Five years old!

Three weeks before her birthday, Clara didn't think she could possibly wait so long until it came...  But the time flew by (at least for her parents) and now we're over three weeks since the big day.  Clara got some presents on the morning of her Birthday:

Had a party a few days later with friends from her Kindergarten group:

And had visits from Oma, Opa, Onkel Robert, and Tante Nadine.  Clara was painting with Nadine in this photo:

Part of the reason we haven't posted much is that it's been very busy organizing things for Clara's school.  We visited six schools, some of them multiple times, and it was really hard to figure out which one to pick as our top choice.  Now we just have to wait a few months to see where she gets in!

Before one of the schools tested Clara to see if she was a native English speaker the teacher asked her "and are you a German girl or an English girl?"  Clara looked at her funny for a second and then answered "I'm bilingual!"  I asked her again recently whether she or I spoke German better, and Clara burst out laughing.  When I pushed her to answer she said "we know that already!"  We got proof of it shortly afterward when as part of her school readiness test at a city doctor they checked how she did with German plurals.  Tanja asked me some of the same questions after the test, and I'm sorry to have to say that the score was Clara 100%, Daddy 65%.

The last few times he's been here, Opa has brought a projector to show movies on our wall.  Oscar was very impressed, particularly with the credits "going up up!"

We've been taking advantage of the early dark nights to play with flashlights in a cave made out of the bunk bed:

And last time Opa visited Clara helped with all of the cooking:

While Oscar helped out by looking his best:

While Clara was the one with the big birthday, it's Oscar that's changed the most in the last few months.  For a long time he never said sentences longer than five words, but now he's expanded into much longer sentences.  Sometimes in his excitement he says whole paragraphs where we don't really understand any of the words, but mostly now he's really easy to understand.  Tonight he even explained that Mommy was out shopping and would come home soon ("gleich wieder da").

Oscar's English and German are almost completely separated, so it's always arresting for me to see him switch over to German when Oma or Opa or Robert and Nadine are visiting.  The only crossover mistake that he makes constantly is saying "mit" in English instead of "with", and that's easy to understand since they sound so similar.