One of the recent highlights was going swimming, which we did twice in November. Clara swims really well now in her water wings, and Oscar just LOVES the water! The first time we were there we thought we wouldn't make it more than 15 minutes, because it was so difficult to keep Oscar from drowning himself. Even though the baby pool is shallow, when he tries to run in the chest deep water he often falls down face first, and we have to rescue him. As soon as we stand him up he's off running again, so it was quite difficult at first. He seemed to become more sure of his footing with time, however, so we ended up staying for almost two hours both times.
One of the top presents Clara got for her Birthday was this CD player. Oscar LOVES having the music on, and asks for it whenever it's not on (e.g. in the 2 second pause between songs). Clara is good at turning it on, but as you see, Oscar can get a little impatient when she's putting in a new cd!
Oscar is a climber, tumbler, wrestler, runner, oftentimes faller, and he likes nothing better than climbing into boxes. Especially boxes that are full of toys!
Oscar is picking up words way faster than I expected. We had heard that both boys and second children are slower to pick up words, so I didn't expect so much talking before he was one and a half. But by our last count he's said 26 words (split evenly between English and German), plus several names and sounds. The cutest recent sound is "wow wow!" for dogs. And badgers. And sometimes elephants, giraffes, or cats...
The only difficult thing right now is that Oscar has a really short fuse. When we have to take a non-toy away he gets really angry. He often used to respond by banging his head on the floor, but thankfully he seems to be mostly over that now. But the late afternoons are fairly difficult, and most of the burden falls on Tanja, since she's still working short days. (Oscar is sleeping a bit better - he normally wakes up only 2-3 times in the night now, but we had one night where he slept seven hours straight! But he just keeps getting new teeth...)
Clara has also been having some weird phases lately, but it seems to be getting better. Some of her angry pronouncements are kind of funny in a way "I'm not going to live in this house!" "I'm going to throw you out the window!" "I'm never going to eat ever again!", and some of them are just really weird "I don't have any feet!" (this is why she can't put her pants on some mornings). One day, after I had closed the bathroom door with only her inside (to prevent Oscar from coming in and bothering her), she jumped off of the toilet and ran to open the door and complain "I don't have any privacy in this house!" (I do not think that word means what you think it does...)
But on the whole Clara's a lot of fun to be around, particularly now that she's so excited for Christmas. Last night after I had put her to bed I took the garbage out. A few minutes after I came back I had to go in and check on her because she was knocking on her door (from the inside). She had heard the front door open, and she wanted to know if it was me doing the garbage, or if it was Nikolaus come to put treats in her shoes!
Tanja's right, she's definitely getting to be a big girl:
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