Please excuse the weeks of silence...

It's been so long since the last blog post that we have enough pictures for two! I'll try to post another set later this week. For now...

We're slowly getting ready for the new baby. Here's Chester helping Tanja build a change table:

Lots of people ask us if Clara understands what's coming. I guess it depends on what "understands" means. She talks a lot about her baby brother in mommy's tummy, and how when he comes out he's only going to cry and eat from mommy's "breast". She's seen a lot of babies lately, and we've been looking at old pictures and videos of her, so I think she understands that we're going to add a baby.

What I'm not sure about is whether she appreciates what a big change it will be. As my former colleague used to say, "so we've got a baby now. ALL THE TIME!" In any case, Clara is big enough to be helpful already, and I think she'll have a great time fetching diapers etc for us to help out. And she loves to look at babies, so I think it's going to go pretty well!

Here are some pictures from recent weeks. We've finally got decent weather, but as you can see Clara was still wearing layers right into June.




A few weeks ago we went to visit Oma in Stralsund. We had some horrible mix-ups with Deutsch Bahn, but Clara was great spirited throughout. We finally got in about an hour and a half late (after 10pm), and even though she was extremely tired she really really wanted to play with the toys at Oma's house!


That photo was taken when Clara was doing something that we didn't recognize or understand. Eventually we realized she must be doing some sort of activity from Kita, and she did it enough times that we learned the actions and (almost all) the words! "Wir gehen heut auf Löwenjagd // und haben keine Angst // Wir haben ein Gewehr dabei und auch ein großes Schwert, OOH! // Huch, was ist das? // Ein großes Elephantengras!" It was very cool to have our daughter teach us such a detailed game, and it made a lot of the other passengers crack up!

While we were in Stralsund, we took a day trip to the beach (windy, and not warm, but fun nonetheless!). On the way back we stopped in at Schloss Schlemmin, where Tanja and I were married in 2005. Here's Clara and Oma hugging the many hundreds of years old Oak.


We recently had a visitor from Philly, who stayed for several days. Clara really took to him, and whenever he was out on his own Clara would ask us "Where's Jonathan?" Even though he's been gone almost two weeks she asked after him again tonight at dinner!


For the last several weeks Clara's been saying funny or interesting things that I always mean to write down, but don't have a chance and then somehow forget! Luckily I have some photo evidence of some of the interesting things she's doing.

I'm always coming across something interesting in the house:


Clara often builds "trains", these two are actually from different occasions:



Clara is a very independent girl, and plays really well by herself. As a result we often come across interesting patterns that she's set up. Click on the second picture to see how she sorted all of the animals into groups:



If the idea wasn't so preposterous I'd swear Clara was responsible for this too:


(For the sake of cat parity, here is a picture of Louie caught in an unfortunate gravity reversal)


Clara's Opa visited last weekend, and his camera is the source of the photos to be shown next time!