Baby Has So Much To Do

I am Crazying

Cora always know the best way to distract us in whatever we do. When I was busy behind the computer she would pop up from the other side of the desk and started doing all sort of acts. This first video is of her simply dancing away to 'Come on Eileen', announcing that she was 'Ik ben gekken!' (I am crazying - most probably not grammatically correct).

And then she started to sing a Paul Anka song.

How come she knows a Paul Anka song? Because it's a song I sing to her every night before bed for no particular reason. I actually just Googled the lyric and found out that it was by Paul Anka. I guess I've been singing it this whole time without really knowing who sang it in the first place.

Baby Curls Are Gone

Just after the holiday I realised that Cora's hair had grown so long. It looks so cute when we have it brushed and clipped away from her face, but most of the time it's simply allover her face. It got into her mouth while eating, not to mention how the food got into the hair itself. If you need more prove on how chaotic it can be, just go and see it here.

I finally decided that I need to trim that gypsy hair soon. So one weekend morning, while she was intently watching Dora, I draped on an inside-out poncho (hood folded inside), whipped out a pair of scissors, and aimed. I said aimed, because it's the kind of precision work that actually needs to be done fast, and on moving target (she kept turning her head left and right, trying to see what I was doing - and at one point wanted to take part in).

I cut the front part of her hair shorter than the back, just enough so that it didn't get into her mouth too easily. The back part I leave longer, just below the shoulders. I could honestly say I'm proud of my work.

The only regret was that all her baby curls were gone. Apparently she wasn't meant to have wavy hair after all. The baby curls she had was simply baby hair. But her new hairstyle makes her looks even more like a big girl now. To see more pictures of her and her new hair, click here.

To see the full new head in motion, you can watch the video of Cora singing "Olifantje in het bos" (little elephant in the woods). She can also be seen together with her new favourite toy, the 'Diego yuka' (Diego computer).

Is Donker

 

While putting Cora to bed.

Me: "Good night, Cor. Tomorrow you're going to babyschool again."

Cora: "Is donker." (is dark)

Me: "Not now, tomorrow."

Cora: "Is donker."

Me: "Yes, it's dark now, but tomorrow we go to babyschool when it's not dark anymore."

Cora: "Is donker!"

I guess she doesn't yet understand the concept of tomorrow. But then again, the conversation (if you can call it so) kind of captures the zeitgeist of the season, with the winter going to the deepest end, the temperature drops and it seems like we live in the dark most of the time. We even got a couple days of snow already (which quickly melted back to the ground).

With the weather we receed back into the house, and here is the comeback of the indoor pictures.

 

We have just installed the bar table by the window for our laptops, as you can peek from Cora's pictures. We already had the bar stools for quite a while now, but at last I found the perfect bar table to go with it. I didn't even have to custom order it, it fits perfectly across our two kitchen window, at the perfect height that when we're sitting on the stools, we each get a heater under our feet. In case your're wondering what's the framed text over it, it reads "You Deserve Pie" (and who doesn't?).

For the rest of the album, click here.

For a bit of Cora's winter madness (I simply asked her to laugh to the camera, and look what the drama queen did):

Two Weeks with Tante*

*Tante = aunt

My youngest sister visited us for about two weeks earlier this month. The two got on famously, having similar bubbly and cheeky personalities.

My sister and Cora almost share a birthday, Cora's at the 29th of March while she is the 30th. If I'd been able to persuade the hospital to postpone the c-section a day longer, they would've had the same birthday. And when two Aries get together, there bound to be some noise.

Cora loves having tante in the house, she follows her everywhere, calling 'Tanden...!' which actually a Dutch word for 'teeth'.

They both took a lot of pictures together (well, my sister did), which I borrowed to put into today's entry.  Seeing them up and close together actually made us realise how the two of them look kind of alike. They have similar nose, big eyes, and to some extent the same expression (look at this). Cora never look too much like me and almost nothing like Chris, but now we figured where she got some of her genes from (not from my sister of course, but from my dad!).

See the rest of the pictures of the two happy campers here.

Zizi also made a video of Cora climbing the slope at the playground. It might look a bit scary, even Cora said "Dit is zwaar." (this is tough) repeatedly while climbing, but the little monkey made it to the top all by herself.

The Big Girl is Now

Cora will turn 2 this March the 29th. So she is technically still a 1 year-old. I know a lot of parents who says 'I can't believe she's already 1/2/9/19!' or 'I wish s/he could be a baby forever!'. I always have the opposite feelings with Cora. Sometimes I can't believe that she's not even 2 yet! She doesn't seem so young and fragile to me, so not baby-ish. She always seems to be so independent (or tries hard to be), so confident and at times a daredevil that I see her already as a budding individual, not an extension of me needing gentle caring 24 hours a day (which is my definition of a baby). And I welcome the fact that she isn't baby-ish even though that means she is bossy at times. I don't know if this is just how she is, or if this how people always view their first-borns (being one myself). Or is it just us doing our no-nonsense parenting. I can't say for sure.

I have to say that I'm really starting to enjoy being a mum now that she is a toddler and not a baby anymore. The baby-parenting phase was more like a blurry episode of survival while now it can actually be (sometimes) fun! Yes, we deal with monster tantrums, confrontations and the battle of the wills (hers against mine), but at the same time she can be sweeter, much more interactive and... well, engaging.

Anyway, no pictures this time, but I give you two videos of Cora in her playtime.

A Day in A Life of A Girl

It's still winter. When mummy doesn't go to work, which means Cora doesn't go to daycare, most of the time we just stay indoor and I will try to invent games of our own, like the Duct Tape Racing game (if you've got several of them, set them side by side and try to roll them all at the same time and see which one wins the race!), flying paper airplanes, setting up a jungle gym with the furnitures, or I simply let her help around the house like unloading the dishwasher, loading laundry into the washing machine, feeding Lukie or putting rubbish in the bin.

Cora also talks a lot now. You can almost always heard her chattering away, in a mish-mash of English, Dutch, German, and words of her own invention. She can also sing. She doesn't get the lyrics yet, but she's got quite good ears for tunes. In the video below she's putting in her own lyrics into the tune of ABC or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, I'm not sure which. But I guess she figures if a tune can have two different lyrics, why not her own?

What Cora loves to most is imitating mummy. She likes putting on mummy's shoes, pretending to put on mummy's lipbalm, she likes to put on a bag around her shoulder and then saying goodbye pretending she's going out. She can even cream herself just like mummy!

Sometimes it's difficult now to put her to nap. She doesn't complain much when I put her in her crib, but she would only toss and turn for an hour or two until finally she gets too bored and start shouting, and I let her out, and then she asks for her favourite 'Danoontje' and would insist on eating it herself. I'm not sure why she has this random nap-insomniac episodes, since she does actually look and act tired for the rest of the day.

For the rest of the pictures, click here.

Playground anyway

It has been a while since I’ve posted the last update. All three of us have had their fair share of autumn flu and the weather has been pretty daunting after the beautiful sunny late autumn days we’ve seen just a few weeks ago. It is nice to see that no matter what the weather is like, Cora loves to be outside. She is a real outdoor girl and you just have to ask her where her shoes are and she gets all excited, bring her jacket and her shoes and can’t be stopped anymore. It’s really cute to see how she doesn’t just pick the shoes randomly. It really looks like she is making a cautious fashion choice there. It has been freezing cold last weekend but she was so, we decided to go to buy some flowers and stop by at the playground. She is now the oldest girl in her day care group and looks a bit lost between the small babies. She usually plays with books and puzzles (Geeky like her parents). I hope she can move up to the toddler group soon so that she has other children to play with again. She is fascinated by older children and tries to do what ever they are playing. Trust me that can be scary at times if you don’t watch her. She is a little daredevil and sometimes doesn’t realize if something is potentially dangerous for because she is still a bit too small. We’ll see if she’s big enough to ride a tricycle soon. She loves them but can’t really reach the pedals yet. I guess we just have to find the right size.

Check out the new pictures here.

Almost ready to move

We already have the keys for our new apartment since 11.07.2007 but much of the work that needed to be done to make the place livable was still ahead of us at that time. Over the course of the last two months much of my free time was dedicated to the coordination of all the work that still needed to be done in the new place. The walls needed to be plastered and painted, the electro fittings still needed to be placed, the glass shower cabin needed to be fitted, the entire apartment needed a serious cleanup (the plaster was everywhere) and of course the floor needed to be laid out as well. I have spend not only a lot of time in the apartment to get things ready but also an incredible amount of time on the phone talking to the contractors that where supposed to carry out the parts of the work that are beyond my DIY horizon. I won’t go into the details but I can assure you that this entire experience boosted my Dutch vocabulary in ways that I wouldn’t have thought I may need. In the end of the day there are still small glitches we will have to smoothen out ourselves but the place does look a bit more like a home now. The floor makes such a difference and we are very happy with our choice of natural varnished oak. We will be moving houses on October 7th and probably hand over the keys to the buyer with heavy heart on October 15th. Unfortunately the view from our lovely large windows is still not really what we’d like to see but that will change over time when the park becomes less of a mud pool but actually a green oasis in the center of the city. Now I just need to find a spot to leave my boat. With the old apartment goes unfortunately also my private dock. We have filmed Cora while she was eating her new favorite food (pasta) all by herself like a big girl. In case you are wondering, yeah sometime something actually does go in the mouth.

Here are some of the pictures we have taken last weekend

Finally to the beach

Our beach weekend is already two weeks ago and if you watched the blog very closely, you might have seen that the pictures are actually already online for quite some time. I just haven’t gotten around writing the new entry on the blog yet. The weather here in Holland has been changing quite a lot in the last few weeks and it seems as if strange weather phenomenon’s occur all over Europe. Germany has seen some baking hot summer days with peaks of 38 degrees.  Here in Holland temperature don’t reach the 30 degree mark. It has been a very rainy June and it continues to rain a lot here in July too. We have seen some massive thunderstorms with dramatic cloud formations and days that became so dark that it seemed nighttime. Thankfully in-between there have also been some beautiful sunny days with temperatures around the 25 degrees. If you know me, you will remember that my temperature preferences are rather Northern European. I actually quite enjoy the frequent changes, the wind, the thunderstorms, and the very maritime weather. I don’t mind if it doesn’t get too hot.

We finally had a chance to make it to the beach two weeks ago. I have changed the car sharing company and we are now driving via www.connectcar.nl. They have newer and nicer cars then www.greenwheels.nl and the cars have a decent radio plus more importantly air conditioning. So we took the new car (a Ford Fiesta) and drove to our favorite beach in “Wijk aan Zee”. Cora loves playing in the sand and the beach was heaven for her. The local library had a little beach shack for children where the kids can borrow books for the beach. They also had those huge FatBoy pillows to lie on and read. Cherrie and Cora walked up and down the beach and we all played ball and had lots of fun. To celebrate the day we went to our favorite restaurant in Wijk aan Zee and ate some nice fresh fish. Cora fell deep asleep in the car on the way back. She was really tired.

The small video below shows her saying her first real word “Hallo”. And there is of course a gallery of new pictures here.

Got Milk?

We barely made any pictures of Cora lately. Not out of lack of interest, but the girl's a whirlwind and it's really difficult to make pictures of her now. I had to take this post's pictures while she was safely tucked in bed drinking her milk.

Like always, she gets a bottle of milk at 8 in the evening, an hour before her bedtime. She's down to two bottles since she was 11 months (one in the morning, one before bed), and at 13 months we switched her from formula to regular full-cream cow's milk. She seems to like the taste better, understandably. I tasted her formula once, and it tastes funny, and Cora is a girl who's into real taste of food. Clever girl.

Anyway, it was then I had the idea to take some pictures of her. She's lying still, and I love how the white bed linens surrounds her like an aura, and makes the milk stand out as well. Of course, it's impossible to make her lying too still, she made sure she posed appropriately.

200ml of milk gone in about 7 minutes, she started to go up and about, and I had to chase her to make the last couple of pictures.

Notice how her hair has grown? She finally has real hair. I absolutely adore her dark blond curls.

To the album.

A short video of Cora pretend playing with the phone (and then proceeded to harrass the bunnies)