Picknick and New Things to Eat

It was a big week for Finlay. He's starting to eat real food now, including carrots, zwieback (dolly-toast, as we call it) and a mixture of pureed parsnips and potatoes, most of which end up around him, including up his nose. He's also started crawling/lunging for things, including the cats, which are keeping a wary distance, after losing a few handfuls of fur. We have a "discovery blanket" with toys and mirrors and rattles attached to it, and he now rolls around all over it, lurching and lunging off to the side and finding ways to move about. Actual crawling and sitting up can't be far off.

Here is Finlay at a picknick on Friday with friends of ours from Monaco, and Finlay crawling toward what he correctly identified as food. But not his!

A new bed for a bigger Finlay!

Finlay on Sunday in his new bed, which we will likely be repainting soon. It was on sale at Ikea for 40 Euros. After we removed the rusty nails and stabilized the legs so it doesn't collapse every night, it's in fine shape. The colour irks us though. We're making a decision tree on a new colour, aiming for either a black prison motif or a subtle cherry bomb red. Something restful, in any case. David and Sointula might notice some familiar objects here...

The raggedy-ann blanket

Here is Finlay last Sunday on 'his' raggedy-ann blanket, which his father rolled around on at his age.

Oma Anneliese

Here are two of the better pictures we have of Finlay and his great grandmother, age 95, Anneliese Werner, in Göttingen. We'll double-check our cameras to see if we didn't get better shots. In one, Finlay is on her lap, and in the other, she is trying to teach him to crawl. Quite something! Oma Anneliese didn't know Finlay can roll around and was absolutely surprised when she put him down on the bed, looked up to say something, and looked down again to find him behind her. It was a good trip, and great to see Finlay's oldest living relative. In 1915, who would have thought that Anneliese would meet her great-grandson, half Canadian, in 2010? Oma Anneliese was kind to all of us and the visit was wonderful. We'll all be back soon.

Finlay on the go!

Here is Finlay on his first train ride last Saturday on the way to see his great-grandmother in Göttingen. This was Finlay's first-ever real train ride on an ICE speed train (which on Saturday was slow and delayed, and later in the day, experienced massive air conditioning problems which led to people being hospitalized... we had left the train by then). Finlay flirted with a small girl aged two next to him, and her mother.

Soccer Finlay

Yes, we say "soccer" in our household. Apparently the term is derived from "association football" - "assoc", becoming "soc", adding a suffix "er", and there you go.

Whatever the case, we haven't been taking the World Cup all that seriously. In fact, on Saturday in the middle of the Germany-Argentina game, we went grocery shopping. We were practically the only customers in the Kaufhof at Alexanderplatz.

Finlay has obviously been inspired though. Here he is practicing to become the next "Schweinsteiger", or "Pig-Mounter"...

Weekend Lazy

It was a ridiculously hot weekend in Berlin. There wasn't much to do but laze around and to try not to move too much. Here are two photos of Christine and Finlay doing pretty much that.

Canada Day!

July 1 is Canada Day. As someone said, Canadians celebrate their national holiday by spending an extra minute during the day feeling superior to Americans. That isn't very charitable, and it isn't true. There are only so many minutes in the day. Actually, we spend it rolling around in maple syrup and debating the politics of language and subsidiary sovereignty. That went over well at work today.

Here is Finlay reading a German newspaper of note with two headlines "Save the German language" and "Where Obama is wrong". He's also posing with some vaguely Canadian things - brownies, his black Canada shirt, and hotdogs. On July 1 in Toronto, hotdogs are sold to the masses for the symbolic price of 5 cents, which is apparently what they cost in 1867, at Canada's Confederation. It's a nice gesture, but perhaps historically inaccurate.

Happy Canada Day!