Carsten is 7 months!

So you've been getting to read a lot about our travels and our life, but what about the life of Carsten? What is he up to? Well, for the most part, he's a very happy boy. And he's 7 months old. Crazy how the time flies.

He's getting to try new foods every few days, and he's mastered carrots, peas, green beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes, apples, avocados, and bananas. He really seems to enjoy eating solid foods and even looks longingly at our food that we eat.

He's also becoming more mobile lately as he puts multiple rolls together (see picture sequence below), has been practicing sitting up which he can do for a few minutes at a time now, and he zooms around the house in his walker.

Starting at the other end of the blanket.

Roll onto back - check!

Roll onto tummy - check!

He reached Mommy at the end of the blanket! He did this all very quickly, and for the record, I think he wanted the camera.

He sits up! And enjoys it a lot. Andy's trying to imitate Carsten's big smile. Love this photo :).

In addition to all of these things, he now will get up on all fours and rock back and forth, which I think means that we could have forward motion soon. For the record, we are not ready for this, but I think he's getting close, so ready or not, here he comes! He also does the plank where only his hands and toes are touching the ground. What a kid! 

This is actually quite difficult if you try it yourself (you have to hold it!).

Crawling position, check!

We also get to see more of his personality every day. He loves being with people and he will smile at anyone across the room, which pretty much melts your heart. He's also started making a lot of different noises ('ma', 'ha', etc.) and he frequently sticks out his tongue. He also recently got his first cold, which I already blogged about. I think he's recently realized that he can interact with the people we skype with, which is pretty fun because he'll smile and look cute.

I'll leave you with some photos that I absolutely love.

Daddy-son moment. 

Happy baby! I just love the way his face lights up when he smiles.

Our baby boy.

The LaughTub

Natalie was putting away a bath toy that Carsten didn't seem interested in, so she squeezed the water out of it. That was when the fun started...

Spring is here!

To be honest, spring has been here for a while, but I've been collecting a few photos over the last couple of weeks of the signs of spring.

1) No winter jackets or hats, instead a sun hat and hoodie!

 2) Spring flowers! These include tulips, daffodils, and others.

 3) Flowering bushes! You can see these yellow bushes everywhere.

 4) Herbs planted in the flower box! Andy planted these on Saturday. I think they are the Italian herb set.

 5) Beautiful purple flowering trees right outside our windows. There are many bees visiting these trees.

 6) Short sleeves inside, and occasionally just a diaper! Carsten is sitting up by himself here.

 6) Picnics at Lake Zurich after church. And they've even turned on the fountain in the lake.

We love springtime! It's also nice for Carsten and I because it's easier to go outside since there aren't as many layers to put on. And it's also fun to be outside and take walks when it's so pretty.

Also, Carsten is still stuffy, but seems to be on the mend. He only woke up once last night. So, hooray! :)

Carsten's first cold :(

It's finally here. His first cold. His first fever.

We've been trying hard to avoid colds with washing hands and hand sanitizer, especially when he was younger and then while we were traveling at Christmas so that way he'd be healthy for our overseas move. Since we've been here, he's had very little exposure to other children, and I still maintained my washing hands routine. So, we've been fortunate that it's taken almost 7 months for him to get sick - what a blessing for a healthy baby for that long. I've started going to the gym where they have babysitting for children under 9, which means that now he has a clear route to germs. However, I'm not sure he got it from there as I had a cold last week, so it's likely that he got my cold. Which means the poor guy started out with a sore throat and will end with a runny nose.

Carsten started getting a stuffy nose Monday night, which made for a rough night. We did not have a humidifier, and the air is pretty dry right now, so I'm pretty sure that didn't help. Tuesday was a good day despite his stuffy nose, and I actually went to the gym in the morning because he really seemed just fine except for the runny noses (runny noses are ok at daycare). However, I started noticing that he has a real lack of appetite for solid foods, but he still seems to be eating breastmilk just fine, which is a blessing. In the evening, after supper we noticed that he was very flushed and we measured a temperature of 99.7 F under his armpit. So, hence the first fever. At least it's a low-grade fever, so we just gave him tylenol and a tepid bath, and put him to bed. I should also mention that Andy came home about 30 min early so we could go to the store and pick out a humidifier. They didn't have a large selection this time of year, so we ended up going with a travel model that uses a plastic water bottle as its reservoir. So we put this in his room at bedtime, and it seems to really have helped. He was only up twice and we didn't hear him waking up and falling back to sleep as often. In fact, he's still sleeping right now, and it's almost 9 am, which is quite late for him. Hopefully he's sleeping off his cold, and since he's such a happy kid, I'm sure today will be a good day.

We usually go to moms and tots at church today, but since he had a fever last night and is sick, we will not be going. So thus begins the first thing I will miss because he's sick, but I'm not really sad about this because I just want to see him healthy again. So, we have a relaxing day at home planned.

Paris - Day 5

Today was the day we headed back home to Egg. We felt like we got to see Paris, at least, the things we wanted to see, and I think all of us were ready to have Carsten back in his own room. Our flight left at 12:45 pm, which meant that after we woke up at 8 am (thanks Carsten!), we got ready for the day & packed. Andy and Carsten went out to the bakery to retrieve our final pastry breakfast while I packed, which worked quite nicely. On the way to Paris, we checked one large bag and kept a carry-on suitcase with us just in case our baggage got lost. Since we didn't really care if it got lost in transit (hey - maybe they can wash the dirty laundry!) when we were headed back to Zurich, we decided to check both bags, which meant that packing used the throw-it-all-in-there method.

After we got packed up, we checked out of our dodgy hotel, and headed into the train station to find our train back to the airport. We got lucky and actually found a direct train with no stops to the airport. Carsten was in need of a nap at this point, so I spent most of the train ride trying to put him to sleep, which eventually happened. Once we reached the end of the line at the airport, we hopped off and found that once again, our plane was to depart from the tiniest and most remote terminal. This meant that we had to take a bus out to our terminal, which added 30-45 minutes onto our transit time. This meant that our travel time from our hotel (right on a major train station) to the security checkpoint was about 1.5 hours, which is a bit ridiculous if you ask me. Anyway, we were lucky that we had left ourselves plenty of time and hadn't tried to see anything in Paris that morning, otherwise we probably would not have made our flight.

So, once we checked in and got inside, we got sandwiches and fed Carsten solid food, and then headed to our gate where we were given preferential treatment (go infants and strollers) as we walked onto our plane. Our taxi time was quite long - probably about 30 min, but the flight was short - 1 hr, so it wasn't ideal, but ok. We also realized that the airport times run different here. In the US, a flight time of 12:45 means that the doors close at 12:45, however, in Europe, this means that you board at 12:45 - at least as far as we can tell this is what happened on both of our flight legs. And then they basically add in 30 min to your actual flight time to account for boarding; for example, our flight time was 1 hour, but our listed flight time was 1.5 hrs. Very interesting. Anyway, there were two infants on the plane, Carsten and another little girl who looked to be just a couple of months old. We've noticed that they seem to intentionally group children together, so the other baby was sitting right in front of us. I'm not sure why they do that because children can feed off of one another, but I guess maybe they're trying to make only the people in a close proximity miserable. Which, for the record, neither Carsten or the other infant really cried, so that was quite nice. In fact, Carsten actually slept the entire flight (hooray for Carsten!). I'm coming to realize that the airplane noise is quite good for Carsten, and honestly, as soon as they fire up the engines for take-off he seems to nod off, which makes things easy for Andy and I (at least for short trips).

Anyway, we made it safely back without a hitch and while we spent another 1.5 hrs traveling back to our house (because we missed a train connection), we still felt that we had a good trip and that we enjoy traveling with Carsten. All in all, we loved our trip to Paris, and we are excited about more adventures coming our way!

(No pictures this day - sorry!)

Paris - Day 4

Allrighty, so we're up to Day 4! Andy, Carsten, and I were on our own since Jess had to go back to school in Nantes, so we bravely conquered the Louvre! Carsten usually gets up sometime around 7:00 +/- 30 min, so throughout the vacation we just woke up when he did. We thought letting him get all of his night sleep was important since his daily naps would be erratic, and plus, most things didn't open until 9:00 am anyway, so that usually gave us plenty of time to get ready and head out. However, this particular morning, he slept in until 8:00 am, which was quite nice for us.

This reminds me that I forgot to mention that we had daylight savings time over here on this particular weekend, and there was no need to adjust Carsten. In fact, he adjusted all by himself. On Sunday morning he got up at 7:00 am new time, which was 6:00 am old time. So somehow, he knew that he should sleep 1 less hour and then that would put him on the next schedule. Seriously, he did it all by himself. :)

Ok, back to Day 4. So Carsten got up late, and we hurried out the door to the bakery we had been buying breakfast at. Pastries are amazing in Paris, and they were relatively cheap too. So we had chocolate & fruit pastries, croissants, croissants with pudding, and one morning Andy even had flan with apples for breakfast. Let me tell you, this was one of the really amazing parts of the vacation. Andy and I haven't had much in the way of baked goods, mostly because I have no idea how to bake over here yet and partially because it's really not good for your waistline to have sweets in the house (at least, for me it's not!). We were also happy that we had yummy food that was cheaper by quite a bit than the hotel breakfast, which I'm sure also contained pastries. So yay for saving some money!

Once we had our breakfast, we made our way to the metro and on to the Louvre. I'd like to make another aside here: metro travel with a stroller in Paris is NOT easy. They haven't made the metro system handicap accessible, which we found to be a bit weird. So not only were there tons of stairs, when you went through the ticket machine, the only way through was a turnstyle, which is very difficult to get an empty stroller through. We never actually tried it when Carsten was in the stroller because I think he would have got a nasty smack in the head. I think next time we hit major cities we'll check out the more touristy transportation (like buses and such) just to avoid this issue. On the other hand, perhaps other cities are better, like Zurich, which has elevators and escalators everywhere. And their ticket checking system is mostly an honor system (there are random checks with a steep fine if you don't have a proper ticket), so they don't have any of the evil turnstyle devices.

Ok, back to the Louvre! When we got to the Louvre, it was sunny and beautiful, so we ate our breakfast pastries outside and then took a few pictures. We then went to go get in line and since we had a stroller and a baby, they put us in the front of the line and sent us down the elevator - what nice treatment! :) I guess they are aware that young children and lines really aren't such a good combination. So, I don't know how much everyone knows about the Louvre, but the iconic pyramid (pictured below) is actually the entrance, and the museum is the huge palace that surrounds the square. We were not aware that it was so huge - seriously. We mostly just thought it had some paintings and the Mona Lisa. We were wrong. It also had a bunch of artifacts from Greek, Roman, early civilizations (Mesopotamia, Persia, Assyria, and Babylon), and Iran. This was really quite fun to wander around, and one of our favorite parts was the Code of Hammurabi, which was the earliest known written law and was the precursor to civilizations. Yes, I know, we get geeked about stuff like this :). The only bummer about all these exhibits were that all the plaques were in French only. We could have gotten an audio guide, but I really don't think that would have worked well with Carsten, so we didn't. Even though we didn't know everything we were looking at, it was fun to wander and wonder. We actually spent most of the day here and I'm pretty sure we missed quite a few things, but we did see most of what we wanted to :). And the best part was that Carsten really only had a couple minutes of crying, and otherwise was either interested in his surroundings or sleeping. What a kid :). I think my favorite part was the Apartments of Napolean, which were grandiose and quite different from the Palace of Versailles (see photo below).

Ok, so here are the Louvre photos: enjoy!

The Louvre! The building in the background was the actual museum, and the pyramid is the entrance.

We went to the Mona Lisa first because we thought it would just get busier as the day went on. It was a bit anti-climactic since we already knew what it looked like.... :) This is me and my 'Mona Lisa' pose. 

Family photo in the Louvre!

Passed out baby :).

I should mention at this point that it's a time honored tradition in my family to take silly photos in a museum. This came about because my dad likes to read plaques in detail, and we don't feel quite as obligated. So we amuse ourselves :). Since we couldn't read any of the French plaques anyway, we didn't feel at all bad amusing ourselves, as you will see... For the record we actually did very much enjoy the museum based on its own merit as well.

There's a limited amount of silliness you can do with a sleeping baby, but I did my best!

Funniness. 

There really was a missing head here, so we felt the need to fill it.

Venus de Milo. Totally famous. Totally seen it :).

Carsten got in on the silliness!

Napoleon's apartments! Amazing :).

I think this was Assyria. Simply amazing. I don't think I've seen stuff like this before in person. I know that my Dad would really like this exhibit (and the entire museum), and he would definitely need the audio guide since he likes knowing details :).

Code of Hammurabi! Very cool

These things made really detailed and cool imprints. They were in the Iran exhibit.

We conquered the Louvre! It was pretty sunny, so both Andy and Carsten are sporting hats and sunglasses. There was a random lady who walked past us and deliberately took a picture of Carsten, so she must of thought he was cute. Mostly she just creeped us out.

It was mid-afternoon when we emerged from the Louvre and we decided to head back to the Eiffel Tower in the hopes of a short line to go up to one of the decks. However, while the lines were shorter, we stood in line for about 10 min, and didn't really move. So we once again, opted to take photos of the entire tower and we didn't bother going up. As you can see, the Eiffel Tower, like most things, is much more photogenic in the sun.

Eiffel Tower in the sun.

Carsten fell asleep at the Eiffel Tower and since the metro tends to wake him up, that meant we needed to walk somewhere. We weren't excited about this prospect since we had already done so much walking in the Louvre (seriously, it's huge), but we found that the other Statue of Liberty (that's right, Paris has one too) was <1 mile away. So we started walking to it, but when we noticed that we were the only tourists around, we opted to turn back for safety reasons (nothing says 'mug me' like a stroller, baby, camera, and diaper bags which all indicate that we are tourists in a non-tourist part of town). By the time we made it back to the train station, Carsten was awake, so we headed back to our hotel area for supper and baby bedtime.

So, that's Day 4 in a nutshell! I'll warn you that Day 5 really wasn't exciting since all we did was travel back to Zurich, but I'll tell you more about that later.

Paris - Day 3

After having to travel a ways to Versailles, we were looking forward to just taking the metro around Paris to see things in town. We first made our way to the Arc de Triomphe, which was much larger than we were anticipating. In fact, it was downright huge.

Us in front of the Arc de Triomphe.

Tomb of the unknown soldier. What I loved best was the guy who was maintaining the flowers was wearing a suit.

We got to go to the top of the Arc (by elevator mostly!) where we could get a pretty good view of the city. Carsten tried to get a better view trying to eat this telescope. :)

Our first view of the Eiffel Tower! Too bad the weather wasn't great this day.

The Arc has a giant traffic circle where a bunch of roads come into it, so it's pretty fun to see all the traffic patterns.

 From the Arc we took the metro to the Eiffel Tower. The Tower was busier than we thought (since the weather wasn't great), and the line to get up to the first deck was pretty long, so Andy and I decided that we'd try again the next day to see if we could get some shorter lines because waiting in line with a baby isn't that fun. But we still got some photos with the Tower :).

Jess, Carsten, and I with the Eiffel Tower.

The Swiss Huismans with the Eiffel Tower.

We decided to take a walk along the river so Carsten could hopefully nap in his stroller, and then we'd get to see some of the city that you otherwise miss on the metro. One thing we noticed was there were a lot of houseboats on the river that looked pretty permanently docked. So perhaps the Parisian dream is to live in a houseboat on the river? :)

Houseboats

 While walking along the river we discovered a monument 'erected by the children of America'. Child labor anyone? ;) And by that time, after some protesting, Carsten fell asleep in his stroller. This was lovely because I had been carrying him around in the wrap all day at the Palace of Versailles and while an 18 lb baby isn't that heavy initially, by the end of the day he gets to be a bit heavy. It wasn't raining while we took our walk, but it was a bit windy, so we elected to put the raincover to shield him from the wind while he slept.

Children of America monument.

Sleeping babies are so peaceful and cute.

We came upon this monument (I don't really know what it is) and while the monument was cool, what was even better was the amazing oblong traffic circle around the monument. I have no idea how people know where to go as there's no lines painted on the street and sometimes it seems like there's 3 or 4 lanes of cars. We're really glad we elected NOT to rent a car. :) This circle definitely beats anything we've seen so far in Zurich in terms of craziness. Also on the square was a building that was getting renovated, and when they renovate buildings, apparently they put a facade. This particular one was difficult to see because it blended in with the sky perfectly.

Crazy traffic circles.

Building facade - can you see it?

On our way to the Louvre, we found Julius Caesar, so naturally, Jess stabbed him in the back. :)

Julius Caesar vs. Jess

We continued on to the Louvre and had lunch at a stand outside. Since it was already into the afternoon and Jess had already seen it, we elected to keep walking towards the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the Pantheon. It was a bit of a hike, but it was still fun to see all the buildings and interesting bridges along the river.

View of the island that Notre Dame is on.

We walked past the Cathedral of Notre Dame briefly and continued on to the Pantheon, which we had read was pretty good. Unfortunately, we didn't read far enough apparently because it's closed until April 1. So, we walked quite a ways just to view the outside, which was a bit of a bummer. I suppose that it was still a pretty cool building though. And actually, the trip wasn't a total bust because we saw a beautiful church next door that people were going in and out of, so we went in! 

Pantheon. 

Beautiful church next to the Pantheon.

Inside there were people practicing what seemed a weird sort of opera where a child was wearing angel wings. We didn't even try to understand it, but it was fun to gawk a bit :). We walked along the edge of the church to the front and found a plaque for Blaise Pascal. Again, not really sure why it was there, so to mark the event, we took a picture.

Gorgeous.

From there we headed back down to the Cathedral of Notre Dame and took some photos. It's a huge cathedral and very ornate. When we went in, there was some sort of church service going on, and it occurred to us that it must be very weird to worship in a sanctuary where there are constantly tourists coming in and out. The tourists are allowed to wander along the outside and then the congregation is in the middle. I must say, that I think it'd be very distracting to be part of the congregation, but perhaps you just get used to it. We walked around and were awed by the ornate ceiling and stained glass windows. It was pretty dark, so not very many of the photos turned out, but I have one of the congregation below.

Notre Dame!

Inside the cathedral.

 We didn't go up inside the cathedral because it was still a pretty dreary day, so the view would not have been worth it, and plus, we had Carsten, who may or may not have done well going up and down. So in the end, we elected not to go up. Instead we found some yummy hot food at a stand near the cathedral (hot dogs with cheese and an inside-out ham-grilled-cheese sandwich which is apparently a France specialty) and then ate it at a park right next to the cathedral. As you can see, it was quite fun :).

Picnic at Notre Dame.

We then headed back to our hotel where we said goodbye to Jess (thanks for hanging out with us and showing us Paris Jess!) and then we put Carsten to bed. Now I should mention at this point that we had Carsten sleeping in his travel bed, which is like a mini-tent with a small mattress. The first two nights we were there Andy and I slept horribly because I think Carsten kept waking up when he moved around in his bed (hitting the sides and making noises). Fortunately, I think Jess managed to sleep though it; although I'm not sure how she managed it. He had slept in this travel bed for about a month when we first got here, but it was never an issue before because he wasn't rolling and moving so much. Anyway, but the time we got to Sunday night, he slept much better and so did we :). And on Monday night, he slept great. So moral of the story: it apparently takes him some time to get used to sleeping in small spaces (his crib is relatively huge and he makes use of it!).

Ok, that's the end of Day 3! Day 4 is the Louvre - stay tuned!