Stadtrundfahrt!

The last few weekends we've been very busy with trips all over, Stralsund, the Czech Republic, and Hamburg. It felt almost strange to have a weekend at home with no plans!

(Unfortunately, some of the places we visited in the Czech Republic and adjacent areas in Germany are now flooded. We saw photos of the flooding from 2002, and it's hard to reconcile the area we just recently saw with what it must look like now.)

On Sunday afternoon, I took Oscar for a public transit ride to try to help him fall asleep, like we have been doing on weekends for ages.  But this time he was totally awake the whole time! In the end we traveled about 25 kilometers by U-bahns, S-bahns, trams, and buses, not to mention lots of walking in between stations.  Here's our awesome path that crisscrossed over itself:

When we were walking inside of the main train station, I said to Oscar "lay your head on my shoulder and close your eyes" and Oscar replied "Why are you trying to march me up to bed?"  (He got that line from the fantastic song Pierre written by Maurice Sendak and sung by Carole King.)

Then, a few moments later he pointed and said "that one says 'ehhh!'"  I looked, and he was pointing at a big letter "E" showing the section of the platform. Later on the walk home he pointed to a sign that said "Fahrschule" and said "that one says 'efff!'". He also loves to roll a set of letter dice we have and make the sounds that come up (especially H: "haaaah!"). This is making me re-think my opinion on iPad games, because one of Oscar's favorites right now is Endless Alphabet, and that's where he's learning the sounds from.

Clara's reading is of course much more advanced, and probably mostly from the work they do in the Kita (the other day she looked at the newspaper and asked Tanja "Why does this say 'Ost'?). But we've also noticed that she's started adding some of the words from Endless Alphabet in her regular speech, so we're really happy with that game.

We had our share of rain (although not as much as in the flooded areas, thank goodness), but the weather has finally turned, and that's meant a lot more fun outside.

The long days (and short nights) are making it really tough on the kids sleep schedules, though. It's really hard to get them to sleep (Oscar fell asleep around 10pm tonight), and then we have big scenes in the morning when we wake them up.  But can you blame them?  Look what we're interrupting:

Clara sleeping warm in bed. Wakey wakey sleepyhead!

We have a lot of photos built up from the last few weekends, I hope we'll find time to post them soon!  As always, I can't remember the best stories now that I sit down to write, but a few things I hope I'll always remember are:

Oscar's cute words: "flinished", "Pittsah" (not pizza)
Watching Kalli Feuerwehr (almost) every night
Clara doing her first climb in the new climbing gym down the street from us
Clara hating having to go to swimming lessons and loving every minute of it while she's in the water...