Baby Bits

Can you tell he likes toys?

Nikolai was so cute today. On Saturday when we left, he was holding one of the bigger playroom balls that is blue with white dots. It is somewhat deflated and he can hold it with one hand. When we took it away in order to bring him back to his room, we told him he could play with it again on Monday. And today as soon as we walked in before we even laid out the blanket, he reached toward the blue ball sitting on the shelf. He is so smart. He is going to be a lot like his cousin Alexis in that he loves roller coaster-like movements. He laughed out loud at being dipped upside down and being held on his back and swooped around.

Recently Nik has been in an exploratory mood. I think he just realized that he can get where he wants to go and has decided to check everything out. He went over to the swing, so we let him sit in it for a while. Nik also crawled for real today! He complained the whole time, but did it. I guess he was complaining because I had taken the ball out of his hand in order to get him to use both hands rather than elbows and had rolled it out in front of him. He crawled to go get it, but was not happy about it. He giggled at being bounced in time to music on the little singing caterpillar – much of which was quite fast energetic music. Eventually, he nearly fell asleep doing this, though.

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Zhana’s mother cooked us a whole batch of blinchiki since she heard we had been buying them from the store! These are big pancakes, like Swedish pancakes (or Russian I guess), filled with things – usually slightly sweet cheese like a blintz. We were surprised by a caramel-filled one we came across during dinner last night.