21 weeks - the bear dance

This week has been all about catching up on sleep... both Tim's and ours. So far so good. He's pretty much back to his normal self. Actually it was pretty amazing how quickly he recovered from the trip. He was very happy to be home and is very happy to be sleeping back in his own bed.

He's been practising rolling from his tummy onto his side a lot. He hasn't managed yet a complete roll over like two weeks ago, but in time. He does hold himself up on his forearms more confidently now. Although after a couple of minutes he really has to take a break (see last photo) :)

We had very nice weather on Thursday and Friday, so Tim and I went to Tiergarten on both days. I took with us a picnic rug and he was very happy to be lying on the grass and looking around at the trees and leaves in the sunshine. He was so happy entertaining himself that I even managed to read a little of my book. I'm reading stories by Dostoevsky at the moment and he's officially my absolutely favourite writer.

One thing I wanted to write about for a while is how nice people in Germany are towards parents with children and children in general. Almost every time we're out there are people smiling at Tim, or commenting how he is a kleine Мäuschen (little mouse - a German endearment for babies). Some of them (especially when we're in the lifts of our building) keep insisting on touching him or trying to tickle him, of which I'm not a big fan of. But pretty much everywhere people open doors for me, or help me with the pram up or down stairs. While on our hiking walks last weekend, in parts where the path was very narrow, people would stop and give us way when they saw that Jack was carrying Tim in the baby carrier. When we were on the train back from Bad Schandau Timmy was getting a bit grumpy so I took him and went to stand in the area at the back of the train. There were some colourful buttons which kept flickering and that kept him amused. So we were standing there for a little while and then a guy (around 30 or so) approached me and asked if I needed a seat - he wanted to make sure that I wasn't going to stand with a child in my arms all the way to Berlin. And I mean it was a very generous offer, because the trip is three hours. So I reassured him that I had a seat and explained that I was standing for child-entertainment purposes only.

I just find this very interesting, because for starters Germany has a negative birth rate... so in some ways people obviously don't' really want to have children. Additionally until recently "child noise" was equivalent to industrial noise, in that it wasn't _allowed_ in certain places and in certain hours of the day. Only recently did the law change to say that children are _allowed_ to be noisy anytime and anywhere. Thus, it's not a particularly child-friendly society. Germans in general are also not the warmest and friendliest of people, especially to strangers. So how come everyone is so nice and caring to children? Not that it's a bad thing by any means and makes me very happy to live here.

Some photos from this week:

And finally the "amazing bear dance":