karen could bring it when we met them in France. And so we waited some more. Finally, Jer called to check the status of the order, only to find that they had no record of it. He then re-placed the order over the telephone. (I'd initially done it over the internet, and while I order stuff like that all the time, I'm willing to admit that I might have skipped some final confirmation step without noticing. I was going a bit hormone-crazy back in August.)

Then we waited and waited and waited some more, figuring that we could get the kit when we were visiting at Christmas. Well, it never arrived. Jeremi called again to check, and it seems that this time they had a record of the order, but that it had been cancelled without any explanation included in the record of the order. He tried to order it again, but they were now sold out of some of the yarn for the colourway I wanted, and in fact didn't have enough yarn for our second choice either. They were pretty nice about it though, and sent me the pattern anyhow for free.

So what to do with a really nice pattern but no appropriate yarn? Shopping for lace yarn in Jena would only be an exercise in frustration, and I really liked the colour gradations in the sample, which I knew would be hard to mimic if I ordered yarn from somewhere else on the internet, so I decided to do what anyone in that situation would do: spin and dye my own yarn!

Okay, so that might not be everyone's first choice, but it appealed to me. After another consult with my mom in February or so, asking for what colours she'd like now that she had her druthers, she said that she'd like greys and blacks. I refuse to knit lace in black, because unless you always wear it stretched tight over bare (pale) skin or something white, all that work is hard to see. And so I decided to go for shades of grey. I ordered some dye in from a weaving supply store in Vienna (there were no suppliers for Ashford dyes in Germany, and at least in Austria I understand the website), and waited impatiently for it to arrive. So impatiently in fact, that I spun half the yarn while waiting. The original pattern involved 6 colours, let's call them A through F, held double so as to form 11 colour gradations as follows: AA, AB, BB, BC, CC, CD, DD, DE, EE, EF, FF. Rather than spinning twice as much yarn and doing it the same way, I opted to just make a 2 ply yarn and work with 6 colours in that way, starting with only A, and then one ply of A and one of B. What this meant was that I could spin all the yarn for the AA, BB, CC, DD, EE, and FF while waiting for the dyes to arrive, and then dye that spun yarn along with the rovings for the singles of the mixed colours. (I'm sorry, this is getting a bit technical.) In any case, here are my six piles of fibre, both the weighed rovings and the skeins of spun yarn, just waiting for the dyes.
And then the dyes finally arrived! It's the first time that I've really dyed anything, not counting experiments with onions skins and sunflower seed shells after a visit to a pioneer village back in grade school, and these acid exhaust dyes were really easy to use. We went and bought a cheap pot for the purpose (in retrospect it should have been bigger, even though I was never dying more than 33 g of fibre at a time), and Jer even picked up some glass stirring rods and a better glass thermometer (here I'm using a meat thermometer rigged to stay submerged with an elastic band and a vegetable peeler).
The whole dying process was made more complicated by the fact that I was using a fibre that's 50% merino and 50% raw silk, and unlike pure wool, which you can simply leave to simmer, silk starts to degrade if heated above something like 86 C, so you've got to maintain it at around that temperature for a while, which isn't easy. Another thing that I struggled with was how much to stir. You're supposed to "turn" the fibre gently a couple of times to avoid blotches, but on the first batch I "turned" it a bit too much, which was a bit too much like stirring it, which resulted in the fleece becoming hopelessly felted, and the skein of yarn felting to itself somewhat as well. (Unwilling to lose all that work, I actually pulled it all apart and knitted it all the same.)

The blotchiness was much more of a problem for the yarn that was already spun - any blotchiness in the roving disappeared once it was spun, plyed, and knit, so I really should have waited for the dyes. I'll know for next time! Besides, it's a homemade item, so the blotchiness just gives it character.

Here's a picture of some of the colours drying on a laundry rack. For some reason this picture makes them all sort of look the same colour, which I assure you was not the case. The first five shades are shown here, with the darkest not yet added to the group, and the two lightest rovings are missing, as they were being spun into the AB yarn at the time.
Then, of course, came the knitting. Somehow we don't have a single picture of me actually knitting it, so I'll include some pictures of my "helpers". Here's Béla chewing on the big 8 mm needle I used to cast off. I know, letting a baby shove pointy sticks in his mouth isn't the best idea.

There, this way is much safer.
And here's Aeris, making sure that none of those stitches get away while I left it on the couch for a while.
Finally it was finished. Here it is being blocked on the mattress in the spare room:

And finally us trying it out, offering some wearing suggestions. First, the classic show-it-off batman look:

As a classic old-lady-style shawl:

Or a more updated look (a classy silver shawl pin here would be ideal):
Or worn in front, thrown over both shoulders:

Or worn as a scarf, which would even work under a coat:

Or worn as a scarf in a way that makes Jeremi look positively Parisian:

Or like an old-timey pilot, complete with goggles (Fisher-Price blocks that Béla's trying to get back):

Or standing in as a skirt:

Or keeping your head warm on a cool day:
Or the ever-popular everything-looks-good-wrapped-around-a-baby look:



I hope my mom loves it! And while she knows I was planning on knitting it, she hasn't heard a thing about it in months, so it's sort of like a surprise. As such, this post is ready and waiting before my trip to Canada, but won't be posted until her birthday, April 21st, or slightly later. Happy Birthday Mom!

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?!?

Up to his seven month birthday

It's been a bit long since I posted, I'm afraid. Lots has been going on of course, but somehow I haven't managed to organize it into a blog post. The big news, especially for those of you who might be living in or around Toronto, is that we're going to be visiting Canada very soon - Béla and I from the 13th to the 24th of April, and Jer from the 17th to the 24th. My Baba is very sick, with a large tumour in her brain, and we're coming back for a visit while we have the chance. We had planned on spending the week of the 17th-24th in Italy, meeting up with my parents in Rome, where they were going to be celebrating my mom's 60th birthday on her dream vacation, and spending some time together before my dad's surgery for prostate cancer in May. Because of the severity of Baba's condition, however, they've had to cancel their trip, and we're going to meet them in Canada instead, where we can all celebrate her birthday there. To be honest, my family is having a pretty rough year health-wise.

Okay, now I'll try to lift the mood with some cute pictures of Béla. I still find the extra time and processing of the videos a bit daunting, so I'm going ahead with just a few pictures, and I'll leave the videos for another day. I'm also not doing one giant post with all the latest stuff, but rather just the stuff up to about his 7 month birthday at the end of March. There's big news coming after that (he can crawl! and pull himself up on his crib and on the couch!), but these feats are better served by video, so I'll stick to a nice easy post for now, which somehow involves a lot of pictures of him eating. He does eat a lot, but I think it's also because it's an easy time to take a picture of him, as he's confined to a chair and basically stationary.

The first couple pictures are from his first supper of spaghetti bolognese. It wasn't actually spaghetti, but rather a thicker, wavy-edged noodle, that I thought (rightly) would be easier for him to manage. On websites of people practicing baby-led weaning (the idea of giving babies regular food instead of spoon-feeding them purées), photos of babies eating spaghetti are pretty well compulsory, just because it can be so very messy. Many advocate letting them eat in just a diaper, so it's easier to clean up, which we tried...
...until he got goosebumps, so we threw on a dark-coloured shirt to keep him warm. (Now we have a couple of bib-shirts, so it's not such a problem.) And yes, it was messy, but not as ridiculous as I'd expected. Maybe if we'd given it to him his first week, but now his skills are such that most things do make it at least close to his mouth.
The Thursday of this week (a week before Maundy Thursday) was incredibly warm and beautiful, so everyone was out in the city. I'd met up with some women from my prenatal class, who meet up weekly to let the babies play together, and we took a walk by the river to enjoy the sunshine. Afterwards, I wasn't ready to go inside yet, so I met Jeremi at work for a drink on the market square before I had yoga at 6:45. The plan was to hang out with him, and then pass Béla off so they could go home and I could go to yoga. But then we met up with our friends Calin and Susanne. Susanne was waiting to get her haircut, so Calin joined us for a drink, and then we all went out for supper at a new-ish Italian place we hadn't tried yet. The waitress loved Béla and wanted to take him home, and he was very spoiled with childrens' books in Italian, and his very own plate of watermelon for dessert. They were very impressed with the way he ate too. Here he is, going after some spinach pizza:

...and here I am, recounting how Béla grabbed another baby's head with both his hands and tried to bite it, like one would an apple, at the play group. Yup, he really does love to eat. (As an aside, I was out in the park with another mom and her daughter yesterday, and he pulled the same move on her, but settled for just chewing on her hat.)
Here we all are, enjoying our meal. We also went up to Calin and Susanne's place that Saturday for Calin's birthday, which was really fun. They made a pork loin wrapped in seasoned ground pork wrapped in puff pastry. It was fabulous. Unfortunately they're going to be leaving here soon, moving back to Copenhagen at the end of June, which is sad for us. At least now we'll have an extra-good reason to visit Copenhagen!
The day after the Italian restaurant was even warmer and sunnier, so before I met up with some other moms downtown for lunch, I went shopping to buy Béla a sun hat. (Oh, and before that, I brought in a sample of his urine for analysis, because it was two days after he'd finished his antibiotics, and he got the all clear. Hooray!) Unfortunately when I got to the store Béla was fast asleep in the carrier, so I couldn't exactly try the hats on him. Luckily they were all sized by head circumference, and his head had been measured two weeks before at the doctor's, so I had a rough idea of what size I needed. Of course, his head is so giant, that of the 10 or so varieties of summer hats they had at the store I went to, only one came in his size. And so, by process of elimination, here's his adorable new sun hat!
Okay, so the hat itself isn't really that cute, it's really the baby wearing it. (The hat's okay, but when the brim is folded down he looks like an old man out playing golf.)

And finally, on the Sunday of that weekend, we had another French brunch at our place, with the theme of eggs. Unfortunately not many people were able to make it, so it was only four of us (plus Béla), but the food was incredible! Here Béla's playing with me and Julia on the couch.
The spread on the side board, with (starting from bottom left, and skipping the blatently obvious things) a baked apple pancake, raisin buns disguised with mascarpone and apricots to look like eggs, two flavoured butters (one with corn and chili, the other with zucchini and garlic), some cheeses, and Grüne Soße, or green sauce, a mixture of several herbs, hard boiled eggs, and some combination of yogurt and/or quark. Julia brought this, as it's a traditional food on Maundy Thursday in her region of Germany (near Frankfurt).
And the spread on the table, with fruit salad inside a melon cut to look like a cracked egg, and marinated eggplant. Not pictured was two cheese souflés, a few baguettes, and crêmes brûlées for dessert. All in all, the food was ridiculously good, and we ate far too much, for both brunch and supper.
Here's Béla tucking into the grüne Soße with some baguette for supper. It looks like he loves it as much as his mom does!