Hunger-, Thirst-, and Sleep-Strike

Clara has been on a hunger-, thirst-, and sleep-strike for the past 3 days. Not interested in doing any of the above, thank you very much! Unless, it's between 1:30-5:00 am, then she's interested in eating and drinking, just not sleeping! Wonderful!

But, the good news is that today she's been doing all three, a lot! She was so hungry (and very demanding about it, too!) that she had her dinner at 4:30pm and then went for a third nap! Bizarre. Hopefully she'll still sleep some tonight.

Accomplishments

Clara drank her whole bottle of baby tea today for the first time! Yay! It's the first time she's really drank anything in any significant amount from a bottle. It means that she can now have a babysitter (or dad) feed her lunch instead of just Mummy. Whew! We've been working on this accomplishment for a few weeks now, but up until now she's only chewed on it or drank just a few sips. Today she drank the whole 100mL.

She's also getting good at sitting up for longer and longer lengths of time. (Although today she fell over and bumped her head on the wood floor, but a few cuddles and all was better again.)

She's also learned to clap and is very excited to be able to make a clapping sound now (before she had her fingers curled up, so couldn't get a proper clap sound out of them).

She floated by herself (with water wings) for a few seconds at swimming this week - without Mummy touching her at all!

Oh, and she's also started helping herself to toys out of her toy box. She sits in her chair next to the box and just pulls it over to grab something else out of it.

She's still not quite crawling yet, but she's so close! She has no trouble getting up on her hands and knees, but can't coordinated moving all her arms and legs separately. She gets up on her hands and knees and kind of throws her whole body forward at once - sort of like a frog! Usually landing in a face-plant, but she doesn't seem to mind that! Between that and rolling all around, she manages to get all around the house!

She's very proud of her accomplishments and always has a huge grin on her face whenever she's doing something new!

Hungarian Baby

Clara has become a true Hungarian now - here she is sampling her first Hungarian paprika! (Not to worry, it wasn't a hot one!) She's grabbing everything she can get her hands on these days, wildly flailing her arms about to snatch up whatever is within her reach - hence the pepper!

She met all of her great-grandparents this week in Budapest, and of course, they were all very taken with her! Even Grumpy Great-Grandpa! She also visited her future pre-school. All in all, it was a successful trip.

February break

Off to Budapest tomorrow for February break. Going to visit Andras' grandparents, introduce Clara, and also stop by the school to check it out.

Clara's soooo close to crawling! She can get up on her hands and knees at the same time now, but still pushes with her hands instead of her legs, so still goes backwards. I'm sure she'll have it coordinated by the time we get back from Hungary. Maybe even before we go!

Beautiful red sky out tonight - good weather for tomorrow's early flight I hope!

Decisions, decisions

Ok, we've finally made up our minds: Budapest it is!

Wild Ride

What a wild ride! That's really the only way to describe the job fair in London this past weekend! Of course, just our luck, a million and one things went wrong - basically everything that could go wrong, outside of the job fair itself, did! Clara not booked properly on flight, almost missed plane because of it, running to catch connection in Munich, lost car seat, waiting around Heathrow all afternoon waiting for it come on next flight (can't leave the airport without it), hotel reservation cancelled, smoking room instead of non-smoking, breakfast order cancelled, babysitter called to cancel at 10:30 friday night, sudden change of plans on return flight - Andras had to suddenly go to Geneva so we had to get our suitcases out of storage and unpack them in the hotel lobby (we'd already checked out) and repack them so we could take one each, Clara and I had to come home alone and Andras met us at home, and of course after we'd separated we realised that Andras didn't have a driver's license to rent a car so had no way home from Berlin, and I didn't have any Euros for the taxi home and Andras had my bank card ....blah blah blah etc etc!

However, the job fair itself went really well. We had interviews with about 7 or 8 different schools. We also had invitations for interviews from a lot of other schools that we weren't interested in so didn't interview with. We were really surprised at the schools that were interested in us though, a lot of really good schools actually wanted to interview us! Shocking! (A huge difference from last time we went to the job fair and these schools didn't want to give us the time of day!). In the end, we got 3 very good offers, plus we're still shortlisted for 2 other ones, but they need to confer with the directors before they can make offers. We're expecting at least one more, though.

Wow! We can't believe it! We already turned down one offer from Zurich as they needed to know by Monday afternoon and we weren't ready to decide yet. We're still debating between the others. It's all so hard to decide! I really have no idea what we're going to do. I'm making a list of things that we need to consider so that we can sit down tonight and compare all the schools based on those criteria. It was just all so crazy! And the Geneva school flew Andras down there immediately to teach a couple of sample lessons, which is why Clara and I had to come home alone. It all happened so quickly, it was crazy. Andras and I didn't even get a chance to discuss any of the offers between ourselves, as we didn't have a moment alone, and then we both had to go off to our separate destinations! It was all so surreal!

Anyway, now we have to make a decision by the end of the week. Stressful!!