Eating and Playing Outside

... Clara's two favorite occupations at the time...


On Clara's one-and-a-half year birthday we made good use of the great weather and did another bike trip. Again, we rode to the beautiful park around Charlottenburg castle, this time to sit on the grass and enjoy the view (castle in the background):


Here are our bikes in front of a little building aptly named "Belvedere":


It's great that Clara likes to ride the bike with us... even though she's locked in her bike seat she really really loves the trips and gets very excited when we're about to leave for one. She usually talks the entire time and has even started pointing out what she sees to me.

Mostly we spent our time on the grass eating a little picnic, since eating is one of Clara's favorite pastimes right now. This is such a huge change from her behavior before... it's really hard getting used to. We can only go as long on our trips as we have food for, and when at home we need to feed her in principle constantly. And Clara even eats large amounts now in one sitting, so that we have to plan for her when cooking (and buying food) instead of just giving her scraps of our food. It's great! Even if it requires a little more planning.

The only thing on my mind is that Clara's favorite foods are meat, dairy (cheese, yogurt, milk), and grains (bread, pasta, pizza!). Virtually the only two fruits she will eat straight up are banana (she can eat a whole one in one go!) and tomatos. And vegetables... not really either. So for the big meals we do ok, since she will usually eat some veggies mixed in with other stuff, but for the oh-about 15 snacks a day we rely on bread, cookies, cheese, yogurt, and of course, ice cream!


Greatest new trick: pushing buttons!


Oh, I almost forgot the other part about eating: the nursing is coming to an end. Quite naturally we had gone down to about 2 nursings a day, at wake up and right before bed. Now, we've been cutting out the morning nursing session and replacing it with some Cheerios (thanks, mom & dad!) and milk. It has gone really well, with almost no protesting and really Clara almost never even asking to nurse anymore. (But oh, the sweet sweet half-hour spent lounging in bed in the mornings snuggled up to our baby! It was really my favorite nursing time...) I still nurse Clara once a day right before bed. I don't know how much longer this will go, but right now I have a feeling she won't give up that session too easily. I'm sad, too. But then, there's still lots of snuggling going on, since Clara has always been very generous and loving with the snuggles!