Up high, please!

I have to share a sweet anecdote. A week or so ago I was taking the kids to Kita, and I had lots of things to carry: backpacks, a pack of diapers for Oscar, and Oscar's walky-bike (since he got tired of riding it). The kids were walking, but there's a huge construction site on the way and we had to cross the street to get around it. Suddenly Oscar started to get nervous because a machine was making loud noise. He came to me, stood in front of me and said, urgently "Up high, please!" I argued with him that I just couldn't carry him on top of all the other things and since we were only a block from the Kita, he would just have to try to walk the rest, too. Immediately, Oscar turned around, stood right in front of Clara and lifted up his arms: "Up high, please?" ... Clara just looked at me and giggled, and Oscar ended up giving her a big hug. I loved how sweetly and seriously he asked her - I was really moved. When he couldn't get me to help he just naturally turned to his big sister for reassurance. (When he did this, I realized just how nervous he was about the noise and picked him up anyway... Clara carried one of the backpacks for me.)

It's nice when the weather is good and we can play outside - they both have a lot of energy to play on the playgrounds. Oscar is so strong... you can get an impression from his look on the picture below. He can jump (sometimes he jumps off steps), he can hang on his arms, he can balance really well (he does this on balance beams that are higher than I am tall, holding on to a rope). He loves climbing and running and balancing and bouncing all day long. He doesn't have much patience for sitting around and playing with the sand toys anymore (buddeln).

Clara has gotten so confident and proficient, too. She often jumps off of really high things. A few months ago I watched her convince some other kids to lay down on the floor so she could jump off a ledge over them. She can climb anything to the very top. She can ride her pedal bike perfectly now - one day she just started by herself, too. The only problem is the traffic... she just couldn't see it yet and react to it.

Oscar will turn 2 next week. I'm pretty amazed - I mentioned this to Kristina today, who knows him since he was not even half a year old. On the other hand, he seems so big and able anyway - he is very strong and physically very confident, and he speaks really really well - so I've been telling people that he is (basically) two already for a long time.

With Oscar you can really see how it is that two-year-olds can get so easily frustrated, because he talks really well and so we can understand what he is thinking. Very frequently Oscar has a "grand idea". This could be that he wants ice cream, or that his Grandpa may be coming through the door, or that he's going to visit Oma on the train... and then he talks about this and gets very excited. He knocks on the door exclaiming "Grandpa coming! Papa coming now!" and we have to check that there's nobody in the hallway. So no wonder poor Oscar gets disappointed when the grand plans don't come to pass. It must be hard to understand all the complicated constraints on when somebody is coming for a visit or whether we can take a train somewhere, and most of them are out of his control anyway. The only good thing is that other little excitements can usually distract him pretty quickly.