New bikes!!

Last weekend we finally got around to buying bicycles! We bought them from a local Berlin manufacturer, FroschRad (Frog bikes!). They're both pretty basic city bikes, two different styles but both three speeds. We bought the bikes on Saturday and took them out for our first short trip on Sunday morning. Here's Clara walking out for her first ride. It reminds me of the astronauts walking to the space shuttle:


Clara's bike seat was installed on my bike, and they also installed some kind of super kickstand that holds the bike vertical to make it easy to put children in without the bike falling over.


When Clara was first on the bike she was pretty nervous, you can see how she's still gripping the seat when we'd only gone one block:


Our first trip was short, from our place to the playground in the Tiergarten (map, wiki).


After our trip to the playground we went home for lunch and Clara's nap, but Clara couldn't sleep at all! While Tanja tried to get her to sleep Clara kept exclaiming "Beh! Beh!" (her word for "bike). After a bit we decided she wasn't going to sleep, so we started on a longer afternoon trip. This time Clara was much more relaxed, so relaxed that after about fifteen minutes she actually fell asleep in the bike seat!


After a short break where Tanja and I had ice cream (don't tell Clara!) we started off again, and Clara woke up for the rest of the ride. Our destination was the park surrounding Charlottenburg Palace (map). Once we were there we found out that there's a really nice playground in the middle of the forest on the palace grounds. Clara was still a little zonked for a bit, here she is sitting on a bench with Tanja and having a snack:


The playground had some cool equipment, one of the best was this slide. This was the first time she's done the whole climbing up and sliding down entirely on her own!



After the playground it was time to head home. Here are two nice pictures from a bridge still inside of the palace grounds and close to the playground (I think we had stopped to adjust Clara's helmet).



Shortly after those photos were taken I took this video. You can tell that Clara's much more confident on the bike now, as she reaches out for the camera when I held it backwards!




For anyone interested here's a map of the route we took. It was a total of 12 km.


When we finally got home and took Clara off the bike here was her reaction:


"Up! Up! More! More!" I hope the weather is nice again next weekend!

One last picture related to Easter. Here's a scan of a "drawing" that Clara made of an Easter egg:


One of Clara's new words is "malen", German for "to draw." A bit after Tanja left today Clara wanted to go into the spare bedroom, and I thought she was saying "Ma! Ma!" for Tanja. (I had taken Clara out onto the balcony to wave bye to Tanja this morning) But when I opened the door she ran over to where her crayons were and grabbed them - she was saying "Mal! Mal!" for "malen".

Clara is getting pretty good at saying "car," and she's working on "tree," "bench," and "water." Her words are still pretty unclear (sometimes she says something over and over and we have no idea what she's talking about) but when you either know what it is because she's pointing at it, or when you realize what something was (like in the "Mal!" story above) then it's suddenly easy to hear. It's especially awesome to watch her practicing sounds and having a concentrated moment of thinking before she says something!