Learning, talking, and... sleepwalking???

Clara's pace of learning seems to have exploded recently! Since last Sunday she's been able to walk freely, and she's learning words and animal noises really quickly now. We have some cat shaped fridge magnets on our dishwasher, and when she walks into the kitchen she points and says "Kah!". When I ask her "what does a cat say?" she sort of sighs a "mrrr". Very cute!

Today we went to the zoo, and Clara is now really into the animals. On our first trip to the zoo she was only really excited about a few birds, then on later trips many of the birds, and now she's finally into mammals large and small! When we saw chickens today she did her "bwk bwk" and when we saw a huge lake full of ducks she made lots of quacks! If I ask her if she's hungry then if she is she says "num num" and she's called bananas "nana" or "bana". I also think she may have figured out the sippy cup principle today!

(Ach so, für die Leute, die denken, dass Clara mehr Englisch als Deutsch versteht: Zuerst hat sie nicht "duck" gekannt, sondern "Ente". "What does the duck say?" - [nichts], "Was macht die Ente?" - "gak gak". Aber jetzt versteht sie schon beides.)

Here are two photos of Clara riding the caterpillar she got for her birthday. Look at her checking out her fingers!



Finally, since (almost) no one ever says that Clara looks like me check this out:


I think two things when I look at these photos: First, maybe she does look a bit like I looked as a baby. Second, thank goodness people don't think she looks like me now! A 30-year-old bald man with facial hair? Honestly, what kind of self respecting baby girl has stubble?

Of course regardless of any similarity to me as a baby, when I look at the photo of Tanja with her Mom I realize that it's clear what Clara's going to look like in her 20s...



I almost forgot - sleepwalking! With all of the excitement and new skills Clara is going through a monster sleep regression. Even when she's incredibly tired she sits up when we put her down, and tries to stand up! Sometimes she does it with her eyes closed, so I wonder if it's some kind of sleepwalking? When she first learned to roll over we also got no sleep, as at nighttime her body seemed to take over from her brain and force her to roll over and over and over again. That didn't last so long, so I'm hopeful that this phase will pass soon, too.