13 months already!

Our Little Viking is walking really good now and clearly prefers this new mode of moving ahead. He manages turning around, carrying things and is about to start running, too. Cute as an apple!!

Yesterday, on his 13-months-day, he got his 4th molar. Which means that he has 12 teeth now. I was truly surprised as I read Jennifers baby book the other day and realized that she had only 8 teeth on her 1st birthday. Erik had 11, still he got his first teeth a good month later than she did. Jennifer was an extremely poor eater, especially when there was another teeth on it's way - which it constantly was. Erik, on the other hand, is an exellent eater and used to pop a new teeth the 18th every month followed by bad sleep and refusing to eat from a spoon for a day or two before the teeth was out.

It is so amazing how kids are different, still so alike. Jennifer was very interested in books, balls and animals, learning to imitate their sounds very early. She also adored Pingu and loved to play simple animal-learning games on my iPhone. Erik looooves everything on wheels. If it rolls, it's fun and brings the "car sound" to his lips. He doesn't care much about books, even though I really try to have book-time with him anyway. He doesn't want to look at the pictures or learn what's on them. I so hope he will discover books some day.
Right now the only thing he likes about books is to open and close them, again and again.

 Balls are fun, too, but he isn't as obsessed about them as Jenni was. Erik is also not that interested in TV, which is actually great.
Erik loves milk. He goes nuts if he sees the milk package on the dinner table and you won't give him his zippy cup fast enough. Jenni doesn't care about milk. She likes "bubble water", allthough she drinks her milk anyway, with a whole lot of pep talk about strong bones, good teeth and growing, cows sending their milk to her etc. etc.
Erik loves bread. Jenni would never finish a sandwich or even a cinnamon bun, if you please. A typical situation at our dinner table is one kid being fussy because she must eat (faster than a snail, please!) and the other one being a drama queen since he is not being fed fast enough. :) But both of them like music, eating fruits, kicking ball, drawing, sledding, playing in water and getting their nails done.

Oh, just getting my weekly manicure

Singing together is an important part of our days

Cute in her hair, Jennifer is showing off her coloring book :)

With his big sister looking so cute in hairclips,
 Erik wanted to have his hair fixed,too. At least Jennifer thought so :)

A couple of weeks ago, Jennifer (3 years) found an anatomy book for kids. It's a book for children about double her age but she insisted on reading it and as a nurse, I couldn't resist it either. So, we looked on all the pictures - you know, the ones with our sceleton, muscles, nervous system, digestive system etc. She was very interested and asked me a LOT. Especially about digestive system and fetal development. I didn't think she'd understand it but she surprised me by explaining it pretty much as it is for daddy afterwards. Next day she wanted to read the book again. And again. Then she started to draw the digestive system. And yesterday she obviously decided it was time to teach her little brother, too. She made a sketch (which, by the way was totally understandable) and wanted him to sit and learn. Talk about her frustration when Erik was just not that interested! Nevertheless, this really made me thinking of how much children can learn and understand if you just let them to.

In January, I've also started to put Erik on the potty after his meals. Here's our potty odyssey aka what to do when mommy is waiting for poop and pee :)

Put rings on a stick...

...watch Pingu

... read (=chew) a book

...drive my car

...eeeee, what more...

... yeeee, make a phone call!!

Outside, it's still cold winter and we try to enjoy it as much as possible. Getting dressed is not our favourite but we try our best.

Continuing on this boring getting-dressed theme, we are happy not to need to dress our kids Micheline-man-style for a while soon. In 10 days, we are leaving the cold Sweden. My husbands best friend is posted at the Swedish Embassy in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and we are going to visit him and his lovely family there. We are so excited and look very much forward to the trip. We are also planning a long weekend to Sri Lanka all together. Our primary plan was to visit Mumbai, but unfortunately there was a big risk that our visas wouldn't be ready and sent back to us on time before we leave. Hence we just didn't dare to take a chance, allthough we are so sad not to be able to meet our very missed and beloved friends in Mumbai - and of course our surrogate, N. I so hope we meet again some day.