We had a huge amount of fun, great weather, and did a lot of stuff! Here we are on a bike ride, I think we did about 15km that day. We biked across the old bridge to the island Rügen and had lunch at a great little restaurant. These photos were all taken on Rügen.
The restaurant was also a guest house, and had a little beach which we enjoyed for a bit before going in to eat.
We went to several different beaches on our vacation, and Clara LOVES the beach! Luckily for us, there is a little lake near us in Berlin (fifteen minute bike ride) which has a "Freibad" (supervised outdoor swimming). After 4:30 it only costs $2.50 to get in, and since we've been back we've been three times! Unfortunately I don't have any good beach photos - you'll just have to come here and see for yourself!
Also water related - we went to the Hansedom in Stralsund. We were there at the end of 2008, and going with Clara now is a totally different experience! Now that she's bigger she can spend way more time in the cool water, and she really interacts with things like this "snake fountain"
She would sometimes walk up to the fountain and let it run over her back or face, she also liked to touch them, or fill the little toys that Oma brought along. Was the trip a success?
I think so!
Opa took us on a trip to a "Vogelpark" (birdpark) near Stralsund. I had expected some kind of nature preserve, but it's actually more like a zoo with a focus on birds. It's really really well done, and I'm looking forward to going back again, since we only saw about half of it before Clara was crashing tired! You've seen one photo of it already from Opa's camera, here's the Clara by the flower garden with our camera:
They had a few sections where you could walk among the animals (you had to carefully grasp your purse when you went through the monkey land, as the little buggers sneak up and steal people's stuff!). If you zoom in on this one you'll see the rabbit that's got everyone's attention:
In one of these spots it was like a petting zoo, with some very friendly little goats!
With Opa by the penguins:
And snuggling Daddy on the way out:
Opa got thank you snuggles at home after Clara's nap!
Opa also took us to the Ozeaneum (English wiki. The German wiki has lots of photos). Clara really likes fish, so this was a lot of fun too! Here's a ray hugging up to the glass of the tank as well as a starfish.
That's (almost) it for photos from Stralsund. Now, as promised, a bit about Clara's language acquisition! We've been keeping track of each new word as Clara says it, and here is what we've seen over the last two and half months:
Red boxes indicate one new German word, and blue boxes indicate one new English word. Starting about three weeks ago Clara's language acquisition started to take off! As of today Clara has said at least 94 English and 75 German words. This only counts words that Clara says spontaneously (ie not repeating us when we say "Can you say Tintenfisch?"), and only words that are relatively clear (I don't count "orange" even though she always says "ohhh" when she points at an orange). It's been really fun keeping track of this! It's really hard to believe how quickly she's gone from saying a few dozen words each individually to having a vocabulary large enough for little sentences like "Daddy bear too."
I really love talking with Clara (I've been waiting a long time to have her tell me what's on her mind!), and it's also really fun to sing songs with her (twinkle twinkle) and read books now that she says some of the words too. Her favorite book right now is "ABC die Katze lief im Schnee," and she asks for it by saying "ABC! ABC!" (The italics are justified because she says "ah-beh-tseh" and not "ay-bee-see"). She also says a huge number of the words for me in "Goodnight Moon." Her favorite line is "bears chairs!"
Finally, a photo of the three of us that I like:
And another example of what happens when you let your toddler put their clothes on themselves:
2 comments:
What a wonderful smile in the second picture of Clara wrapped in her stripey towel! Well, in most of these pictures... but that one especially.
Jacob is still asking to go play with Clara. I tell him next summer and since it doesn't mean anything to him, he seems to accept that means yes, soon.
A physicist + a linguist = chart describing language acquisition!
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